00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired2Hunt 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. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. And today's episode is all about why this could be the most important part of the season to e-scout and just how to go about that process so you can find your buck. You guys know kind of how I feel about following most of the deer hunting advice out there. And really, this episode is just kind of about that contrarian view or, you know, takes that contrarian mindset and really kind of runs with it. A lot of folks will tell you this is the easiest time to screw up your deer plan. And if you want to kill a big buck, you better tread lightly for the next week or two at least. But I disagree. And I think mid-October is actually a really good time to hunt. But it's also a time where a successful hunt probably won't happen where you want it to. That's okay. There's a way around it. And that way starts with e-scouting, which might seem a little bit weird, but it's not. Allow me to explain why right now. Not too long ago, the news was dominated by drones in New Jersey, whisperings of government disclosure on non-human intelligence, and, well, a whole bunch of stuff around aliens and UAPs that was, depending on how you feel about the topic, interesting, terrifying, exhilarating, or just a load of horseshit. I guess we got tired of the drone thing because now it's A.I. Will artificial intelligence kill us or allow us to live in perfect harmony with a pile of resources at our disposal? Will we be wiped out by autonomous weapons controlled by superintelligence that is emotionless or see cancer cured? Maybe both. Maybe neither. But if you see any news stories anywhere, there's a high likelihood that the topic of our impending doom when it comes to artificial superintelligence is going to pop up somewhere. But what is intelligence really? For the most part, it's pattern recognition, which allows for accurate predictions. When you hear someone say AI is just large language models, what they're saying is that those programs were fed enormous amounts of human-generated data. Research papers, Reddit forums, blog posts, YouTube comments, Shakespeare's complete works, and pretty much anything we've generated that consists of words, which is a lot of stuff. The intention was to develop something that could predict what would come next in a sentence. but it has gone way beyond that at this point. But think about that for a second before you come to too many conclusions and put it into the deer world. Who are the best deer hunters? The ones who have no idea what a deer will do or the ones who can predict with a high level of accuracy what deer should do? I've had the good fortune of hanging with some amazing dog trainers in my life, and I can tell you they are good for a lot of reasons. not the least of which is that they can damn near see into the future when it comes to dog behavior. And even though dogs are individuals, they've digested so much dog behavior that they are very accurate in their assessment of what will happen next in a training situation, or any situation with dogs, really. When you can predict what will happen, you can get ahead of a problem. You can shape its direction in a way that results in a positive outcome. In the deer world, the same rules apply, and there are so many ways to develop this skill. You can consume massive amounts of content around your style of hunting and learn a thing or two. For real, I mean that. You can also spend years in the woods scouting and hunting and watching deer, and that will certainly help you predict deer movement. That's a good way to go about it, even if that is a very long game approach. To make the most of that, you can also employ some valuable tools. I think mobile setups and the willingness to use them rank right up there with the most valuable tools a whitetail hunter can have. Trail cameras, you know, they're a no-brainer here too. Good binos on stand and the willing to use them often, they are as well. So are scouting apps like OnX, which offer so much in the way of learning the land and cross-checking that with actual deer sign and actual deer sightings. That's what I really want to dive into here because I've been scouting so much lately and I've been hunting some and just using satellite imagery to sort of figure things out. I was reminded of how important this is a couple of weeks ago when I was thinking about taking the girls to Wisconsin on a spiker mission when I just started to look at a chunk of public that I really like to hunt. It doesn't really look any different from thousands of acres around it, but it does have a tiny trout stream that you really can't even see on satellite imagery. It also borders some private land. including two parcels that have fields on them. One I know is corn this year, and the other is horse hay. But in an area with almost no ag, walking half a mile or a mile to a hay field is something that a lot of deer will do. I think this is true for obvious reasons. You know, like they can gobble up some greenery in a world of browsing. And some mast. But also being able to feed at night in the open, where wolves and bears and coyotes and bobcats live, it's also just a wise choice if you're a prey animal. I like that property, and I really like one particular spot on that property that has a very subtle saddle between two swampy areas. That saddle sits below a big hill on one side and a subtle hill on the other side. It has a couple of huge oaks on it, which is a nice bonus, but mostly it's just a season-long pinch point that is tucked into the timber between where they might go to feed and where they might go to bed. Now, as I zoomed in on