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 is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today is all about understanding your home field advantage and how you can use it to have a better deer season. One of the things that sucks the most about modern society is how prevalent victim mentality is. Now we all have a reason to blame someone else for our problems, and the more we are exposed to that kind of thinking, the more we normalize it.
Now.
Of course, there are plenty of people who are actually real victims of many bad things, but there's also the reality that a lot of us just wanted an excuse for not doing something that we should. This happens in all facets of life, and of course it happens in deer hunting, but it doesn't have to and that's kind of what this show is all about. A couple of weeks back in the middle of June, I caught a flight out of MSP to Bozeman, where the meat Eater
headquarters is. The main reason for my western travel was so I could film a show where I explained how hard it is to teach Steve Vanella how to white tail hunt. I wish that was a joke, but you'll see anyway, if you were to ask me about that part of Montana versus the part of Minnesota I currently live in, I'd pretty much vote to move out there
in a heartbeat. When you land in Bozeman, you can see a couple of mountain ranges that look like they are straight out of a Bob Ross painting, complete with a hell of a lot of happy little trees. The opportunities to hunt a variety of critters there are a hell of a lot different than what I have at home, and I'm kind of a I don't know.
A variety kind of fella. I guess.
The air is crisp and clean, and there's just a vibe to those mountain towns that I love. People are generally pretty dang healthy because they can get outside and do stuff, and there's a nice mix of modern convenience, old school cool. In fact, I think about moving out to the mountains a lot, partially because I only think about the good stuff. I don't have to actually try to buy a house while competing against a horde of trust funders whose vacation homes are worth three times what
my normal home is worth. I don't have to drive a big truck on streets built for horse and buggies back in the eighteen hundreds. I can think about how awesome it is to shoot an elk while not thinking about busy trailheads and competing against a pile of outdoor recreation enthusiasts for space on the trail. Hell, when I was there in mid June, it snowed, not up in the mountains, well, I guess up in the mountains, but right in town too. It was a true blizzard in
mid June. Top that off with the fact that many of the best rivers out there were seriously blown out, and the reality of living there becomes something more balanced between well, I don't know, amazing and a heaping.
Pile of horseshit.
Reality often sucks, Like say you get a job with your dream company and you're like, I'm going to make so much cool content. But then suddenly you find yourself in some swamp in Michigan with some coworker who won't shut up about what kind of pollinators are his favorite, while you're filming something related to deer hunting and you should be turkey hunting, and you realize, dang, actually got
myself a real job. Anyway, here's a thing. It's a good idea to acknowledge reality and how to deal with it. This is something I think we should all do. And I got to remind you of this recently, when a Kentucky whitetail hunter emailed Old cal with a question about how he should look at the increased pressure on public land in the Bluegrass state. This guy, who put more thought into this problem than a lot of folks, admitted he just wasn't stoked about how many non residents there
are chasing the same whitetails he's after. Ugh, this is a common problem. What was uncommon is that he admitted being uneasy about advocating to take away hunting opportunities from someone, anyone, even folks who live across the state lines from him. Now, I got to tell you it warmed my heart to read that he was truly concerned with the issue of
hunters taking hunter opportunities away. As I was thinking about how to respond to him, I realized how often I hear residents of some state say that non residents are taking away their chances, but they have home field advantage and should use it. It's not all doom and gloom. The reality for all of us who don't own or lease land is that it just seems like there's more pressure out there pretty much everywhere.
You know. I don't know if that's true, but at least it sure feels that way. Now.
While I'm going to get into some other things, I want to address this first. Pretty much, any hunter who has to drive into your state to hunt is at a disadvantage compared to you. We should all be thinking about how to use that. For example, it's July. Do you know what that means. Most of us have one hell of an opportunity to do some real scouting right now. We can run trail cameras, we can glass, and we can get out there and take a good look around.
If you live, say, twenty minutes from where you hunt, you have a huge advantage over someone who lives five hours away. Why not use it? You know the pressure is going to be there in the fall, so the best you can do is use your home field advantage to find places where the pressure might not be that bad.
The best part about this.
Is that you'll be looking to get away from the other hunters, just like the deer. That's a two birds, one stone situation, maybe two bucks one arrow. I know that sounds like generic throwaway advice, so let's dive into something a little deeper. Do you do any long distance scouting before trail cameras became so common, this was the move in the summer. It's probably my favorite thing to
do with white tails, besides actually hunting them. The surface level approach to long range glassing is to find a bachelor group with some hitlisters and call that good enough. But it's not. If you have a way to get in and watch often, you should.
