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 Sight. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about reading the land to predict buck travel much more efficiently. Sometimes with this podcast I cover topics I really don't want to. Last week was one of those where I broke down some of my bigger mistakes of the year. This isn't
one of those, though. I want to talk about this one because I've had a few revelations this season that smacked me upside the head like someone tossed a half frozen salmon my way.
In fact, what.
I'm going to talk about, as far as reading the land in a specific way, has helped me fill two buck tags this year, one on private land and one on public So buckle up, my little buck loving buttercups, because it's time to learn about connective tissue. You know that old saying that opposites attract. You know where that came from. I don't, but I can tell you that it's some great a bullshit. Well maybe it's not. I
take that back for a second. Opposites do attract sometimes because we are hairless monkeys who oftentimes base our choices off of the pure attractiveness of someone else. So two people with nothing in common could be attracted to one another. What doesn't happen after opposites attract, though, is that they stay together for seventy years and dye in each other's arms, knowing they lived a life of fulfillment and love. You have to have something in common. That was something I
realized about my life when I quit drinking. My wife's family isn't full of a ton of total drunken idiots, but alcohol is present at an awful lot of their get togethers, in fact, probably all of them. I'd say it's a binding agent for activities like going to twins games, or.
Family reunions or I don't know, days of the lake or whatever.
When you are one of those people who drinks a lot, you can tolerate a lot of stuff that you might not otherwise want to do.
Because hell, you get to drink.
But when you decide it's time to give that stuff up so you don't die super young, things just change a little of that connective tissue rips. This happens often in relationships as people age and mature and find new things they like or get sick of things they used to like but don't anymore. While opposites might attract at first, they often don't stay glued together forever. Religious beliefs, political believes, how are you were raised, income, sense of humor, whatever.
The more that you're not in line with your partner, the easy it is for the whole thing to come crashing down, or for you to secretly wish it would one hobby, one shared passion, something beyond just the life you've built and often the little people you've created together. It's a huge thing for a relationship. It matters, and it's worth the effort to try to keep that thing going strong, because if it doesn't, it's time to give up half of your hunting land in Wisconsin and fire
up that old tinder profile or whatever. You have to have that connective tissue, just like you do with deer hunting. This is something that has really struck me this year, and after the first time, I thought maybe it was something, you know, pretty interesting. But after the second time, I killed a buck while thinking this way, I really decided to explore it. So let me break this down for you with two of these examples. When I drew my
I would tag this year. I had a plan. Then I went to where my tag was good for and found out that a lot of people were hunting there in a lot of the spots I wanted to go to. So I went scouting along a river, because if I'm going to find deer on public land, they will often be along moving water. The first thing I found was a dried up ox bow lake that was covered in buck sign, so I walked it out and found more buck sign in.
A couple of big beds.
I put that in the maybe pile, and then I found a decently used crossing leading to another flat along the river.
Now that was two data points.
So the first night I was there, we set up on the second flat. While waiting for my cameraman to get settled in, two bucks trotted down the hill right into our laps. I couldn't do anything but pick up a camera and film it for myself while we waited to see how it played out. What happened was that my cameraman finally got settled in and I was halfway up to my saddle platform when he hit some button on his camera that made a lot of digital noise, and I watched those bucks sprint out of my life.
We sat there that evening and came back the next morning. We heard deer cross the river in a specific spot. In fact, it was the spot those bucks ran to, but I couldn't see any of the deer, so I figured we'd better walk out that spot, and when we did, I found a much more promising crossing that would allow bucks to travel through three flats along the river, mostly
in a straight line. That meant they could cruise the thickest bedding cover around where the most lush and green browse was, they could get a drink, all while avoiding most of the hunting pressure. It was efficient and effective, and when I looked at on X to get a better idea the whole thing, it dawned on me just how linear and straightforward the buck travel would be in that spot. It took an afternoon and then half of a day before we decoyed in a buck on the river,
and it was cool as hell. It was all about the connective tissue between those spots. Now, follow me back to Minnesota, where I've been hunting a small twenty five acre property in the suburbs. The spot only allows for a few setups, and for some reason, while I had had deer come through in different areas, there's one stretch of woods between a wet pond and a dry pond that a lot of the deer passed through. I sat watching them from a different stand about seventy five yards
off the mark, and the movement didn't make sense. So once again I pulled up on X and had a real aha moment. For starters, the spot was kind of between what looked like an amazing five acre bedding area next to someone's house and the nearest cornfield, which was very far away, but the travel was so linar and allowed them to stay and cover mostly from point A
to B and back. When I realized why I had seen so many dos come and go through there, and then why almost every cruising buck on the property seemed to use that twenty yard wide runway through the woods, it just dawned on me that spot is just a connective tissue between the betting and the food, between the food and the betting. That's not much of a dear secret. But the truth is that little patch just concentrates travel
and it doesn't look like a funnel. Neither did this stuff in Iowa that I hunted, because they weren't funnels.