that spot, I toggled through the 3D map option and and then used the elevation slider to exaggerate the up and down nature of the land around it. It kind of became plain as day why they're crossing there, and why I've killed my biggest public land buck in Wisconsin exactly on that spot. But I also thought, I wonder if I can find another spot like that in the same area. So if the wind sucks for my main spot, I have a backup location. So I started scrolling around, and realized that maybe a mile and a half away, in an area I have only grouse hunted briefly, and not for quite a while I might add, I saw a similar setup with a hayfield on private, a good-sized hill, some low stuff, and what looked like another tight saddle. Now, what does that mean? Well, I don't really know yet because I haven't gone in there to look around, but my hope is that it'll play out similarly to the other spot. And you know what that does for me? It just cuts in half my presence on either spot right off the bat. If I can bounce between the two spots like that, I can pick and choose more carefully which one I hunt and when. The fear of blowing a big one out gets cut by 50% pretty quickly, at least on paper. Now, I'm not going to point to the stands before I step into the batter's box here, because I don't know if that spot will hunt as well as the first location. But you can bet I'm going to find out. And all of that took me a few minutes of e-scouting while sitting on a couch and scratching a black lab behind your ears. In my experience, this is the time of season where a lot of hunters kind of pump the brakes. The opener is all excitement and optimism. And if a buck doesn't go belly up for them, then it's time to take it slow until the pre-rut is definitely on. If you hunt pressured ground and follow that pattern, I feel like you're making a mistake. I don't really know any other way to put it. And that might seem hard to believe if you're dealing with low or no deer movement right now, but that's exactly what I'm talking about. When you can't find deer, you can either say they aren't moving or assume they are and go find them. This works if you have 50,000 acres of public land or 50 acres of private land. That first funnel I mentioned, one of the few spots on public land that I've ever encountered a buck I'm positive was 160 inches. I went back and I looked at it after getting distracted by finding other spots just like it. But instead of satellite imagery, I looked at it with a topo map and the LiDAR layer on. A LIDAR is an active remote sensing technology that fires off rapid pulses of laser light to measure distances. It then uses that data to create extremely accurate three-dimensional maps of the land and the objects that are on the land. So in other words, it lets you see the shape of the land without having to try to look through the forest canopy. Not only does this technology allow archaeologists the opportunity to find ruins that have long been swallowed up by the Amazon jungle... but it lets deer hunters look at their deer ground in a way that it was impossible to see before. I can't really describe how valuable this can be, but as an experiment, if you've never done it and have the option, look at your favorite deer spots this way. I don't care if they are on grandma's farm or out at the lease or whatever. Just look at them with that fresh set of eyes, because that will usually show you something you didn't know about the area. You know, why they walk in the way they do, or why they show up in mid-October to a certain spot, whatever. This is just feeding data into your brain to allow you to better recognize patterns of deer behavior, and it's sort of a self-reinforcing loop. You can do what I just said, or you can go out and scout in person and look at the satellite imagery and LiDAR layers and all that stuff when you're out there standing in the spot, too. Both work, and both are really, really valuable. This is a thing that will not only make you a better whitetail hunter, but also make you more lethal if you ever pull the trigger on a mule deer or an elk hunt. It'll help you find more public land roosters and grouse, and what I've found recently can actually help you find schools of smallmouth and muskies when you're out fishing. The technology we have access to is crazy stuff, and it absolutely can help you better understand the land. I also think that this is important because it's effort you can put in before the hunt, or I guess anytime when you're actually not hunting. Too many whitetail hunters go set a spot and then try to make something happen there like you would, you know, when trying to strike up a bugling bull in the mountains. But the whitetail game is won mostly when you're not in the woods. It just is. And that's sort of the beauty of the whitetail versus the rest of the game out there, especially Western game. They allow you to figure them out year round and apply what you've learned when the season hits. Let me give you another example. In the beginning of September, I paddled into a piece of public land that I hunted when I was a teenager and haven't set foot in for a long, long time, like 15 or 20 years probably. When I was hiking around trying to find spots to arrow a buck in October, a lot of memories came back to me. And, you know, as is the case when you revisit an old friend after a long absence, I realized how much things have changed. I also found some killer spots and left feeling really good about my chances. But when I got home, I pulled up that property and looked at it with LIDAR. And let me tell you, the big picture view I had taken with me from e-scouting beforehand and then actually walking the ground became something else. The knobs I found beds on are plain as