It's the easiest way to get.
On in an early season pattern, and honestly the easiest way I've ever found to kill a big one, even on public land. Now we all think the rut is the best bet, but for pressure ground it's often not. When you go out in glass you can see many, many things just beyond the obvious stuff like I don't know bucks like to feed in the soybeans in July. You can see where they feed in the afternoon when it's super hot and the sun is shining, they're going to stay in the shade.
It's going to tell you a lot.
You can see what trails they take to get to the food, and when they take them. Often you see them crossfields in such a way that just doesn't appear to make much sense. But when you watch enough and see enough deer do something, it doesn't really matter if you know why. It's good enough to know that they just often do that something. Maybe you notice that one corner often has dozen vonds, but another tends to have more bucks. That's pretty good intel that's not going to
come from a single glassing session. Now, imagine if you do some glass and often enough to start learning this kind of stuff, and then you throw up a couple of trail cameras in the woods on various trails leading out to that food source. What are you doing? Then you're putting together some real knowledge. Because what if a bunch of those loser non residents come in the night before the sea and walk those field edges and hang
some stands. Well, you know what trails the bucks usually take to get to the fields and what conditions they take them during, so you have a huge advantage. No one who is just showing up is going to have that piece together as well as you. Even if you never had to compete with a single out of state or for a spot, that strategy would put you ahead
of most of your local competition too. And do you know why, because most people don't even understand how to give themselves a real advantage over the deer and the other hunters, and even if they do, they probably won't put in the effort. Think about it this way, if you're frustrated with how hard hunting on public land has become, for example, you might look at it as almost an impossible task. A lot of Colorado residents feel that way
about out their elk situation. In fact, a lot of hunters will say that, but it's not true, and the proof is in the folks who go out and fill their tags in places that other hunters think is impossible. Some folks are content to allow themselves to be victims of too much pressure, while other folks just show up and try to get the job done. There's not much more to be said on that front, actually, but let's
take it a step further. Anyway, If you're dealing with a lot of pressure and you just can't connect with a deer, take a look at the old calendar. Are you hunting only weekends? Are you hunting opening weekend and then sporadically through the season, and then pinning your hopes on the rut. If so, guess what, you're gonna have
a lot of company. I know it sucks to see a ton of trucks in the parking areas on opening weekend, but it doesn't suck seeing almost no trucks on October tenth, especially if you're slipping into an oak flat where you know there's going to be some hard mask, or maybe you're down south somewhere in the per simmons are just starting to ripen up. You can set yourself up for this stuff, especially if you live close to where you hunt. Let me give you another example of how to recognize
your deer privilege. Last year, when I drove up to North Dakota to try to film big prairie buck hitting the dirt, I ended up on a section of land that was littered with trail cameras. Now, there aren't very many trees in that part of the state to begin with, but it felt like about half of them had cameras on them. It was pretty discouraging, but the deer sign wasn't. It was especially not discouraging under a few huge oaks
that were scattered throughout the property. Now, I'm not the smartest pup in the old litter, but I know that when I see a ton of fresh sign that I should hunt. That's what I did, and it was a short hunt that ended up with a short blood trail and a long drag through the night. The hunters who lived there, without doubt having an advantage over an odda stater who drove in with zero intel and walked out
to figure something out, they thought. And I'm filling in the blanks here, but I believe it to be true that running cameras was good enough. But it wouldn't clue anyone into that mast pattern. Most likely it just wouldn't. But some fresh late October snow and an hour walk
would do. You see where I'm going with this. It's easy to pin our failures on someone else, and in some cases that's okay, because it's definitely going to be true, but it's usually not when we start pointing our fingers at some faceless enemy who has sabotaged all of our deer hunting effort. Like most things in life, it's just pretty much on us. We have agency over ourselves, and that's about it.
Now.
