Ep. 760: Foundations - How to Take Your Whitetail Scouting on the Road

the month of white tail work. You know, I feel anyway, cut down those trees, trimnose, shooting lanes, pull some stands, do what needs to be done. And if you plan to hunt somewhere other than your backyard or close to home, it's also a good time to consider a scouting trip. This is arguably the best way to spend your time right now, but it takes some planning and consideration, which

is what I intend to talk about right now. I'm sure some of you listeners are in the life stage where your kids are old enough to be in a lot of activities, or they're into one activity that consumes much of your life. I don't know where we went wrong with this, but somehow a lot of society decided that ten year olds in hockey are the most important thing in the world, and that it must be a year round commitment. That definitely doesn't mean that junior is

going to make it to the NHL. My daughters aren't fully committed to any one activity, but boy, oh boy, are they in a lot of stuff. In fact, we just wrapped up a long basketball season wherever the span of three months, they played in ten weekend tournaments, Nearly all of them were two day tournaments, and nearly all of them were not very close to our house. It was a grind, and I don't know why I was surprised by this, but it was only their first basketball

league of the year. The day after that one ended, they started another four week league that my wife didn't even tell me about, probably because I would have said that is absolutely freaking crazy. Well, she didn't ask me, which tells you everything you need to know about my marriage, in addition to an extra basketball league that ends right

before Turkey season starts. The girls are in student Senate and choir and this thing called Destination Imagination, which is a stem program that encourages imagination and engineering and teamwork and is actually pretty cool and my daughter's love it. But there's one part that one of my daughters hates, and that's performing. Their team of seven kids has to write a skit, build a bunch of props, and eventually

perform it for judges and an audience. The audience is almost entirely composed of parents and grandparents, because, let's be honest, it's not like they put on a high demand show. It's not like when Taylor Swift plays within a thousand miles of Michigan and Mark and Spencer dip into their retirement accounts to buy VIP meet and greet tickets. This is a little more low key than that. But that

doesn't matter to one of my daughters. You'd think she was about to live Mark's dream and get called up on stage to sing right next to Taylor in front of I don't know one hundred thousand screaming fans. Instead of seventeen people, eight of which she's directly related to. Sometimes our brains can't rationalize that, and we freak out anyway. Performance anxiety, or that bastard fight or flight response that kicks in when we are in front of a group

of people isn't much fun. It's the result of glossophobia, which comes from some Greek words mashed together to describe the fear of public speaking. There are some theories as to where this comes from, but a common one is that it wasn't that long ago in our history where if we were addressing a crowd of people, we were pleading for our lives. Now, generations of people who might have to make the case to not get publicly executed while standing in front of a crowd would probably lead

to a rough response to that situation even today. I suppose, as someone who spent quite a few years speaking at various sports shows and deer classics, I can say that there is only one way I found to alleviate the hyper anxiety of public speaking, familiarity with your material. The more I rehearsed my presentations at home before any event, the easier it was to fall right into the groove

when my seminar started, but that wasn't enough. Sometimes the promoter would ask me to address like a specific topic, so instead of me choosing what I wanted to cover, you know, there was always some kind of ask about the material that maybe wasn't as natural to me. Now I could cobble together a deer calling seminar and make it work, but it wasn't ever as easy as a seminar on like diy public land whitetail hunting, if that

makes sense. I tried to explain this to my daughter when she was losing her shit the night before their regional competition. I said, if you can't sleep, just rehearse your lines. The more you know them, the more comfortable you'll be. Now, rationalizing that to a twelve year old nutcase who is chock full of her father's genes isn't easy, but it was the right move. She freaked out over nothing because she had her stuff down. It's honestly that simple.

It's also one of the primary reasons to take a road for deer scouting. Now I realize a lot of people only hunt one place and they don't need to do an overnight or to scout it. You also know how I feel about hunting only one place, and how I feel about the future of traveling to hunt. I'm telling you right now, if you ever wanted to cross state lines to hunt anything, you better get on it now. These opportunities are going away, and that's only going to

accelerate for a while. But before you do, consider how to make a scouting trip productive. Because this is your dress rehearsal, at least to some extent. It's your chance to not only find good locations to set stands, but also to familiarize yourself with the process and the logistics of the travel. This is something a lot of people totally ignore when they decide to spread their wings and try to hunt somewhere that isn't their home go to property.

