June 24, 2025 • 17 mins
This week, Tony breaks down how to summer scout with intention, so that you can predict buck movement from the opening day through the rut.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm your host, Tony.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Peterson, and today's episode is all about summer scouting and
the mistakes we almost all make.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
This is an easy one for me.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I love summer scouting, and I'm acutely aware of the
ways in which I've messed it up over the years.
There are a couple of different ways to summer scout.
I'm going to cover them all along with sort of
the typical pitfalls that come with each. Plus I might
dive into a few more issues we create for ourselves
with this crucial time of year and our deer strategy.
So buckle up, because it's time to talk white tails.
(01:03):
There is often a disconnect between what we think something
is and then what it actually is. We like linear
connections in our brains because we just don't have the
mental horsepower to consider the nuance of everything all the time.
When it comes to summer scouting, it used to go
like this, Load up a day pack with a spot
or in a tripod, spray down with some mosquito repellent,
(01:25):
and then go post up somewhere to watch a hayfield
or a beanfield or.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Some other food source.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Watch a bachelor group come out of the cover, make
note where they feed, set up there, kill them in
a month or two. Easy peasy, right Quite Today summer
scouting goes more like this. Load up a couple of
trail cameras, deploy them in the usual hotspots, build that
hit list from the comfort of an air conditioned house,
(01:51):
and then go kill them sometime this fall. There are
a lot of ways in which we screw up summer scouting,
and I want to get into that, you know, the
nitty gritty of the whole thing. But first off, there
is the question of frequency and intention and efficacy of
summer scouting. When it comes to the last one, a
lot of hunters focus much of their actual hunting efforts
(02:12):
on the pre rut and the rut, and so there's
this disconnect between July bucks and the November bucks. We're
hunting that keeps them from going, you know, too deep
in summer scouting, and why not if you live in
Iowa and you have a sweet property to bohunt all
of November, you don't really need to go scout bachelor
groups in July only to watch the early October open
or come and go and then get ready to hunt
(02:34):
when things start getting a little feisty.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
In the woods.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Pretty easy for a lot of us in a lot
of states to look at the opening dates of our
deer seasons and not be able to make a strong
connection to summer scouting and the likelihood that it'll have
us tagged out in the first few days of the season.
Couple that with the fact that you know, most of
us expect hot, buggy weather for our openers, and it's
easy to phone it in summer scouting wise. But how
(02:58):
effective some are scouting can be is up to us,
and it's very easy to believe it won't work that well.
And when we believe that, we don't want to put
in any effort. It's kind of like if you know
you'll never get a raise at work, no matter how
many extra projects you could tackle or overtime hours you
could put in if the precedent is set that you're
worth x amount of money to the C suite team,
(03:20):
you'd be a sucker to suddenly put in a ton
of extra effort on top of your normal duties. Now,
with deer, we sort of look at this as a
transactional thing in a similar matter, but also with deer,
it's often just the difference between how we perceive the
benefits of summer scouting. For example, I'm really bad at maths,
but here is an equation that might work. When you
(03:42):
take frequency and intention of summer scouting and increase them,
how effective it'll be well skyrocket or at least point
up into the right. On the frequency front. There's a
balance to be struck. Too little and you won't learn
anything actionable, or you'll only learn a tiny bit that
(04:02):
you need to know, which won't influence your actions the
right way, or could give you a false read on
the deer situation. Too much, which almost no one does,
and you can put the deer off long before you
get a chance to hunt them. Now, while most hunters
aren't in danger of summer scouting too much, it can
be done, and I know that because I've done it
(04:22):
many times. I'm not in danger of this now because
where I live, in my general life schedule, but there
were quite a few years of my life where if
I found a bachelor group somewhere that I could hunt,
I couldn't not go watch them. It's like an addiction, which,
if you know me, makes a hell of a lot
of sense. But those relaxed, easy to find bachelor groups
(04:43):
are only relaxed and easy to find if they don't
know they are constantly being monitored by one of their
scariest predators. And by that I don't mean me specifically,
by the way, but humans in general, the presence of
us in their world is tolerable to some extent, but
when you cross that line, it gets a hell of
a lot tougher. Most people won't cross that line, but
(05:07):
that's also highly dependent on how much pressure the deer
get where you hunt, and how small of a property
you're working with. On a twenty five acre parcel, it
doesn't take too much to do some damage with your
summer scouting, just like with your hunting frequency in the fall. Now,
if you have two hundred and fifty or twenty five
hundred acres to work with, that's different. If your deer
(05:27):
only get hunted by you, then their tolerance level will
be higher than if you're on public land and they
get hunted by you and a revolving cast of other people.
