Ep. 812: Foundations - The Most Important Week of Scouting

Summer scouting is all about finding a target buck and then watching him like some kind of camo clad creep until you know his whole routine, or at least his evening feeding routine. In season scouting is all about finding the hot sign right now. But this week, right now, this week, whether your season is open or not, is the week that matters a lot. This is when deer shuffle the deck, so to speak, and those summertime patterns

can blow up. The food sources often change, and the white tailed world is just in sort of a state of flux. It might not seem like a big deal to get out and figure things out, but it is, which is what I'm going to talk about right now. I know you fine listeners are well aware that I have twin daughters, since I talk about them all the time. They are my little girls and they always will be. But they are also twelve and will be teenagers in

a few months now. I always figured I was meant to raise boys, since I'm a pretty manly fella and quite honestly, mostly like a little boy myself. In fact, I recently filmed some fishing content that required me to go catch some frogs, some crayfish, some minnows, and as a bonus, a painted turtle and a garter snake. Like all of us, there are a lot of times where I'm not super excited to do my job, especially if he involves spending a lot of time with Mark Kenyan.

But sometimes, like when I'm tasked with catching some frogs so we can film them hopping across lily pads, I realize how lucky I am. As an added bonus, one of my daughters tagged along to supervise the critter catching

mission and pitch in where she could. It was the best three hours of my working career, and about a thousand times better than just a few hours earlier when I watched my camera man butterfinger a go pro so that it fell from his grasp and sunk to the bottom of a lake, and it had a whole bunch of hours of much needed footage on it. Anyway, my

little girls aren't so little anymore. And the thing that sucks about raising girls is how everyone tells you stuff like, oh, just wait till they are teenagers, you'll really be in for it. That's kind of like if someone has a puppy and you're like, man, that's a cute little dog. Just wait until you love it for twelve years and then you have to put it down. That will absolutely destroy you as a person, and you'll cry like a little baby. Ha ha. Sometimes some things just don't need

to be said, because we all know what's coming. With my daughters. I knew the preteen and soon to be teen behavior was coming. I didn't need to be told over and over again. It still surprised me when suddenly one day they went from wearing pink puppy love shirts to suddenly being obsessed with fashion and wearing shirts that, in my opinion, are way way too short for the average twelve year old. What's worse is when I bring up the clothing choices to my wife, she thinks it's

hilarious that I'm in full on old dad mode. Now, the old blonde buzzkill isn't exactly known for her risk gay clothing choices, so it surprised me that she was okay with our little, tiny baby girls wearing shirts that show off their belly buttons. Now. To her credit, she told me, we can clamp down on it now and fight a much bigger battle later, or we can give them some autonomy with their fashion and do our best to guide them to be smart about life. You fellas

out there raising young dog might think that's bananas. But I was raised in a household where my parents, mostly my mom, talked about alcohol like it was about one hundred times worse than pure heroin. We never had an ounce of it in the house, and I was rarely around anyone who drank it all, so naturally, by the time I had my learners permit, I was well on my way to being a functioning alcoholic, which only got

worse and worse for about twenty years or so. Such is the way with kids and parents and navigating the differences between the two. I don't think any of us really knows what we're doing. The girls are just in a big transition in their life, and that's going to lead to a new reality. Do you know what else is in a big transition right now? That's right, the game of golf. I'm so sorry, guys, imagine what it's

like to be married to me. The deer in transition, and I think doing your best to keep tabs on them right now is a huge benefit to early season hunting, and quite frankly, you're hunting over the whole season, or at least up until about the rut or pre rut time. Anyway. The thing is, there are multiple reasons why the deer are going to start doing things differently now. You know, in the next ten days, the biggie that we all know about is all the bucks are going to go

from velvet antler to heart antlered. This is the week where that happens for I don't know most of them, maybe like eighty five percent of the deer out there. Now. If you get the chance to watch a bachelor group, not just get trail camera picks of them, but really glass them. You can usually over a few days see the dynamics change when they start going hard antlered. There's nothing saying their patterns will totally die or shift to something that might seem more familiar in October, but they

definitely are prone to changing. This is due to several reasons. Most likely, for one, it's time to fight or at least spar. You do, you know, sometimes see late August or early September, deer square up and kind of spar even when they're in velvet, but it's not super common. But once they shed their velvet it does become super common. They can also now all of a sudden make rubs, and let me tell you something, pay attention to those September rubs. They are the ticket to killing bucks in