So let's take the travel part first. When I was a young lad growing up in south eastern Minnesota, I had spots to hunt that were maybe, I don't know, five to thirty minutes away from home. Scouting and hunting could be done in a few hour timeframe. For getting something at home like a saw or whatever, not a big deal. You just go back and you get it. Or if I needed some food between morning and evening sits, it was simple, go to town and eat, get back

out there. Of course, back then gas was like eighty nine cents a gallon, but still, if you live that close to home hunting lifestyle, you might not realize that some of the best hunting locations don't have a lot of amenities nearby. Especially when it comes to western white tails. You might realize that your chosen honey hole is fifty minutes away from anything that will sell you gas or

groceries or a place to sleep. What you don't want to do is buy a non resident tag somewhere, focus solely on e scouting, you know, potential deer ground, and then show up to realize that you're a long ways from some of the things you'll need to keep the hunt going. Figuring this out on a scouting trip so much easier than figuring it out on a hunting trip.

And the cool part about this as well, there's no pressure. Well, you'll want to get into the woods and start putting on the miles so you can find some bedding areas and staging areas and food sources and I don't know, sweet pinch points. It's such a different thing than traveling to actually hunt. When you do that the clock is always ticking and the pressure is vastly different. Scouting is a lazier figure it all out kind of a fair, which is a really good thing. Maybe instead of crashing

at a roach motel, you want a camp great. You can figure out some of your gear and the logistics ahead of time. You can also figure out if your chosen campground requires a reservation, how expensive it is, what amenities they offer, and whether it's a good move to stay there when you're actually hunting. Now, this probably seems weird, but I've stayed in a lot of campgrounds. Some are

awesome for hunting trips, and some just planes suck. They might be noisy, or too busy, or just full of people who don't want to watch you butcher a deer on the picnic table. I want to know that before I ever go hunting. So many of the things that make a traveling hunt not much fun happen when we confront the disconnect between what we expected and what we

actually got. What I mean by this is if you expect a nice, peaceful campsite and then get there and realize it's anything but that the quality of your hunting experience is going to drop. You know, the same goes for the actual scouting part. I don't know how many times I've e scouted my ass off only to show up somewhere and that it's just not what I expected. This happens a lot with walk in type properties, especially which are you know, those private land open to public

hunting spots, usually through some kind of state program. Now, these properties are often cattle ranches with very little deer cover. Even though they look good on satellite imagery, what you don't see is that the oak tree covered woods is really mostly just a pasture with zero undergrowth, and you know it's covered in a high population of bovine hunt spoilers mooing and taking giant dumps on the landscape. Again, wouldn't you rather know that before you go hunting? Now?

This issue goes much deeper than cole pastures in marginal deer habitat. Sometimes I'll e scout properties and think, you know, I'll just park there, walk in there, scout that spot. Then I get there and the ditch is totally washed out and there's nowhere to park, or the easy walk is anything but that, or this is something that happens a lot. I'll mark some ponds to walk in and track check them and look for suitable stand trees, only to realize that the pond is way way bigger than

I expected, or more often nonexistent. This happened to me in Oklahoma last year several times, and it was a real pain in the ass, considering it was like eighty five degrees when I was scouting. Having the chance to ground truth your e scouting and familiarize yourself with access points is such an advantage for when you actually hunt. It's such an advantage I probably can't even really contextualize

it properly. This is the differentiator between settling during a hunt in a subpar spot versus always being in a location where you have confidence. Again, that is a huge difference maker when it comes to enjoying your time and actually fill in some tags. An off season scouting trip offers you something else as well, which is a good thing. When you find something worth hunting, it allows you to make a much better plan overall because you have so

much time to expand on your findings. Let me give you an example from my life recently where this happened. So last fall, I took the dogs and one of my daughters on a midday grouse hunt in northern Wisconsin. As I usually do, I ended up marking a few big rubs we found while trying to shoot a few grouse for dinner. I didn't think much of those waypoints that I dropped until I went back there just a

couple of weeks ago. Now I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but when I was back out there with nothing to distract me, it became very clear why the rubs were where they were. As I looked at my waypoints on on X, they were strung out on an elevation line in a property that honestly might have ten feet of elevation difference throughout the whole thing. The one top o line that runs through it also happened to

