Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which has brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about the opportunity that winter offers you to truly understand the land, which is kind of the ticket for figuring out big deer. This happens all the time. Someone sends me an email or a message asking me about how they should.
Scout to kill more big bucks.
The general tone is always like there's some kind of secret that I'm withholding and they just haven't been told yet. And once they get it, they're the club and their taxidermy bill is going to skyrocket like the cost of well just about everything lately. But there are no real secrets left. I'm sorry to say that, but it's true. The dead bucks will come, but only if you put in the work to do the things in a way that should produce results. How's that for disappointing and pretty weaselish.
But now for the good news. I'm of the belief that the one thing you can do for yourself that will really help you overall for the rest of your life is to make an effort to understand the land, not just the land you hunt all the time, but land in general. What I mean by this is all about to become a hell of a lot clearer right about now. I'd guess that just about every one of us has, you know, at least a few places in our lives that we drive to a lot.
Work is the most obvious.
If you have to commute to an office or a job site, you know what it's like to travel the same route over and over and over again. Maybe you're lucky and you get to work from home while writing about deer hunting and dog training and you don't have to commute. You probably have a few places in your town that you travel too often. The gym, the grocery store, gas stations, whatever. I'll bet you something about these routes and those destinations. There's a lot of stuff you don't
notice on the way to and from these places. This is a weird phenomenon, but you can see if you're susceptible to it. The next time you commute to work or drive to the gym, just try to look at something different. What I mean by that is, try to see some houses or stores, or woodlots or something that you just normally don't look at during your drive. Because you see, when we are used to going certain places in a certain way, we tend to focus our attention
on specific aspects of the trip. There's probably an evolutionary component to this somewhere, you know, maybe the preservation of some brain energy or something.
I don't really know. What you might realize.
If you intentionally try to look at different landmarks and buildings and stuff along the way is that you've been missing a lot of things. Another easy way to do this is to go for a run along a route you usually drive. Since you probably run quite a bit slower than you drive, you have a lot of time
to take in the scenery. And I'm telling you it's eye opening, not so much because you might notice a taco bell where you didn't realize there was one, but because your blind spots are probably huge on your most known and familiar routes. I'll give you an example. About two hundred yards from my house is one of those ninety degree turns that almost should have been a cul de sac, if that makes sense. It's like a three quarter cul de sac. I drive that route dozens of
times a week. I can see most of it my picture window in my living room. I also almost always passed through there when I go for a run or a bike ride with the girls. Last summer, I walked out the front door to go for a run when I saw emergency lights in that mutant cul de sac. As I jogged past several cop cars in an ambulance, I saw them carding out someone from a house that
I really didn't even know was there. It's tucked back into a wooded lot, and I guess I'm always just looking ahead around the corner instead of off to the side. If you'd asked me beforehand how many houses were on that little bend there, i'd have been one short, and there's only four in total. Our brains have the amazing capacity to mostly filter out unnecessary stuff. If you think that doesn't happen to you, and I'm just the most unobservant fool out there, just try to pay attention more
just for the hell of it. I bet you'll see things that you just totally have ignored for years larger because you didn't need or think you needed to know they were there. Guess what, my little ombres, we do this in deer hunting. In fact, the best way to kill big bucks for a lot of folks is to intentionally create scenarios where there is no penalty for not
noticing stuff. If you have a managed property with food plots and ponds and box blinds, does it really matter if you know where a certain rub line is or a specific ditch crossing that only gets good for a few weeks in October exists?
Not really.
This is why it's so popular to try to raise dear on a specific property versus learning how to figure them out. On any piece of land you might step foot on with any kind of weapon in your hands, you probably don't have the means to block off a section or two to let a handful of bucks get old and comfortable so that you can shoot them when they are mature enough to not being harassment on social media. That drive to work where you don't notice a whole lot of stuff.
That's like the walk.
Into your favorite stand, you know, the one where you always see a few deer, the one that's easy to get to, the one you run cameras on, you know, from summer, you know, midsummer, probably to the season's end, that stand. We all have at least one spot like that, typically on private land, on public land.
Whatever.
It gets worse though, think about shed hunting season, which we're coming into right now. We all want to scoop up a bunch of shed antlers, and we all have our best spots to go, but how we move from spot to spot is probably similar from shed hunt to shed hunt, and from.
Year to year.