They aren't funnels.
Neither spot necked down movement physically, it was just where they chose to travel. After seeing two bucks one evening use that spot, I told the landowner that I was going to go rogue the next day during mid morning
and hang a stand right over it. The wind was going to be pretty good and it was going to be November seventh, So I got set up in this dreamy red oak that was positioned so well for the and honestly was something I appreciated a lot after spending so much time on public land trying to just find a tree that might work in the areas I wanted to hunt. And at one point thirty I looked behind me and saw a buck standing where I didn't want
to see a buck standing. He was going to have to come around my end of the pond, and that meant he was probably going to get my win.
Now. I had a NOSONYX unit running.
Specifically because I was worried about that exact thing happening. But I thought, there's just no way that buck did win me. I'm sure of it. He also wanted to get past me so bad that I could see him almost weighing the danger. Now, these deer live in the suburbs, so they smell people a lot. They aren't the brightest year I've ever hunted, but they don't tolerate big mistakes either. This buck had like a real battle of wills as he almost offered up a shot and then started to
finally walk off. I thought, well, you know, I guess it wasn't meant to be. But he wanted to get to that dope betting area so bad, and the only way was to go through the pond or walk past me. And he made the wrong choice, And it was a wonderful feeling watching him pile up seventy yards away. The truth was, the whole reason I killed him was from
deer observation in satellite imagery. This isn't revolutionary stuff, but I find myself thinking too small on this front a lot of times, or maybe a better way to put it is, I find myself thinking mostly like to the size of the property, Like I limit my thought process to what do I have to hunt?
And that's it.
Now, when you hunt that small twenty five acre property, you know, I was mostly thinking about just what the wind is going to do and what limited options I have. I'm not thinking about the fact that there's no good food source anywhere near me other than one standing cornfield on the north end of a sod farm that is well over a half a mile away. I'm not thinking about a scrubby patch of grass and brush that might be three acres that a handful of does bed in
every day. That's way on somebody else's land. But both of those spots are vital to the overall deer movement on that small place I can hunt, and I'll probably never set foot on either property. I just needed the deer to show me what they do where I can hunt, then figure out why via a bird's eye view of the land. That gave me the confidence to sit there, and it worked out really well, really fast.
What does this mean?
Well, there's two things in Iowa. I had to decide that the connective tissue between those three spots would be strong enough to host some good buck movement. It was, and it didn't take long to see that. With a private place by my house, I had to figure out why the deer I saw did what they did, and it made a hell of a lot more sense when I put those pieces together. This is where I like to go with deer hunting. You know how, either on a spot you know really well, or maybe you hunt
with a buddy on his place. There's just like stay spots where you or he is like, hey, they I'll just go through the woods here, knowing that might be just good enough to kill it here, and that's it.
But I want to know why, and so should you.
Why do the deer walk through the woods in that particular spot during certain conditions and not during others. Where are they coming from and where are they going? What is the connective tissue holding things together there. The more you susce out the answer to those questions, the more
you can put that together anywhere you go. This is why it's important to use satellite imagery to figure out as much as you can about the whole dear neighborhood you hunt, not just the spots you can actually shoot a deer in Let me give you another example. I love to hunt states where you can bait on private land but not on public. If those states allow feeders,
that's even better. You know why, because the deer will often be very shy of those spots in daylight, so they'll stage up in the cover on public and then feed on the private at night. You can sometimes see feeder on aerial photos, or you can at least see the spots where there's very likely to be a feeder. In other situations, you can see food plots in the woods, ponds, egg fields, all kinds of interesting things that you may never get to hunt yourself, but could very well influence
movement on your ground. This is something that you almost have to understand to be successful with any level of consistency.