be exactly where the rubs were. It was clear that even though the difference in elevation might not equal the height of a regulation basketball hoop, bucks traveled along it enough to leave a concentration of sign. That's a great finding and something that should not have been as much of a puzzle to me as it was. But what it also does is tell me how to keep looking for buck movement in that mostly flat mono habitat of

big woods over there. My deer hunting blood runs deep in bluff country, so I'm pretty familiar with deer habits in the hills. When I get to flat ground, I struggle, But a scouting trip helped me see something that wasn't evident at first. This is a huge advantage when I'm looking for more spots and some kind of pattern to play off of. If you travel to scout, you might find something similar, and in fact probably will if you go somewhere that is a bit different from your usual haunts.

Deer have definite patterns to their behavior. You know this span from Canada to Florida, but there's also a heavy bit of deviation depending on the habitat and terrain. Spending more time and places where you're not familiar with the local nuances of deer life will help you get better

at reading sign and identifying quality ambush spots. Again, this is a different beast in March when you're on a long weekend trying to crush cabin fever and be somewhat productive, versus showing up in late October with an expensive tag in your pack. The benefits extend beyond that, as well, let's say you're wearing a new pair of boots or trying out a new pack, or you plan to drop off a couple of cell cameras to send you updates

on deer activity for the next several months. All of those pieces of gear that come together to make a hunt better or worse have the potential to an enhance your hunt or detract from it. Maybe you've got a smoking deal on some close out cameras and you think, well, one hundred dollars a pop for sell cameras is the best thing going, so you load up and you take them out there with you. But then a few weeks later you realize that one of the cameras doesn't seem

to be sending and he picks at all. Another is all deer butts and leaves blowing in the wind, and another is draining battery life, you know, like seventeen times faster than it's advertised. Maybe your pack doesn't ride right on your shoulders, or your boots give you hot spots on your feet. Maybe a dress rehearsal with your gear on a low pressure scouting trip shows you a lot about what to do or what not to do when

you return to hunt in seven or eight months. I honestly think this is one of the reasons guys like Andy May are so deadly in the woods. He's not showing up to hunt after not scouting for five months, while hoping all of his gear is just good enough. He's been there and done that dozens and dozens of times in that span of months, and there are very few surprises left to change his hunt for the worst. Now, there's one last thing I want to say on this topic.

You might not think you need to travel to hunt because you have a good spot at home. You might not see the reason to leave your state to shoot a buck that you could shoot at home. But here's the thing. This is not just about killing deer. Taking your hunting on the road, away from the ground you know by heart. It's good for you. It's good for all of us to get into the unknown and have to rediscover how to do this stuff. It's also a great way to find more outdoor experiences to enjoy, which

is kind of like compound interest. Your initial investment is just the idea of getting a tag and hunting deer somewhere. So you go scout that place in March and maybe you find a great place to hunt, or maybe you don't, but maybe when you're scouting that area you find a whole bunch of pheathers living on public land. Or maybe you run into an area that just seems chalk full

of turkeys. Maybe you cross a beautiful trout stream ten times while looking for thigh sized rubs, and you realize that it wouldn't be such a terrible idea to drive the kids out this summer to catch some fish. When you open yourself up to these possibilities, things just get more interesting. I don't know how many times I've found a reason to go somewhere for some fun in the outdoors that started out as a deer scouting trip but then morphed into something else. And the reverse is also true.

I've had some of my best deer hunts because I traveled upland birds somewhere, or because I fished a stretch of a smallmouth river that I'd never been to before. Whitetail hunters are heavily fixated on the goal of killing a big deer, but there are many many paths to take you on your way there, and there are many ways to enjoy the world of the whitetail without taking the most direct path from not having a dead buck

to hopefully having one. Think about this stuff as we grind our way through this stupid ass month and start to think about turkey hunting, and come back next week because I'm going to talk about how to save some money on deer hunting, which is probably a good topic to dive into considering how expensive everything seems to be. Right now, that's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much

for your support, Thank you for listening. If you want some more white tail content or some turkey content, which is dropping like crazy right now, head on over to the meedeater dot com. You'll see all kinds of videos. You'll see all kinds of podcasts, all kinds of articles, lots of good stuff there. Go check it out.