We almost all know this on a fundamental level, which
is one of the reasons trail cameras have become so popular.
But they've also become popular because they are fun, relatively effective,
and while a hell of a lot easier than any
(05:48):
other form of scouting, they literally do the scouting for
us all day long, for months, without us having to
do anything more than look at our phonees or walk
into the woods to swap out an SD card. There's
a thing about that. If you have a shitload of
cameras out and can saturate the woods, you can learn
an awful lot about your deer. That's the shotgun approach
that some hunters take, but that's mostly hunters who have
(06:11):
a lot of land to work with and not a
lot of competition, because those hunters also generally have some
money to work with. If you don't have that option,
a targeted approach to trail cameras is a better idea,
especially if you use them to complement a glassing strategy
or a boots on the ground strategy. This is where
one of the biggest mistakes comes into play. We use
(06:31):
one tool in the kit mostly always, but not all
of them more evenly, but all of them together are
what gives us the best intel.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Think about it this way.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
If you want to catch a limit of walleyes this
summer on whatever lake or river you live by, will
you go out with only slip bobbers and a couple
scoops of fat head minnows? You could, and you could
catch walleyes in that setup in a hell of a
lot of lakes and rivers all summer long. Fish eat
fish and minnows are always on the menu. But what
if there's a fish fly hatch going on and the
walleyes are thinking about a very seasonally limited food source,
(07:05):
or the crayfish are molting so they are nice and
soft and good to eat. What if the walleyes are
eating minnows like crazy, but instead of hanging around a
couple of big bowlders and fifteen feet of water off
at some point, they are cruising the shallows, weaving in
and out of cabbage and other mergent vegetation. It's snacking
on balls of shiners. A slow approach like a slipbubber
(07:26):
set up just may not cut it.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Most people wouldn't limit.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Themselves super tightly to one sole presentation in one bait
when they want a fish fry for the fourth of July,
and that just makes sense. And when it comes to
deer scouting, we are often very content to limit our
options and then we just deal with the results later.
I think this is where the intention part of summer
scouting comes into play. What are you actually trying to
(07:50):
learn with your efforts? If it's nothing more than some
big bucks are around, and then they might be there
again during the rut, that's one thing, But the rut
isn't so easy. And who wants to miss out on
the early season hunting on the off chance that things
will come together later? Also, and I say this because
I believe it. If you want to become a better
hunter and kill more big bucks, you can't ignore the
(08:12):
early season. I don't care if that means the September
one opener where you live or a mid October opener
where you live. There's no denying the simple advantage of
deer not having been hunted for several months. I don't
(08:35):
care where you live. The dumbest deer in the woods
often aren't the ones that we want to find during
the rut. They're the ones that we can find in
the first week of our season. Now, I know a
lot of folks will disagree with me on that, but
I also know that a lot of folks think that's
true about the rut, and they still don't kill mature
bucks done. And it's also undoubtedly true that a lot
(08:55):
of hunters put way more effort into their rut hunts
than the first week or so the season, So there
is some sampling bias there. I know this varies a
lot by hunters and individual situations, but I believe it
would be way easier for most of us to kill
mature bucks if we put rout effort into the first
week of the season, especially if that effort comes on
the heels of proper summer scouting. Now here's another way
(09:18):
to look at this stuff. The more you learn about
all deer, the more you can predict where they'll be
when you can hunt them. So you think that the
bachelor group in July and what those deer do doesn't
relate to October hunts, for example, But what if you
glass those bucks from a safe distance during a heat
wave and then during cold fronts throughout the summer. You'll
learn a thing or two about where they enter the
(09:40):
food during different conditions and can make an educated guess
on where they might be betting, or at least how they
travel through the cover. You can drop a few cameras
in the woods to check your work on specific trails,
which is a great idea and can help you put
many of the pieces together. But you say, so what,
it's all change once they go hard antlerd and the
(10:02):
hunting pressure hits. That's not true, at least not entirely,
and this is where a lot of people make their
biggest mistakes on summer scouting. You're not going to get
all the answers on deer no matter what you do.