day. And so are some very subtle crossings on ravines and washouts. I found an old logging road on recent satellite imagery that looked like it'll be a scrape fest when I hunt there. But with LiDAR, I can see what is actually going on on that particular hillside, you know, from the ridge top to the valley below without actually seeing the logging road. Now I can take a very likely travel route, as old logging roads on hillsides usually are, and pinpoint where the bucks are most likely to be concentrated on it. You know, the entire length of it that I can hunt. I can look at the whole thing and pick my spots. When the forecast calls for a west wind or a north wind or whatever, I can find a spot to sit that movement instead of writing it off because my knowledge of it is too general, if that makes sense. I know every piece of that travel route. This gets easier to read if you toggle on the slope layer too. But a lot of the stuff I've been talking about is most useful if you hunt terrain with some elevation changes. That's my favorite ground to hunt, but I also spend a lot of time on really flat ground, which is a totally different thing. If that flat ground is big woods type of habitat, it's even worse. Now you're looking for transitions in cover where, you know, softwoods meet hardwoods or where slightly lower and wetter ground meets slightly higher and drier ground. Subtle stuff that when you're in it, you know, is sort of obvious, but it's impossible to see the big picture when you're standing next to a swamp. This is the kind of situation where identifying possible bedding areas is really tough, because the cover is everywhere. Out west, and in some places in the Midwest with a lot of ag and really limited cover, that's a totally different story. The easiest thing to find is bedding cover, but pinch points or subtle food sources might be a different story here. We all know some of the easier stuff to e-scout, and it's all good. I think the more you think about this stuff, the better off you're going to be. But I also think there's a hidden benefit to e-scouting right now, even if you don't fully intend to put boots on the ground. It sparks curiosity. When you listen to a publicly known deer hunter and they speak without a hint of curiosity, I'd say one of two things is going on. They either have extreme confidence in themselves, or they are hunting in situations where the mystery is just gone. They know where the bucks live on the ground they hunt, and they know it's a matter of time. But if you listen to a hunter who talks like they are curious, you're listening to something else. Curiosity gets you to break the deer hunting norms. It gets you doing things others won't. And it is the process by which we expand our available strategies to meet more and more different types of hunting scenarios and conditions. When you're sitting on your couch, wishing it was the rut, but knowing you have a couple of weeks to get there, do some e-scouting. Don't just look at the aerial imagery to confirm what you already know. but mess around a little to see if you can dig deeper. What usually happens is that it leads to some level of curiosity. Like, I always sit a stand on the edge here, but sometimes I see the bucks cross the valley way over there. Why? Most folks won't do the work to walk over there and see, let alone to try to figure it out with a scouting app. But that crossing, which is probably not very obvious, has something the deer like, and with some e-scouting, you can almost always start to tease out the why behind that travel. Or maybe you're just trying to get it better at predicting where bucks will bed in your neighborhood, like I am. So you start looking for those benches and those knobs and those spots with just a slight uphill advantage that might offer them a better chance at threat detection when the wind is straight out of the south or whatever. Find a few of those while e-scouting and go look at them in person. Or lace up your hiking boots and go look for some rubs. And then when you find them, look at them on your scouting app. Look at the area. Go find some rubs or a scrape. then take a long look around make your predictions on the why behind it and then expand your scope of understanding by looking at the area on your scouting app while toggling through the most relevant layers check the wind map in those spots maybe drop a camera to see what you can learn but the point here is that this isn't the time of the season to accept all the bucks are nocturnal and you don't need to be anywhere near them because they are unkillable this is the time to try some things out and to scout with some intention despite what a lot of folks say, you have very little to lose by doing this right now and a whole lot of experience to gain. And I'll say this, if you start scouting around now to try to find a couple locations that just pique your curiosity and then you actually hunt them with a plan, you are far more likely to run into a mature buck than the folks who just aren't doing that. So get out there and come back next week because I want to talk about scrapes, some of the research behind them, some personal experience, and well, a lot about this type of deer sign that can be a really, really good thing to concentrate on if you plan to hunt in mid-October. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, thank you so much for all of your support. Everyone here at MeatEater, we truly appreciate it. We have the best audience ever, so thank you for that. If you need some more deer hunting content, maybe you just need a film to watch with the family at night, maybe you need some podcasts to listen to on your commute to work, whatever. 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