Ep. 802: Foundations - How to Use Summer Trail Cameras to Plan a Successful Rut Hunt

the new white tail lineup. We have three different systems coming out, the early season Phase, the mid season Core, and for late season hunters or anyone who just spends time in Arctic like weatherwaight on white tails to thermic. As I said, these are all systems tailored to seasonality and likely conditions, so you'll need to check them out

to see what's right for you. I spend a lot of time in the Phase and the Core offerings last fall, and I'll just say this, if you're in the market for new white tail hunting clothing, you're probably going to want to go check these twenty twenty four offerings out. Head on over to first light dot com. That's where we'll see them all Right, enough salesy stuff. I think the number one reason why I love white tail hunting so much is that it's just a pursuit that allows

you to build in layers to your success. During the entire off season. Those nine months are your opportunity to do detective work on last year's buck movements and to try to figure out what this season's buck movements should look like. One of the best ways to do this is through trail camera usage, and that's what I'm going to talk about right now. Anybody who listens to this podcast,

they know I love fishing. In fact, when I'm daydreaming about my future, I often conjure up a mental show that involves me living somewhere close to a beach where I can smell the salt water every day and head out in the flats to sitefish for whatever might be

cruising along. Now. I'm not about to plaster my truck with salt Life stickers, although I did notice that my wife had a salt Life hat on the other day, and I thought, Hmm, I can't think of someone less comfortable in the ocean than the very pasty and very

suburban soccer mom. I happen to be married to who has the most irrational fear of fish in anyone I've ever met, and who is far far more comfortable on land than she is even wading in water where it's highly unlikely to encounter anything more dangerous than a bluegill any huski. I just like the idea of figuring out how to fish for a pile of different species in an environment that speaks to me on a level I

can't quite explain. Since I'm quite a ways away from buying an ocean front property and retiring early, I bide my time fishing the freshwater lakes and rivers here in the Upper Midwest. To do this, I need a boat. Technically I don't need a boat, but if you love fishing, you need a boat. It's kind of like, sure, you can love pheasant hunting, but if you don't have a dog, do you really love pheasant hunting? Now? I have a new boat now, but from nineteen ninety nine until last

March I had the same boat. It was a great boat. I loved it. It was a great boat for up to two people and occasionally a couple of dogs for taking kids or a whole family. A seventeen foot bass boat gets awful cramped in a hurry, And as I learned when one of my daughters tried to grab a lily pad flower when she was like four, it's very easy for a young kid to fall out of and

go headfirst into the drink. At least she had her dad there to grab her by the ankle and haul her back in, which is more than I can say for myself when I went headfirst into the drink out of that boat one time. Now, as the girls got older and wanted to cast more, and as their dog pack went from one to two, I realized I was

going to need a new boat. The problem was that the old blonde Buzzkill wasn't stoked about me replacing what she deemed as a perfectly fine piece of watercraft for something that cost a quarter of what our house cost

when we bought it. After we got married. Since I'm a savvy fella, I started talking a lot about how the boat was just too small and someone was going to get hooked in the face, and really a seventeen foot boat was way, way too dangerous to take a family fishing it, especially when there were nineteen foot bass boats that are so much safer out there. You know.

I dropped subtle hints for months. I mentioned that a couple of power poles on the back of the boat could make it really nice to bobber fish with my family, which is kind of my bride's chosen fishing style. I mentioned how if we just had some new grafts that I don't know, communicated with my trolling motor to bring us into the high tech world of modern fishing, the girls would probably catch more fish. She didn't seem super

sold on the idea. I pointed out how a new boat could have a built in ladder on it, just in case we decided to haul some twelve year olds on tubes or go swimming for an afternoon in the summer. I played the long game, and when the boat sails started popping up, I showed my wife what a good deal we could get, and she loves a good deal. So that was that done and done, And it only took me like a year and a half of subtle conditioning to get her on board with the whole deal.

The thing about life is we all want instant gratification. We want what we want, and we want that shit right now. But that's not how life works. It's not how big purchases in a marriage work, and it's not how things work in the white Tail woods. This hit me last week when I sweated my way through a swamp in northern Wisconsin with a backpack full of moultrees. While I do plan to hunt the early season over there in Packerland, it'll all be about my daughters at

that time. I'm not going to go boat on over there myself until the rut. And you know, I even have a rifle hunt plan there this year, which is actually kind of one of the bigger reasons why I wanted to get cameras out now, even though that probably doesn't sound like it makes much sense. But you see, last year I spent some time scouting after I arrowed a buck over there in mid November. What I found was some bucks sign in some hell holes that felt like a tip of the old deer iceberg kind of thing.