my experience. Think about it this way. Deer sign like rubs, starts out at zero for the season. Now, while you might find scrapes getting used all year long, you won't find that with rubs. They are not there in the summer, and they start to show in just kind of a trickle in the early fall. Now, as the season progresses, more bucks of all sizes just make more rubs. This means that any individual rub, or even a cluster of rubs, becomes less important on its own as September gives way

to October and then November comes roaring in. The first rubs of the season matter, and they matter even more where you have low deer densities. But even if you have tons of deer around, pay attention to them. Where bucks make early season rubs, especially rubs in the cover, is where you want to hunt right now, and beyond rubs, you just have a reshuffling of the deer herd. Young bucks head out to go stake their claims somewhere, and if you're in the market for young bucks, that's good

news for you. Not all of us are in a situation where we can name bucks and pass them up at four and a half years old every season so that we have a fresh crop of five year olds to hunt. So sometimes you got to go for what you can get, and if that's a young buck, you're in luck. I'm convinced this is one of the reasons

why some deer seems so stupid in September. Now, sure they haven't been hunted for nine months or so, but Some of them have just left their homes that they've known their whole lives and struck out to find a new place to live. They settle where the living is good, which is often some food plot tucked into the woods where they think they haven't made I killed a buck

like this a long long time ago. He's an eight pointer that might score about eight eighty inches, but at the time he was a really good one to me. This year ended up setting up shop right next to a stand that my dad and I hunted a lot, and the first time I saw him was during a morning on September where after I walked in in the dark, I heard a deer approaching in the moonlight. I could see him walk right up to my stand, and I

could hear him sniffing my screw in steps. He was gone before first light, but I remember thinking that he might be the kind of deer a guy with my skill set could actually kill. And I had never killed anything with more than six points, so an eight pointer was a real dream come true. I did what any not very smart why tail hunter would do, and I went in there the next morning with a set of

rattling antlers. I don't even really remember what my justification for that move was, but I do remember the feeling of seeing that buck walking right toward my tree after I had done my best to convince him a couple of buddies were having a shoving match in his new living room. He walked in close enough that even I

didn't miss him, which wasn't always the case. When I started out deer running, another deer a little bigger than that one, but equally as dumb and seemingly lost, walked out during extremely windy and somewhat wet evening in northern Wisconsin. A few years after I killed that other eight pointer. My buddy had had an encounter with the deer and it didn't break his way. But when I saw him walk out, I not only knew it was the same deer, but that he wasn't on his a game survival wise.

I'll tell you what, when I walked up on that buck dead in the swamp, it didn't bother me in the least that Mother Nature had reshuffled the deer deck and put that buck in my lap. While most of the white tail talk involves mature bucks and figuring out their home ranges, if the bar isn't set quite so

high for you. Scouting right now can put you on an interloper deer that is just trying to figure out his new way of life in a new neighborhood, and those deer can be an absolute gift, which is not something that the deer gods deliver on a regular basis for most of us. Now you also have the food aspect out there. The thing about scouting deer is that you're not only scouting the deer, but the environment in which those deer live. This is what trail cameras won't

do for you, and that matters. While you might suddenly stop getting picks of deer here or there, or suddenly start getting picks on a somewhat dead camera, you're going to have to fill in the blanks for why those changes occurred. But when you go into the woods to look around, or you sit back on a spotting scope and you try to keep tabs on your favorite beanfield buffet, you're also exposing yourself to the world of the deer in a way that often delivers answers instead of just

more questions. I dealt with this last week. I took the girls over to Wisconsin to bate some bears and set some deer blinds, and just generally get a little more ready for the upcoming season. What I was particularly curious about was why my cameras had gone so dead in the last week or so. I went from at least some buck activity to literally no buck activity and just had a few doze and some random natural movement bears.

