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 Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about scrapes. Why do you make them? Why they use them? And why they might be your best bet for a mature buck right now. We're getting into the heart of the bow season here across the country. Things are heating up out there. Now, even if your cameras don't really show it yet, more and more buck sign is showing up by the day. And while a lot of us have our hearts set on getting out there like the last week, October, missing this time window right now is a mistake. This is one of the best times to scout for scrapes and then hunt scrapes. And this isn't just my opinion, although I do believe it. It's also what the deer science says. In a past life, I lived in an apartment on a lake in north central Minnesota working as a magazine editor. I was sort of on an island at that point in my life, very far away from my wife and my friends and pretty much anyone who I cared about. So I did what anyone would do. and hunted and fished like an absolute fiend. I was in a place with a lot of outdoor opportunities, and I had a boat and a few places to deer hunt, and, well, I went pretty hard. And I remember a particular evening up there on October 20th where I saw two bucks working through the woods toward my stand. One was a forky, but the other was a two-year-old type of eight-pointer, and he was plenty big enough for me at the time. I watched both bucks as they ate acorns and meandered in my direction, but the bigger of the two bucks would stop fairly often, make a quick scrape, and then just keep moving. I remember thinking that those scrapes didn't look like they meant a thing to him. It was like watching someone who is obsessed with golf take practice swings with an air club while disengaging from conversation. Now I went on to miss that buck clean at about 20 yards due entirely to buck fever and not being able to keep my shit together. Fast forward from that hunt a handful of years, and you can get to a night in mid-October where I again watched two bucks together. This time, the bigger deer was pushing Pope and Young, and since he was on public land in the Twin Cities, I really wanted to shoot him. Both of those bucks made scrapes on a field edge, and both of the scrapes they made, they just felt like they had a different vibe. I don't know how to describe it, but I felt like those bucks would come back. So the next night, despite it being October 15th and really hot and windy, I carried a stand in there and set up over the bigger buck's scrape, which I had marked by a pine tree that he was raking his antlers in. He was the first deer I saw after he emerged from a cattail slew, and eventually he walked right into that scrape and offered me a wonderful 7-yard shot. Now, I don't say this to brag, but to illustrate a point, I also killed a great 10-pointer in Illinois during that time period who was working up a scrape on like November 11th, and also a really good 11-pointer in Nebraska who was working a scrape on November 8th. I don't say that to muddy the waters any, but to highlight that you don't only have one option to hunt scrapes. They can produce, you know, from now until the season closes in many places. But that doesn't mean they'll be as attractive to the deer at other times as they are now. A recent study conducted in Tennessee by researchers who monitored 107 scrapes for a total of almost 7,400 camera trap days found that scrape activity peaked during the first half of November down there, immediately before the beginning of the rut. And then activity declined pretty quickly as the rut progressed. They parsed that data out over 3,000 scrape visits, which is kind of wild. Now you might be thinking, well, then why wouldn't I wait until November to sit scrapes? And that is a great question. They observed peak scrape activity right before the rut really hit down there, which means it had been building up for some time. I kind of think about it this way. You might have more chasing on November 7th than you would on October 27th. but that doesn't mean you don't want to catch the first wave of chasing. Now maybe that's not enough to convince you to hunt scrapes right now, so consider this. There's a lot of research on scrapes, and the primary findings across the board are that scrapes are places where deer advertise and investigate reproductive conditions, social status, other deer's individual identities, and the sex ratio of the area. Does use them, little bucks use them, and great big mature bucks use them. And what they are is more than a big buck's chance to paw up some dirt, rub his forehead on a licking branch, and advertise that he is there and ready for the ladies. It's so much more nuanced than that. This is where we can do an interesting little thought experiment. So we think about the rut and phases, and we hunt according to those phases. What we don't think about is that all of the deer out there, does and bucks, are already well established into their hierarchies. and they are well-versed in the most desirable mates to produce offspring, you know, which are the healthiest mates they can find. Does don't really have blind dates a whole lot. They know who is around, and they know who is the best bet to produce strong and healthy offspring. They have been smelling individual bucks in their sign for a long time, with increased frequency in the days leading up to the rut. This isn't an accident, and it's probably not nearly as random to them as it appears to us. If a buck wants his chance, and he does, he needs to make the does aware of his presence and his prowess. And he can communicate a hell of a lot of that through scent. But his