You could glass every night for three months and run
fifty trail cameras and you'd still have an incomplete view
of what bucks are doing on your property. But that's
(10:23):
not a reason to not scout. It's a reason too scout.
You're looking for an edge on predicting deer movement in September,
October and November, whenever you can hunt until at least
you'd consider the late season anyway, you want to be
able to make an educated guess on where they're going
to be. And on that note, I'll say this. If
you do glass, that's great. If you run some cameras,
(10:46):
that's great. But also you need to just get out
there and look around. Nothing beats boots on the ground
because it puts you where the deer actually walk and
lets you take in the entirety of the situation. It's
a reality check and it's the most thorough method of
recon you can make. Now, let me frame this up
the best way I can by telling you a not
(11:06):
so secret secret about myself. I am a second guessing machine, literally,
a self doubt filled fool. When I walk a field
edge looking for a spot to hang a stand, I
will look at one hundred and twelve different trees and
consider them all, and I'll fret over every single trail
that comes in the field, and I'll consider natural blinds
(11:28):
for every wind direction. But I don't get to run
through all of those options. When it's September fifteenth and
the season is just oping up. I have to pick
one and put my faith in it. That's a hard
test for me. I need information to make that decision.
So I have to consider my access in my wind direction.
I have to consider what my trail cameras have shown me,
and when my glassing has shown me. I have to
(11:49):
ponder the tracks on the edge of the field, you know,
and the ones leading into and out of the bedding
or staging cover. I have to make a decision with
as much info as possible to try to maximize my
chances of an encounter that day. Now, the reason I'm
so neurotic about the choice is because the consequences of
getting it wrong mean the next time I have to
(12:12):
make that choice it'll be some order of magnitude more difficult.
Most likely, my presence in that carefully scouted spot is
not going to make the deer more comfortable. So there's
something at stake now. I don't want this to be
like overly dramatic, because we are talking about hunting rabbits
with antlers here. It's not that important. But to me
(12:33):
in some ways, and to you too, it kind of is.
More information is always better, as long as you know
how to make it coalesce into a confidence based plan.
This was really hammered home to me when I started
taking my daughter's deer hunting. You know, they're a limited
amount of time in the field, and their limited experience
being in the woods and in close proximity to white
tails meant that the odds of something going wrong, or
(12:55):
at least not enough going.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Right, they were pretty high.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
It helps that my daughters want to shoot any deer,
which opens the aperture up quite a bit, at least
more than what a lot of.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
Us are looking for.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
But it was still a good lesson on how to
approach this stuff throughout the summer. Scouting for them mattered.
It was important to me. I had to get it right,
so it made me think about the little things. But
it also made me scout whenever I could. And this
is the last thing I really want to touch on.
In fact, I just wrote a piece about this for
the Meat Eater dot com, but I think it's worth
saying here too. The best way to summer scout is
(13:28):
to think about the conditions and how they relate to
your findings.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
This is kind of hard to do.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
With trail cameras, you know, because we get a pick
on our phone and think it's cool. You know, there's
a nice buck whatever, But we aren't out there to
realize that the reason he walked by right then was
because the wind switched to the southeast, or the mosquitoes
got so bad that he decided to switch bedding areas
to some grassy swale on a hilltop that catches some
wind and probably isn't nearly as full of biting and
(13:53):
buzzing insects as the wooded valley. That's more like a jungle.
When we glass, we look at the forecast and we think, well, shoot,
it's going to be nice and cool tonight for the
first time in a week, so I'll grab the spotter
and head out to watch the soybeans. That's great. But
what if it's not nice and cool on opening weekend?
But if it's eighty degrees and the sun is blazing away,
(14:14):
will the buck movement be the same then as it
was a month earlier with vastly different conditions. Probably not.