I knew from some of the local scouting that the acorns were hitting the ground, but at least in my world this year, it seems like the hard mass crop is way down from last year. Now that might be solely a regional thing, but that's all it really matters

to me. It doesn't do me any good to focus hard on how many white oaks are dropping, and, say central Missouri, for example, now here the acorn situation feels light, which is generally good for my hunting because I don't have enough situations where I can get out an acorn pattern quickly and ride it out to a short blood trail. So that made me happy, but it didn't answer why the bucks had all disappeared off of my cameras. My suspicion is that there are some bait piles out there

on the names. Even though that option was made illegal in our area last year when a game farm deer pop positive for CWD. Now I don't know what the compliance rate is when baiting has been legal for a couple of decades and then suddenly it's not, but I'm

guessing it's not one hundred percent. Hell, just perusing the land listings on a dream of picking up another hunting property has shown me that there's a lot of illegal baiting going on in such a way that it's like, literally so prevalent that the photo evidence is often used to try to sell hunting land any husky. When the girls and I got into the woods, we realized that the apple trees in our neighborhood were absolutely weighed down

with the good stuff. We also saw some deer munching on Granny Smith's in the middle of the day while we were driving to a brook trout stream to see if we could find a few fish to mess with. When there is a heat advisory, because the air feels like Florida in August and not northern Wisconsin, and yet there are deer on their feet munching away at one o'clock in the afternoon, you know there is a powerful

food draw there. That's what we saw. And while I don't know if apples are the sole reason for the sudden lack of bucks of my cameras, I know that

it's certainly a possibility. I also know that being in the woods right now and actually scouting put us on a couple of trees that look like they might draw a deer in for a couple more weeks, especially if we can hunt around them right after pounding rain or some frontal wind, both of which tend to take soft masts from the trees and put it on the ground, and the deer that eat it know that is for

sure the case. Scouting right now can help you dial into another reality that is unavoidable as well, the fact that there are more people in the woods than there were a month or two ago. The weeks leading up to the boat opener witness a steady increase in people poking around in the woods and checking cameras and messing with stands and generally just tipping off the deer that a mass invasion of their worst predator is building up. If you're a public land hunter, this is a big deal.

If you're not, it might be a big deal, depending on the size of the property you hunt and the density of hunters in your area. The idea is to start to figure out where the deer could be when the season actually opens. Now, this goes against the traditional summer scouting advice of finding a bachelor group and then dialing in their patterns so you can kill them on opening week. That works, but sometimes well so you know a lot of times actually it doesn't because the deer

changed their patterns. So what do you do? Well, This is why you have one mobile setup, or at least keep your options open to that natural ground blind thing I talked about last week. The deer might come in and march right by the stand you have on the alfalfa field or food plot where you've been monitoring their

activity since turkey season. Or they might pull some move where they decide the apples are a better bet, especially since they are falling in the overgrown homestead that no one goes into until late in the small game season

when the cottontails are in real danger. It's not enough just to scout heavy right now, to keep tabs on what is changing on the woods, because if you don't have the means to react to it, you're just giving yourself depressing information about how your typical setups might not cut it. You need to be able to act on

what you find. I think this is maybe the best reason to try to keep scouting right now, instead of just admitting that things have changed and probably not for the better in relation to your early season plan, you know, and just hoping that things will level off later in the season and the deer will start doing what you want them to. You need to meet the deer where they are now. Like a couple of twelve year old

girls who decide puppy power shirts aren't cool anymore. You can try to get the world to bend to your whims and wants, but it doesn't really work that way with the deer. They go where they can, you know, where they can get what they need and avoid danger as much as possible. It is that simple, and it's

something they do all season long. It's also something they are doing right now, along with the fact that their world is changing in a variety of ways, many of which will take them right out of the path you have set for the season. Don't let that happen if you can help it. Now. Keep those cameras running, but get out there too, find those rubs, pay attention to

the random new bucks that seem to show up. Ask yourself, what food is here today that might be more important than the food that has been there all summer than prepare to react to whatever you figure out. Do that and come back next week, because I'm going to talk about how you just can't live vicariously through others when it comes to making deer hunting decisions. That's it. 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, for checking in, for supporting us. We truly appreciate it. If you want to get a little bit more of a white tail fix, you know, maybe check out the new white Tail Edu series that Mark and I put together. Uh, you know, how to strategies, styles, hunting tactics in video form. Go

check that out at the medieater dot com. While you're there, you might find a whole bunch of articles or maybe some other podcasts to kill the time, some video series, tons of hunting content there. Go check it out at the medeater dot com.