scent communication is deeper and more nuanced than we often think as well. So for starters, a buck's going to paw up the leaves to get to the bare dirt. But why? Well, bare dirt's more absorbent than leaves and sticks. It holds the scent longer. You know, when he pees in it or pees down his legs to gather scent from his tarsal glands. But that's not all, though. Deer also have interdigital glands on their feet that contribute to the scent signature on the ground. He isn't digging a hole and just exposing bare dirt to pee in. He's also actively leaving scent from those glands. He'll also rub his preorbital forehead glands on licking branches as well. He'll chew on it, he'll lick it, rub his antlers on it. He's leaving as much viable information as he can. Now, when I was a young deer hunter full of piss and vinegar and almost no deer hunting skills, the common thought around scrapes was that they were made by a big buck and that was that. He made it and he might come back or he might not. We didn't have trail cameras then, and we didn't have nearly as many deer around as we do now in a lot of places. But mostly, we just didn't have as much good information on deer behavior. Now we know that scrapes don't quite work that way. One study conducted in the early 2000s found that as many as 13 different bucks visited one scrape. Some scrapes they monitored were worked up by at least nine different bucks. That might seem like two connected but disconnected pieces of information. But what they also found out was that a lot of the bucks that visited scrapes didn't add any of their own scent. They just checked out the olfactory info left there by the other members of the herd, but didn't add any themselves. They also found that does actually visited scrapes a lot, but that bucks exhibited much more marking behavior. But why would does visit scrapes a lot? Remember what I said about them trying to pick the best mate to produce the strongest and healthiest offspring? Think about it this way. In almost all courtship rituals from butterflies on up to us people, there's usually a finding out period where two potential mates get to know each other. Sometimes that's a short period of time, sometimes not. But when it comes to selecting someone to produce offspring with, at least intentionally, there's usually some care and planning and thought and, well, decision making. You don't really wanna produce offspring with someone who isn't a very good example of your species, I guess you could say. That study I just mentioned found that of the 3,000 interactions with scrapes, about a quarter of them were from does. Some does lick the licking branch and paw off the dirt, but most just go around and sniff up some information. I think we can't begin to really understand what that information is like to take in, though, because we just don't have their scenting capabilities. Research has shown that deer scent glands produce numerous chemical compounds that vary with sex, age, dominance, and hormonal state. It's so much more than just, a buck was here. They are truly evaluating potential mates. Now, to take this a step further, just think about the licking branch. For starters, if you find a scrape that doesn't have a licking branch, you might as well not hunt it. It's that important. A licking branch allows deer to leave saliva and scent from their forehead and preorbital glands, resulting in a multi-layered chemical message that contains a lot of information. Scrapes are important to deer, and they should be important to deer hunters. That Tennessee study found that the scrape activity ramped up in mid-November. They also found that peak breeding happened in early December in that region. So scraping got hot and heavy about two to three weeks before peak breeding. If you're in the upper Midwest, that means now or very soon. If you're down south, you might have a month or more to wait out before this hits. But the key is to understand that this is a strategy that can work no matter where you hunt, as long as you understand scraping and its connection to peak breeding. So that makes it seem straightforward. But with anything nuanced, there's always a catch. And the catch with hunting scrapes is that most of the visits happen at night. A study in Georgia found that 85% of buck visits occurred after dark, and 75% of doe visits occurred after dark. That Tennessee study showed that two-thirds of all visits to scrapes occurred during the time when the vampires are out. That's not great news for anyone who only hunts during legal shooting hours. This is one of the reasons that hunting scrapes is so frustrating. It's very easy to blank when you hunt scrapes, even community scrapes, which are a thing. The right scrape is a social networking spot for the deer, and finding a scrape in a hub of activity during the window when deer should most likely be using it is one of the best bets for actually killing a big buck on a scrape. When you pair those details with, say, a cold front or a crisp morning after it has rained all night, then you have something that is primarily visited at night that is far more likely to be visited during the day. The lesson here can't be overstated. Hunters are good at taking seasonal timing and then some tactic and combining them because they should work. I don't know, like a lot of hunters think that rattling during the rut is the move because it's November 10th and all the bucks should be out actively looking for does and ticked off at all their rivals. but what if it's 75 degrees and you expected it to be 30? Or what if you have nine deer per square mile and only three of those are bucks? Do you expect them to go running into an area where they suddenly