What about if it's raining a little bit, What if
it's prefrontal post frontel, What if it's the fifth day
of a heat wave. What if you got a north
wind or a south wind, whatever. The difference between scouting
for fun and scouting with intention is literally between our ears.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
On a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So not only just taking notes on when and why
and what was going on when you saw the big
one or you know you got the pick of him
or found that monster set of tracks on the logging
road leading to the pasture with the pond in it,
but also putting yourself out there when you know the
weather is going to be something other than perfect. This
is the last thing, and it's honestly one of my
favorite things. I love glassing. When it's raining in the
(15:01):
summer and when it's just dead calm and a billion degrees,
I know that weather is going to position deer in
certain ways, and they'll show me something actionable when it
gets a little uncomfortable out there. That stuff matters because
you can't pick the weather on the days you can
hunt usually, and if you can hunt during.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
The season, then you should now.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
I also know that scouting to intentionally learn something in
the summer often gives me something to use later in
the season if I strike out on my early season plan,
which happens a lot. The buck you see approach a
pond a certain way in the middle of summer, he
might approach that pond in the exact same way in
the end October when he started chasing a little bit
and spar and he's just a little bit thirsty. Or
(15:43):
that island of cover between the fields that only does
seem to bed in during the summer. They might also
bed the in the fall, and you know who might
swing in on the downwind side descent check it, or
maybe cut straight through it like the deer you watched
in August as they browsed around whatever it is. The
more you think about what you see, or what your
(16:04):
trail cameras show you, or the fresh tracks or the
freshly browsed plants tell you, the more you understand what
deer do generally, which means you can parse some of
the info out and use it for specific sits. The
key is to scout enough with as many tools as
you can, and to do it with some level of
the intention and a frequency that matters. So think about
(16:28):
that and think about coming back next week, because I'm
going to talk about the hard and fast rules of
deer hunting and why they are mostly bs. 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. Thank you so much for listening and
for all of your support. Everybody here at Mediator, we
truly love it. We have the best audience in the world.
(16:49):
You guys show up for us all the time, and
we appreciate it like you can't even imagine. If you
need some more hunting content, maybe you want to hear
some good storytelling. By Brent Reeves on This Country Life
podcast asked, maybe you want to read an article about
this public land debacle we have going on right now.
Whatever the case may be, Dumby diator dot com has
(17:09):
you covered.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Go check it out.
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.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm your host, Tony.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Peterson, and today's episode is all about summer scouting and
the mistakes we almost all make.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
This is an easy one for me.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
I love summer scouting, and I'm acutely aware of the
ways in which I've messed it up over the years.
There are a couple of different ways to summer scout.
I'm going to cover them all along with sort of
the typical pitfalls that come with each. Plus I might
dive into a few more issues we create for ourselves
with this crucial time of year and our deer strategy.
So buckle up, because it's time to talk white tails.
(01:03):
There is often a disconnect between what we think something
is and then what it actually is. We like linear
connections in our brains because we just don't have the
mental horsepower to consider the nuance of everything all the time.
When it comes to summer scouting, it used to go
like this, Load up a day pack with a spot
or in a tripod, spray down with some mosquito repellent,
(01:25):
and then go post up somewhere to watch a hayfield
or a beanfield or.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Some other food source.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Watch a bachelor group come out of the cover, make
note where they feed, set up there, kill them in
a month or two. Easy peasy, right Quite Today summer
scouting goes more like this. Load up a couple of
trail cameras, deploy them in the usual hotspots, build that
hit list from the comfort of an air conditioned house,
(01:51):
and then go kill them sometime this fall. There are
a lot of ways in which we screw up summer scouting,
and I want to get into that, you know, the
nitty gritty of the whole thing. But first off, there
is the question of frequency and intention and efficacy of
summer scouting. When it comes to the last one, a
lot of hunters focus much of their actual hunting efforts
(02:12):
on the pre rut and the rut, and so there's
this disconnect between July bucks and the November bucks. We're
hunting that keeps them from going, you know, too deep
in summer scouting, and why not if you live in
Iowa and you have a sweet property to bohunt all
of November, you don't really need to go scout bachelor
groups in July only to watch the early October open
or come and go and then get ready to hunt
(02:34):
when things start getting a little feisty.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
In the woods.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Pretty easy for a lot of us in a lot
of states to look at the opening dates of our
deer seasons and not be able to make a strong
connection to summer scouting and the likelihood that it'll have
us tagged out in the first few days of the season.