On public land. If you don't.
Understand how the private land influences your hunts there, you're going to be shit out of luck a lot. But on private ground you can do a lot of looking into the neighboring properties to figure out not only why the deer you hunt might do what they do, but also to try to predict what the deer should be doing in the places you might not hunt.
A lot.
Let me give you a hint about this. Even if you mostly hunt big woods, unbroken tracks of timber way up north or down south, there will almost always be some type of cover where the deer feel more secure. The interesting connective tissue is often just the best cover for them to go from point A to B and feel safe while they're in it. Where a lot of hunters make a mistake here is thinking that any woods is good cover.
It's not.
Open wood sucks, and deer mostly don't like it unless they literally don't have a better option or they get no hunting pressure. Generally, the connective tissue between spots will be something that has a soft edge, or something that just allows them to travel without being seen by people.
This is most evident and easy to understand. If you hunt open country, the deer will gravitate toward ever so slight elevation changes like it's their job, which it kind of is, because their job is to not get shot by you. They'll cater their routes to every patch of willows or sumac or the little bit taller CRP field so that they can go from where they want to be to where they want to be without being spotted. It's really that simple, but it's also not because these
routes exist because they are safe. They not only have the visibility advantage mostly, but they often have a wind advantage too. That spot that I killed my Minnesota buck in favors me very specifically around that pond because that puts a slight wrinkle into their travel plans. They just kind of have to go to the one side of it or the other, and primarily to one side, which allows me to set up and play very specific wind directions. Every other location on that property that is along that
travel route doesn't offer the same advantage. So really this is kind of a big first step to think about where do the deer prefer to travel because it offers security and it connects to places they want to be, Then how the hell do you hunt it? This is the one that a lot of folks get tripped up on, but it's a good idea to think about these types
of spots first. As big as you can on that property by my house, I could probably say that the travel route that I can hunt might consist of maybe two hundred and fifty yards of open country and cover of that, there's one spot where a pond forces some level of movement. There are no hills, there are no
fence crossing. There's just two hundred and fifty yards to work with, of which about twenty five of them offer me a real advantage if the prevailing north or west winds show up like they're supposed to, but mostly haven't this year for some reason. And why does this matter again, I'm going to say this because I have to. People like to sit the easy spots and try to draw deer to them by calling or rattling or decoying or whatever.
That's great.
It can be in the nail in the coffin when you've done the rest of the work to identify a spot like this, But the ticket to being a good consistent hunter is figuring out exactly where deer like to walk first. You can be a master deer caller, but if you don't have the first part, you won't be as successful as you could be. It's the defining factor in great hunters, and it's something that all of us
can benefit from. It's great for bow hunting. It's damn near a necessity if you gun hunt anywhere with real hunting pressure. If you spend time on public land, You better think about this stuff because it'll come into play in so many different scenarios. And this isn't just a white tail thing either. Connective tissue between spots and animals prefers huge in the elkwoods. It'll make you a deadly
turkey hunt once you understand how it works. It's something to think about no matter what you hunt, where you hunt. So take a little time to think about your season thus far. Does any of this give you any idea on what you should scout digitally? Does it make you think about the stuff you might be missing. Maybe you didn't have a great season and you can't figure out
where the deer are. That might be as simple as something along some part of their travel route changing, and it might not have anything to do with the property you hunt. Take a look at the most current satellite imagery you can find. Think about the deer you did see. Were any of them doing something you thought was random, Because it probably wasn't. It was probably just tied into
something you don't quite understand yet. There's more to this stuff than deer like to walk along the swamp across the.
Ridge here in September, but they're in November.
Figure out why if you can and get your ass into some of those spots and look for that connective tissue to with the whole thing together. And come back next week because I'm going to talk about the challenges of cold weather hunting and how to overcome some of them.
That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson.
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