hear two new big sounding bucks going at it? What if they figure most of their squabbles out by the end of October and they just don't want to risk an injury or burning a bunch of calories by November 10th? The thing about good deer hunters is that they are pattern matching machines, which is really the key to most predatory success in nature. While it might be October 17th and theoretically a good time of the season to hunt scrapes, your job isn't just to find a scrape and hunt it. Your job is to find the right scrape, a community scrape, which will be in the cover most likely, and then hunt it when the weather conspires to get bucks moving in daylight. That Tennessee study found that an average of 12.2 bucks visited each scrape, and that anywhere from 1 to 39 bucks monitored individual scrapes. Bucks visited an average of 5.9 scrapes apiece. That is an enormous amount of information being collected and tells you another thing about strategy. If he doesn't visit the scrape today, it doesn't mean that he's not going to tomorrow or when the conditions get better at the end of the week. But if he's been on camera or you've seen him hit a scrape, the odds are pretty decent he will hit it again. And here's another thing to think about. Bucks don't make scrapes randomly and then hope does and other bucks show up and visit them. They make scrapes along established movement routes. This is one of the reasons I love rub lines, too. Bucks make sign where they like to travel, which is them tipping their hand to us in a major way. Scrapes function best when lots of deer encounter them. Immature bucks know that. They make scrapes where they have the highest odds of deer visiting them. It's kind of like if you, I don't know, bought a food truck and parked it on a dead-end street in a run-down neighborhood versus at a bustling shopping center downtown where concerts happen all the time. There's a row of restaurants and bars and maybe a sports stadium two blocks away. I guess one last point I want to make that the research supports is that fresh matters when it comes to scent. This is intuitive, of course, and very likely the reason bucks hit scrapes hard after it rains. The difference is simply someone was here versus someone is here. And the buck wants all of the does and all the subordinate bucks to know that they are there now. Okay, so that's a lot of information. But what do you do with it? You can run cameras on scrapes and you'll learn a lot, trust me. but you'll also be hunting sort of retroactively versus proactively with just a camera-based strategy. If you get a video of a 150 in shooting light on one of the community scrapes on your lease, great. But he's not guaranteed to show up the next day or even in the next week. You want to be there when he visits that scrape. This involves getting off the field edges, looking for big scrapes with licking branches, and figuring out how to hunt them right now. It's honestly one of my favorite things to do for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's still a little early for tons of people to hit the woods. The rut isn't even close enough yet to draw the masses, which is important if you hunt pressured ground. The second is that when you get into cover and find a community scrape, and then you look at the 10-day forecast, you can pick and choose conditions that should promote deer activity in a very specific spot at a very specific time. You might only get two or three weather windows where the odds are highest, but if you do, you had better use them to the best of your abilities. And I'll say this as well. I'm of the opinion that less is more when it comes to deer hunting and gear. While you might be tempted to go blind call while hunting a scrape or dump a bottle of estrus dopey in it to ensure that all the neighborhood bucks will lose their minds and run into your setup, I go the other way with it. Once you understand why deer make scrapes and why they use them, it's a lot easier to put your faith in that, you know, just being enough to get them to come into your location. I'm not saying I wouldn't call to a buck that I saw but I didn't think he was going to come in or whatever, but even then, that makes me a little nervous. When I've intentionally hunted scrapes this time of year in my neck of the woods, I've found that they often take their time getting to a scrape. They're usually just kind of meandering around in the cover, you know, browsing, maybe making a rub, just kind of hanging out. But they usually get there. And I don't really want to make contact with him until I truly believe they won't come in before I have to be done for the night or the morning. It's a hard thing to do, especially if you haven't killed a few big ones off of scrapes or at least seen the whole thing play out the way it's supposed to. The only way to get there is to try. And this is the time of the season to try it. So get out there, find the right scrape, plan your setup accordingly, and then watch that weather. It only takes one morning or one evening to really show you what a scrape can mean to the deer and to us as deer hunters. So do that and come back next week because I'm going to talk more about pre-rut hunting tactics. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As always, thank you so much for all your support. I know that you can't get enough hunting content right now. And because of that, you're awful lucky because those of us at MeatEater who create content create tons of it. And it goes up on TheMeatEater.com every single day. Podcasts, films, articles, news on conservation, whatever. It's all there at TheMeatEater.com. Go check it out. And once again, thank you all so much for your support.