This is where I'm not going to veer off into the kind of lalla land that a lot of hunting personalities like to pretend it is real. I could say that you have to be a scouting machine. You have to risk divorce to be out there every day that you can. You have to scout so much that your kids look at you a little funny at first when you come home, because they rarely ever see you. You don't have to go that far, but you have to do more than your competition, sometimes quite a bit more
if you do really haunt a high pressure area. Oftentimes though it's not as much work as we'd like to think, but it is more work, there's no way around it. Kind Of like you can't out exercise a horrible diet, you can't out haunt a lazy off season. This isn't elk hunting where any moment one could bugle and you
could be in the game. It's white tails and you know, I mean, I guess a buck could show up at any time, but they usually just require some effort when we'd all rather be fishing for big smallies or playing rec league softball or whatever. Now, another way you might acknowledge a real advantage is just proximity to your hunting grounds. Can you snack a little on scouting here and there, maybe an hour after work to walk into a spot you think might have some water you can hunt in
the early season. You don't need to spend dark to dark out there. If you don't have to an hour here and there adds up, especially if you go in with a This is easy to do once you get into the groove of it, and it's beneficial. I can't tell you how many times I've gone into a spot to glass in the summer, or just look at an area that I never ever go in where I've found something that has led me to some good deer. A great way to think about this stuff is to try
and remember your last few seasons. Do you feel like you settled a lot by sitting a couple of your go to spots too?
Much did you try.
To make a hunt happen where you wanted it to happen, despite the deer telling you that that wasn't a good idea, or maybe the other hunters telling you that they thought it was a great idea because they were all hunting there too. You've heard me say this a lot, but it's worth repeating, especially at this time of the year. If you have options, you're in the game. That's it. If you don't have very many options, you'll be out
of the game. The more you scout, the more you go into check areas that you can either add to your list or scratch off of it, the less you're going to be forced to. I honestly think this is one of the reasons that some good hunters will kill on land three states away that the locals struggle with. When you show up, you don't have any choice but to work your butt off to find something to work
with right now. When you live close by, it's easier to think the time you spend hunting will make up for the lack of scouting or stand prep, but it mostly won't. It's kind of like how a lot of folks you know, they think the only way to have a truly good bird dog is by taking it to a professional trainer. While trainers are a dang good thing for getting results out of dogs, they can only do
so much in eight or twelve weeks. Do you know who has a better chance of making your own dog a really great dog?
You?
You're with that dog every day, every little moment you take the train as a win, and no one is going to be more in tune or have more opportunities to do good by that dog than you. Sure, it's nice to offshore that stuff, but it's also not the only pas to what you want. And better yet, you have the best opportunity out of anyone to get what you want out of the situation. Let me try to offer up a few more reasons before I wrap a
boat around this whole thing. Just think about the really little stuff, like knowing where every parking area is on the land you hunt. You know you can know each of those spots well and when you should use one versus the other. Think about property boundaries. You can learn those in the off season, like get a real feel for them. You can get a real feel for what
the neighboring properties might have on them. If you go scout enough, you'll be in tuned to where the cattle are being pastured this week, where the corn gets cut for silage, when you should be counting on it for much later in the season. You can check the river after a fresh rain and see how high it gets and whether it would still be waitable or not if the same amount of rain falls, say in October, you know the night before you want to go hunt that property.
The more you scout now, the more you learn. This kind of.
Stuff that we never really think about when it comes to killing big bucks. But the truth is having a lot of relevant, up to date information about the ground you like to hunt is far more important than buying the latest and greatest bottle of deer p Instead of getting to the river edge in the dark and realizing you might be going for a dangerous swim if you step in, so you got to hike out and go back to bed, you can use that knowledge to start the morning out on one of your spots that doesn't
require you to cross that river. And hell, you can even factor in that the deer might not want to cross it either, which could make certain spots better appoint you in the right direction for catching a buck in the morning, trying to get back to his bedding area. All I'm saying is that it's a good idea to take stock in your privilege, embrace it, use it to
your advantage. Start now if you haven't already, and you'll be real happy with your decisions, you know, by about September, and even happier when you're on stand and hunting like you should be. While a lot of your competition either isn't hunting or scrambling to put together some kind of plan.
Think about that. Think about coming back next week because I'm going to talk about scouting again, but how scouting can be used sort of as a deer hunting dress rehearsal, and why it's such an important thing to get into the groove of doing because it will make you a much more efficient and effective deer hunter. I promise you that that's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you
so much for listening and for all your support. I can't tell you how much that means to us. Just trust me on this. We love it, we appreciate it. Thank you. Also, if you're like man, I'm getting the itch and it's time to start thinking about some extra deer hunting information or just diving real deep into the game, you can head over to the meat eater dot com and there is going to be a pile of different content waiting for you.
Various podcasts.
You can check out the Element guys and what they're doing for their white Tail prep of the season. You can see all kinds of different video series, and of course there's articles there, recipes, and a whole lot more. Go check it out at the meat eater dot com.