Felt like I was in a couple of places that bucks use to stay away from people in wolves and coyotes and whatever else. Now, I know that typical rut strategy is usually just to hang out on a terrain trap until something dumb and horny comes rolling along. My experience with that strategy is that it works very well in good places with high deer numbers. It isn't so simple in places with lots of hunting pressure, or where

the deer density is low, or both. Instead of letting the rut put a deer in my lap, I decided I'd figure out where the big boys are likely to stick to and then cater a bow and rifle hunting strategy to those spots. Now, that seems simple enough, but hiking through the cattails and feeding roughly seventy five million

mosquitoes and deer flies made it feel like something else. Oh. It's also hard to wrap my head around the reality of hanging cameras in July or August that might not show a deer on them until well into the bow season. It took me about five seconds of being in that swamp to realize that not a lot of deer would choose to be in there. Now, that's okay, I want those cameras soaking in there for a while and just waiting for when the nights get much cooler and the

deer start realizing that it's hunting season once again. So far, my prediction of deer movement and those spots has been pretty much dead. On the sum total of deer pictures I've received has been a don of fawn that came in to sniff around after I left. I haven't had even a single spike on camera yet, no bucks, and I don't expect to anytime soon. I do expect that eventually the bucks will show up and they'll tip me off to something in their lives. The spots where I

put those cameras are all pain to get to. They are also thick and just generally nasty, and they are all on trails where I have tree stand trees picked out, but I haven't hung any stands yet because I don't know if this strategy is going to work enough to convince me of the effort. I also know that since I have trees picked out, I can just slip in for a mobile hunt when the time is right, if that's the best or the easiest play. Now, is this

a revolutionary trail camera strategy? Nope, not really. But if we dig into it a little, bit. I think it'll highlight why it's different, and different can be very good. So think about your summertime trail camera strategies. I bet most year hunters who deploy a few digital scouters each summer lean super heavily toward food sources or water sources, or in a hell of a lot of places over some kind of attractant that has been placed specifically to

draw a deer in. That's great, do whatever, But the extent of the potential knowledge you can glean from this strategy doesn't favor a great rot hunt. What it does is offer you information for early season hunting potentially and

definitely information on inventory. That's not nothing. But a lot of folks also happen to not hunt very hard in the early season, and so what they do is gather from this type of camera a strategy that you know tends to be less useful than it seems because they're probably not going to put the effort in right away to take advantage of that intel. And I've been guilty of this many many years, which is why I'm taking

a different approach this year. My thought is that if I can start to see when the big DearS show up, in the hell holes where they leave a lot of sign throughout the season, I can probably figure out a little better about how they will react to hunting pressure overall, you know, both from me and the girls and from the general pressure in the areas I hunt. I should be able to get a look into what happens when the bachelor groups break up and the deer go to

the spots there's so advantageous to them. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, and was reminded of when I found a clear buckbed while scouting last week. Deer are prey animals, so their best offense is a great defense. The buckbed was right next to a dead fall, with thick brush behind him and some open meadow in front. It was ideal for a south wind, pretty dang good for a west wind, both of which we get a

lot in the summer. Now. I don't know who made that bed, but I know that he understands what to do to survive. That's what I want to learn more about with this trail camera strategy. If it shows sporadic movement by something mature in any one of these spots, I should be able to dial down the most likely places that deer will cruise or lay down, sign or

start to chase when the rut gets closer. And when I'm over there with a rifle in my hand and the rut is winding down, I should have a good idea of where the deer should go, you know, to get to those hell holes to evade the Orange army. I think this is possible to learn with this trail camera strategy. I think this strategy will actually go beyond

just identifying some little sanctuaries too. The biggest thing that you know, us deer hunters get wrong about the rut is that it'll just put a buck in our laps no matter where we sit. So many hunters go to burned out stands in November thinking that the rut will erase six or eight weeks of overhunting. And in some cases they are right, but in a lot of cases they aren't. If you burn the doze out in an area, you're in trouble. If you burn the bucks out in

an area, well, you're in trouble. Will the rut put some deer back in play, absolutely, but it often doesn't make hunting as easy as we'd like to believe. The rut is harder to hunt successfully than we've been told. It is an awesome time to be in the woods, for sure, but it's also true that if you're not hunting someplace unbelievably good, you're still hunting deer that know you and everyone else is after them. They do take more risks, but not as many as we want them