We probably follow the same routes. When we're looking for antlers, just like we do and we're going to our stands, we are so very predictable and that hurts us as dear unters in two ways. The first is the obvious one, where the deer figure us out when we were actually hunting and our stands go cold as they just tiptoe around the ambush sites we default to over and over the other is that it keeps us from learning the land and really how the deer used the land that
we aren't really paying attention to. Let me give you two examples here. The first time I drew in Iowa, tag I got permission to hunt a farm in northeastern corner of the state. It was a decent property, it wasn't great, but it was Iowa, and I was hunting the rut with a buddy of mine. I ended up snort wheezing in a great ten pointer and killing him about halfway through my rut cation. So I stuck around and tried to arrow a doe and just give my
buddy some help. One morning, while waiting on a doe to walk by, I saw a solid one hundred and forty class buck walking through the woods above me. Instead of taking the ridge on top of the bluff or walking the creek bottom below, which is what I was set up on, he just sidehilled. I thought that was kind of interesting until I saw more bucks take the exact same trail. Fast forward about thirteen years to this past season, where I was hunting some public land in
North Dakota. This land is quite a bit different from that private farm in Iowa, but I managed to errow a decent ten point round my second day there. Since I had a bit of free time to just kind of poke around. I went scouting in the midday, after checking to make sure there weren't any other hunters parked at this particular parcel. What I found was that the area had the most confidence in was not surprisingly, a ridge stop over a river, kind of like that Iowa spot.
The trail on the ridge was pounded and also under heavy observation by several trail cameras. The trail on the river bottom wasn't pounded, but it showed some usage. Then there was the trail halfway up the hillside that was real pounded and there were no cameras watching it that I could see. Sit up on that ridgetop, you probably wouldn't see any bucks cruising that trail below you. If you were on the bottom, the bucks would be level or slightly above you, which is a great way to
get busted. It was an interesting find, one that will probably play into my twenty four hunting plans. The thing about these little aha moments is they don't happen all that frequently to most of us. In the likelihood they are going to happen on a property you know pretty well, or you think you know pretty well.
It's not so great.
This isn't because there aren't Aha moments waiting for you on your grandma's farm. It's that you probably don't think you even need to look for them.
Here's the rub.
An awful lot of folks are stuck between thinking they have things pretty dialed and still not being able to consist instantly killed big bucks. If you have things dialed, let's say like Andy May, you probably wouldn't feel that way. You'd believe that the mature deer will be there and that you'd kill a handful of them each season. But you probably don't. And I'm going to make an educated guess here, you probably aren't like Andy May in a
lot of ways. The one that's Germane to this podcast is that he scouts like a fiend and tries to understand the land and how the deer use it more than anyone I've ever met. And that's saying something because I know a lot of really good deer hunters, as well as being someone who just personally loves the scout. Now, scouting comes in many forms and involves many things.
For some folks.
When the scouting or in season scouting, you know it's all about deer sign rubs and scrapes and beds. That's great, there's nothing wrong with that strategy, But there's an undercurrent to the whole thing that you might never experience if you focus too much on just finding locations that have some good bucks sign There's the whole thing about how deer get to those spots, when they should be there,
and where they go when they leave. This will be dictated almost entirely by how secure those bucks feel on certain routes and what they have to do to stay off the radar of most hunters, including you. Take a buck that wants to rut hard find a couple of girlfriends, but he also lives on a property that gets a ton of pressure. Let's say that property has a few
valleys in it. He might just, through random encounters in the presence of stands and cameras, start to realize that the two legged predators he's trying to avoid often hunt on top. They might even park where he can see them drive in and walk to those stands in the pre dawn hours. So he says, man, I really wouldn't mind finding a new girlfriend this morning, but I know
that the ridgetop is a danger zone. He might also feel the same way about those nice flats along the creek in the bottom of the valley, where there have been a handful of ladder stands since Reagan was in office. So he does something simple. He splits the difference and uses a side hill trail. This way, he can use the thermals avoid the two most likely spots where he'd encounter danger, and he has the option to go high or low if he does meet someone who wants to
deflate his lungs. It's honestly that simple a lot of times, but we don't learn the land as well as we should, so we set up on top and rattle our happy asses off, thinking that since it's the rut, every big buck is going to throw caution to the wind and risk their necks. But they mostly won't. That side hill trail you're missing, it's out there waiting for you to
walk it this month. If you're a big woods hunter that has thousands of acres of flat timberland to work with, you might not have that bluff side trail to discover, since the land's just pancake flat. But there might be a subtle fold in the train somewhere that offers a bit of elevation, and that might be all you need use onex to look at the land and the elevation changes, and then get out there and see them in person.