Couple that with the fact that you know, most of
us expect hot, buggy weather for our openers, and it's
easy to phone it in summer scouting wise. But how
(02:58):
effective some are scouting can be is up to us,
and it's very easy to believe it won't work that well.
And when we believe that, we don't want to put
in any effort. It's kind of like if you know
you'll never get a raise at work, no matter how
many extra projects you could tackle or overtime hours you
could put in if the precedent is set that you're
worth x amount of money to the C suite team,
(03:20):
you'd be a sucker to suddenly put in a ton
of extra effort on top of your normal duties. Now,
with deer, we sort of look at this as a
transactional thing in a similar matter, but also with deer,
it's often just the difference between how we perceive the
benefits of summer scouting. For example, I'm really bad at maths,
but here is an equation that might work. When you
(03:42):
take frequency and intention of summer scouting and increase them,
how effective it'll be well skyrocket or at least point
up into the right. On the frequency front. There's a
balance to be struck. Too little and you won't learn
anything actionable, or you'll only learn a tiny bit that
(04:02):
you need to know, which won't influence your actions the
right way, or could give you a false read on
the deer situation. Too much, which almost no one does,
and you can put the deer off long before you
get a chance to hunt them. Now, while most hunters
aren't in danger of summer scouting too much, it can
be done, and I know that because I've done it
(04:22):
many times. I'm not in danger of this now because
where I live, in my general life schedule, but there
were quite a few years of my life where if
I found a bachelor group somewhere that I could hunt,
I couldn't not go watch them. It's like an addiction, which,
if you know me, makes a hell of a lot
of sense. But those relaxed, easy to find bachelor groups
(04:43):
are only relaxed and easy to find if they don't
know they are constantly being monitored by one of their
scariest predators. And by that I don't mean me specifically,
by the way, but humans in general, the presence of
us in their world is tolerable to some extent, but
when you cross that line, it gets a hell of
a lot tougher. Most people won't cross that line, but
(05:07):
that's also highly dependent on how much pressure the deer
get where you hunt, and how small of a property
you're working with. On a twenty five acre parcel, it
doesn't take too much to do some damage with your
summer scouting, just like with your hunting frequency in the fall. Now,
if you have two hundred and fifty or twenty five
hundred acres to work with, that's different. If your deer
(05:27):
only get hunted by you, then their tolerance level will
be higher than if you're on public land and they
get hunted by you and a revolving cast of other people.
We almost all know this on a fundamental level, which
is one of the reasons trail cameras have become so popular.
But they've also become popular because they are fun, relatively effective,
and while a hell of a lot easier than any
(05:48):
other form of scouting, they literally do the scouting for
us all day long, for months, without us having to
do anything more than look at our phonees or walk
into the woods to swap out an SD card. There's
a thing about that. If you have a shitload of
cameras out and can saturate the woods, you can learn
an awful lot about your deer. That's the shotgun approach
that some hunters take, but that's mostly hunters who have
(06:11):
a lot of land to work with and not a
lot of competition, because those hunters also generally have some
money to work with. If you don't have that option,
a targeted approach to trail cameras is a better idea,
especially if you use them to complement a glassing strategy
or a boots on the ground strategy. This is where
one of the biggest mistakes comes into play. We use
(06:31):
one tool in the kit mostly always, but not all
of them more evenly, but all of them together are
what gives us the best intel.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Think about it this way.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
If you want to catch a limit of walleyes this
summer on whatever lake or river you live by, will
you go out with only slip bobbers and a couple
scoops of fat head minnows? You could, and you could
catch walleyes in that setup in a hell of a
lot of lakes and rivers all summer long. Fish eat
fish and minnows are always on the menu. But what
if there's a fish fly hatch going on and the
walleyes are thinking about a very seasonally limited food source,
(07:05):
or the crayfish are molting so they are nice and
soft and good to eat. What if the walleyes are
eating minnows like crazy, but instead of hanging around a
couple of big bowlders and fifteen feet of water off
at some point, they are cruising the shallows, weaving in
and out of cabbage and other mergent vegetation. It's snacking
on balls of shiners. A slow approach like a slipbubber
(07:26):
set up just may not cut it.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Most people wouldn't limit.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Themselves super tightly to one sole presentation in one bait
when they want a fish fry for the fourth of July,
and that just makes sense. And when it comes to
deer scouting, we are often very content to limit our
options and then we just deal with the results later.