to know. They do move in daylight, but not randomly. Their desire to pass on their jeans is no joke, but it doesn't compare to their desire to be around for another sunrise. In fact, there might be only a couple of days a year where a mature buck is really that vulnerable at all, and if he spends most of his time hold up with an astisk dough, you're

mostly out of luck. The way to hedge your bets in favor of killing a deer like that is to get close to where he feels safe, to post up twenty five yards downwind of a trail that he uses because it offers him a lot of survival advantages to play off of his strategy to survive, and not just

his desire to meet a receptively. He has lots of nighttime hours to go that way and not too many daylight hours in November where he has to be super concerned with his safety, so he really only has to get things right about eleven hours a day then, and that matters. So I guess my question for you, find folks would be how often do you have amazing rut hunts? How often do you have clunkers on the years where you wait for the rut to save you? How often

does that work out? Or let's look at it another way, how many days would you need for your planned rut cation where you'd make a big bet that you definitely are going to kill a deer that qualifies as big to you? Is it two days or twenty? Maybe you don't need to sweat it out now to try to figure out where your local bucks feel most safe, because

the rut usually delivers something amazing to you. That's great. Now, if you're listening to this and thinking that you've had more than your share of clunker hunts during November, you might want to ask yourself why, what is your typical strategy for hunting the rut. Does it involve going mobile on the edge of a known bedding area, or does it involve hauling a couple of bottles of dope and some rattling antlers out to the field edge stand. You've

been hunting every week since mid September. Maybe to put a little finer point on this, I think a good way to look at rut strategies is to ask ourselves how confident we generally are in our November hunts. Are you confident because it's the rut and hey, anything can happen, or are you confident because you feel you put yourself in a really good situation to kill a cruiser. There's a huge difference there, and it's often the thing that divides the really successful hunters from folks who post up

average results on any given season. Now, I'm not much interested in average, although I find myself there a lot. One of the ways that I'm trying to do better this season is to learn about the bucks in some of the spots I hunt in a way that I've never really tried before. Those cameras right now out there might show me something valuable, or they might not show me anything at all, But I think they will show

me something I can work with. I'm curious if they show me height and travel around the bow opener or just around weekends in general, when there should be more people out in the woods. I'm curious what they'll show me when the youth gun season or whatever happens, will there be more activity in those spots, Let's say when the duck hunters hit the water, because that might actually

play into some of the spots I hung cameras. What I'm looking for with this strategy is that if I can connect the likelihood of a buck using a little sanctuary around any human intrusion, or any other variable like certain wind directions or some kind of weather, the prevalence of coyotes or wolves. I'm also curious to see if there's any connection between deer movement in one part of a particular swamp versus another. Because I have cameras positioned

on trails in two different spots. It might be all a bust, or it might not. The cool thing about whitetails is that we have this off season to work with, and we have plenty of days throughout the actual deer season to gather up a few nuggets of the good stuff that could point us in the right direction by

early November. So while you're out there hanging a camera on the edge of the soybeans, or maybe your clover plot or hew over a mineral block where it's legal, or as I see from people who send me trail camera photos, or in real estate land listings in a hell of a lot of places where they aren't legal. Think about what you're going to learn. Think about your

plan for the season. Is the goal to get on a bachelor group for the bow opener and try to tag out just hours into the season, or are you just doing something deer wise because you feel like you should and it's fun to get picks of bucks doing what they do in the summer. Maybe there is a way for you to divide up your cameras to serve

vastly different services for you. In fact, I think old school non cell cameras are ideal for this strategy, if that makes it more palatable to put some of them in spots where you expect pretty dismal results for weeks on end. You know, obviously this whole thing is highly individualistic, but I want you to think about your camera usage.

Maybe a single camera and a question mark spot can clue you into something really important for your rough hunts, something that the other hunters are never going to figure out. Because they are going to do exactly what they always do. Think about that and think about listening next week, because I'm going to talk about understanding dominance in the deer herd and why it can help your summer scouting. That's it.

I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which has brought to you by first Light. As I mentioned in the intro, First Light has a whole pile of new white tail stuff coming out that you're going to want to check out at first light dot com. And if you want more hunting content videos,

maybe a big game or recipe. Maybe you're heading on your first Antelope Houn or elkont here soon, whatever it is, whatever it you want to scratch in the outdoor, as we probably have you covered with some kind of content over at the media here dot com. Go check it out.