Don't just half asset, but set out to learn with the idea that you have definitely been missing stuff over the years. This is one of the reasons I think hunting new ground is so important. When you leave the lease your dad has paid for since two thousand and three and go scout some new properties, you accept the reality that you don't know what you're going to find. You know you have to go look, and that you
have to go learn. When you walk that lease this winter, it's very likely that you don't feel the same way. You're going to walk the same routes and try to confirm what you believe you know. That's a great way to manifest a fun, familiar destiny come fall. Instead, consider the advantages you have right now. The woods are as bare as they'll be all seasoned for most of us.
Most of the hunting seasons are over. They're damn close, so there isn't a whole lot of danger to going into sanctuaries or betting areas or just generally walking anywhere you damn well. Please couple this with the reality that you have a lot of time this winter to work things out, and the opportunity to learn is real now.
While the average YouTube celebrity or influencer or whatever will feed you content on this subject like it's a mission to locate every huge rub and betting area an important land feature in a matter of twenty minutes or so, a more realistic take is to mostly just go for a walk in the woods while staying curious. Scouting is a lifelong, cumulative process, not something that is easy to knock out and master in one January afternoon. So go where you don't go. You know, I've talked about that
a lot, but I think it's so important. I mean, even if that's just fifty yards from where you always go, don't stare at your feet. Look around. What does that land show you as you walk through it. Is there a knob or a bench on a hill that you just never go look at? Well, go look at it and then look around. Imagine what you would do if you were a buck standing there in November. What can you see? What would you be able to smell if you had his nose? What would it be like to
be bedded there in September versus November. What wind direction would make it a really safe spot if you were a mature buck? Is there a spot right next to the road that you never hunt because you don't want to listen to people driving by all evening? I don't know how often this happens to me, but every year I find all kinds of animals and areas like that. Western critters know this trick, and so do white tails. Hell pheasants are pretty keyed into it too. Go walk
that spot. What do you have to lose? Look around? We often frame productive scouting as going farther than the average hunter, but it's not always about being miles from the parking area. It's about finding the spots people don't go and learning the lay of the land. It's about giving yourself more to think about, more options for when it's October and you're struggling and you don't know what
to do about your burned out stand sites. You know, if you give your chance to go sneak in and hang in hunt on that bench you found in January, you might be surprised what you see. But now here's where this gets tough. Most of us think about our hunting properties as a whole chunk of land, but every individual acre probably holds a secret about deer usage. We focus on finding the whole ridgetop that might be good for a hunt instead of learning what each part of
it contains. We walk field edges and decide to hunt the corners because that's where deer like to concentrate in the early season. But even a couple hundred yards of field edge can offer dozens of spots to hunt if you take into account that some trails will be good at certain times while others will be dead. You know, how will mast influence certain things, How will it be different to hunt that field edge when it's eighty five
degrees versus sixty or forty. Then you've got swamps and slews and monoculture, pine deserts and a hell of a lot more all existing on the land. And you know there's easy travel routes out there and not so easy travel roads. There's deer hiding cover, and there's brows and a whole lot of things that are important to dear on the land. If you want to be better at deer hunting, there's no better way than to learn the ground, and there's no better time to do it than now.
The miles you walk while keeping your eyes open and your curiosity peaked will be more beneficial to you than the trail cameras you put up this summer. They'll be more beneficial than the bottles of dopey you'll buy in late October. All of that stuff's great, but it really starts to hum when you put it together with an actual understanding of the land. Commit yourself to this, not only the scouting aerial photos of your ground or any ground you might consider hunting, but to also just walk it.
Maybe once a week, maybe twice a week, whatever depends how much land you have to work with, how ambitious you are, go where you don't go. Try to understand the land. This is fundamental and it allows you to develop a base level that won't change. The hills aren't going to be flat next year, and the ditch isn't
suddenly going to change somehow. Hunting pressure probably will, the weather definitely will, food, the density, maturity, you, predators, whatever, Most of the variables of your hunt are open to not being the same as they were before. But the land, you know how it rolls, that generally won't change a ton, And that's a huge benefit to you because it gives
you something to start with on every single hunt. So get out there, put on the miles, bring your binoculars, stay curious, try to learn something each time you go. Then come back next week because I'm going to dive deeper into this topic of winter scouting, because I think it's the one thing that really separates great hunters from average hunters, and I think a lot of people don't get how important it truly is. That's it for this week.
I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, I just want to thank you so much
for all the support. It's been amazing putting together this podcast for the last couple of years and hearing from a lot of you folks, and I just I just want you to know that I absolutely appreciate you tuning in and heading on over to the medeater dot com and reading the articles and checking out to everybody you know, everybody under our stable, their shows, their other podcasts, all
that we truly appreciate you. And of course if you want more of that stuff, like I just said, the meeteater dot com is your place to go, check it out,