I think this is where the intention part of summer
scouting comes into play. What are you actually trying to
(07:50):
learn with your efforts? If it's nothing more than some
big bucks are around, and then they might be there
again during the rut, that's one thing, But the rut
isn't so easy. And who wants to miss out on
the early season hunting on the off chance that things
will come together later? Also, and I say this because
I believe it. If you want to become a better
hunter and kill more big bucks, you can't ignore the
(08:12):
early season. I don't care if that means the September
one opener where you live or a mid October opener
where you live. There's no denying the simple advantage of
deer not having been hunted for several months. I don't
(08:35):
care where you live. The dumbest deer in the woods
often aren't the ones that we want to find during
the rut. They're the ones that we can find in
the first week of our season. Now, I know a
lot of folks will disagree with me on that, but
I also know that a lot of folks think that's
true about the rut, and they still don't kill mature
bucks done. And it's also undoubtedly true that a lot
(08:55):
of hunters put way more effort into their rut hunts
than the first week or so the season, So there
is some sampling bias there. I know this varies a
lot by hunters and individual situations, but I believe it
would be way easier for most of us to kill
mature bucks if we put rout effort into the first
week of the season, especially if that effort comes on
the heels of proper summer scouting. Now here's another way
(09:18):
to look at this stuff. The more you learn about
all deer, the more you can predict where they'll be
when you can hunt them. So you think that the
bachelor group in July and what those deer do doesn't
relate to October hunts, for example, But what if you
glass those bucks from a safe distance during a heat
wave and then during cold fronts throughout the summer. You'll
learn a thing or two about where they enter the
(09:40):
food during different conditions and can make an educated guess
on where they might be betting, or at least how they
travel through the cover. You can drop a few cameras
in the woods to check your work on specific trails,
which is a great idea and can help you put
many of the pieces together. But you say, so what,
it's all change once they go hard antlerd and the
(10:02):
hunting pressure hits. That's not true, at least not entirely,
and this is where a lot of people make their
biggest mistakes on summer scouting. You're not going to get
all the answers on deer no matter what you do.
You could glass every night for three months and run
fifty trail cameras and you'd still have an incomplete view
of what bucks are doing on your property. But that's
(10:23):
not a reason to not scout. It's a reason too scout.
You're looking for an edge on predicting deer movement in September,
October and November, whenever you can hunt until at least
you'd consider the late season anyway, you want to be
able to make an educated guess on where they're going
to be. And on that note, I'll say this. If
you do glass, that's great. If you run some cameras,
(10:46):
that's great. But also you need to just get out
there and look around. Nothing beats boots on the ground
because it puts you where the deer actually walk and
lets you take in the entirety of the situation. It's
a reality check and it's the most thorough method of
recon you can make. Now, let me frame this up
the best way I can by telling you a not
(11:06):
so secret secret about myself. I am a second guessing machine, literally,
a self doubt filled fool. When I walk a field
edge looking for a spot to hang a stand, I
will look at one hundred and twelve different trees and
consider them all, and I'll fret over every single trail
that comes in the field, and I'll consider natural blinds
(11:28):
for every wind direction. But I don't get to run
through all of those options. When it's September fifteenth and
the season is just oping up. I have to pick
one and put my faith in it. That's a hard
test for me. I need information to make that decision.
So I have to consider my access in my wind direction.
I have to consider what my trail cameras have shown me,
and when my glassing has shown me. I have to
(11:49):
ponder the tracks on the edge of the field, you know,
and the ones leading into and out of the bedding
or staging cover. I have to make a decision with
as much info as possible to try to maximize my
chances of an encounter that day. Now, the reason I'm
so neurotic about the choice is because the consequences of
getting it wrong mean the next time I have to
(12:12):
make that choice it'll be some order of magnitude more difficult.
Most likely, my presence in that carefully scouted spot is
not going to make the deer more comfortable. So there's
something at stake now. I don't want this to be
like overly dramatic, because we are talking about hunting rabbits
with antlers here. It's not that important. But to me
(12:33):
in some ways, and to you too, it kind of is.
More information is always better, as long as you know
how to make it coalesce into a confidence based plan.
This was really hammered home to me when I started
taking my daughter's deer hunting. You know, they're a limited
amount of time in the field, and their limited experience
being in the woods and in close proximity to white
tails meant that the odds of something going wrong, or
(12:55):
at least not enough going.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Right, they were pretty high.
Speaker 2 (13:00):
It helps that my daughters want to shoot any deer,
which opens the aperture up quite a bit, at least
more than what a lot of.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
Us are looking for.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
But it was still a good lesson on how to
approach this stuff throughout the summer. Scouting for them mattered.
It was important to me. I had to get it right,
so it made me think about the little things. But
it also made me scout whenever I could. And this
is the last thing I really want to touch on.
In fact, I just wrote a piece about this for
the Meat Eater dot com, but I think it's worth
saying here too. The best way to summer scout is
(13:28):
to think about the conditions and how they relate to
your findings.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
This is kind of hard to do.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
With trail cameras, you know, because we get a pick
on our phone and think it's cool. You know, there's
a nice buck whatever, But we aren't out there to
realize that the reason he walked by right then was
because the wind switched to the southeast, or the mosquitoes
got so bad that he decided to switch bedding areas
to some grassy swale on a hilltop that catches some
wind and probably isn't nearly as full of biting and
(13:53):
buzzing insects as the wooded valley. That's more like a jungle.
When we glass, we look at the forecast and we think, well, shoot,
it's going to be nice and cool tonight for the
first time in a week, so I'll grab the spotter
and head out to watch the soybeans. That's great. But
what if it's not nice and cool on opening weekend?
But if it's eighty degrees and the sun is blazing away,
(14:14):
will the buck movement be the same then as it
was a month earlier with vastly different conditions. Probably not.
What about if it's raining a little bit, What if
it's prefrontal post frontel, What if it's the fifth day
of a heat wave. What if you got a north
wind or a south wind, whatever. The difference between scouting
for fun and scouting with intention is literally between our ears.
Speaker 3 (14:36):
On a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So not only just taking notes on when and why
and what was going on when you saw the big
one or you know you got the pick of him
or found that monster set of tracks on the logging
road leading to the pasture with the pond in it,
but also putting yourself out there when you know the
weather is going to be something other than perfect. This
is the last thing, and it's honestly one of my
favorite things. I love glassing. When it's raining in the
(15:01):
summer and when it's just dead calm and a billion degrees,
I know that weather is going to position deer in
certain ways, and they'll show me something actionable when it
gets a little uncomfortable out there. That stuff matters because
you can't pick the weather on the days you can
hunt usually, and if you can hunt during.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
The season, then you should now.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
I also know that scouting to intentionally learn something in
the summer often gives me something to use later in
the season if I strike out on my early season plan,
which happens a lot. The buck you see approach a
pond a certain way in the middle of summer, he
might approach that pond in the exact same way in
the end October when he started chasing a little bit
and spar and he's just a little bit thirsty. Or
(15:43):
that island of cover between the fields that only does
seem to bed in during the summer. They might also
bed the in the fall, and you know who might
swing in on the downwind side descent check it, or
maybe cut straight through it like the deer you watched
in August as they browsed around whatever it is. The
more you think about what you see, or what your
(16:04):
trail cameras show you, or the fresh tracks or the
freshly browsed plants tell you, the more you understand what
deer do generally, which means you can parse some of
the info out and use it for specific sits. The
key is to scout enough with as many tools as
you can, and to do it with some level of
the intention and a frequency that matters. So think about
(16:28):
that and think about coming back next week, because I'm
going to talk about the hard and fast rules of
deer hunting and why they are mostly bs. 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. Thank you so much for listening and
for all of your support. Everybody here at Mediator, we
truly love it. We have the best audience in the world.
(16:49):
You guys show up for us all the time, and
we appreciate it like you can't even imagine. If you
need some more hunting content, maybe you want to hear
some good storytelling. By Brent Reeves on This Country Life
podcast asked, maybe you want to read an article about
this public land debacle we have going on right now.
Whatever the case may be, Dumby diator dot com has
(17:09):
you covered.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Go check it out.
Host
Mark Kenyon
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