00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Hey, guys and girls, we've got something different for you today. We have launched a whole bunch of new stuff this week on Wired Hunt. It is a very big week on Wired to Hunt, and one of those things is this brand new podcast you're about to hear. This is the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast with a new host, Tony Peterson. You've heard him on the show before. And what I want to do here in a second is toss you over to a little intro conversation between Tony and I explaining who he is, what this new podcast is going to be about, and what you can look forward to in the future. I'm really excited about this. You're going to enjoy this. Tune in for this intro discussion, and then we're gonna jump right into the first episode of the new show. You're gonna learn a lot, you're gonna become a better deer hunter because of this, and you're gonna be having a damn good time too. So thank you. You know, by the way, new theme music coming at you now to both for this podcast. And the regular Wired Hunt show. So get ready for a little dance party. Two. All right, thanks for tuning in. All right, welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light. We have got a different kind of show for you today, and you have a different kind of show every week from here on out when you listen to this podcast. Because I'm here with Tony Peterson, who has been a long time contributor to Mediator, a frequent guest on the Wired Hunt podcast, and now officially a Wired to Hunt team member. Tony is here with me on the show today to talk to you about a brand new mini series we're launching here that Tony is going to be hosting. So I'm I'm really excited about this. We've got some cool stuff in store. And uh, Tony, are you equally as as amped as I am? Or is this just a one sided love affair right now? That I'm just pretty stoked and you're you're sitting in the corner like, I don't know, man, I don't know. I I'm stoked to buddy. I think this is gonna be a really fun project to get out there, and it's it's been really interesting to work on so far. So I want to give folks just a little bit of background to you before we get into the details of what this podcast is going to be all about, because most long time listeners know your story. But at the same time, there's a lot of people have come on more recently and and since the early days. You just kind of jumped in and been like, hey, Tony is a public land expert, and then you talk, Uh, we haven't really gotten into the Tony Peterson story. So now that you're gonna be the host of this show, people really need to know you man. Your skeletons have got to come out of the closet. We've got to put it out there to the world. Can you can you give me like the cliff notes on how you got here, Tony Man. I feel and I'm not being you and I have talked about this many times. I'm not being totally humble here. I feel like I've I got very lucky. And I just grew up loving to write, loving to read, and always had this had this little dream in the back of my mind of becoming an outdoor writer, even though I didn't think it was actually a viable career choice. And I just had a couple of people take a flyer on me over the years, a couple of editors and publishers, and I got into the industry, uh in my mid twenties, and it really it was an eye opener for me because I was I was an associate editor for a big bow hunting magazine, and the readers kept reaching out and saying, you know, I love the articles, I love blah blah blah, but I want to hear more relatable stuff. You know. When I was sitting there, like, freshly married, no kids, tons of free time, and I'm looking at this and I'm like, well, so to why, like as a consumer of you know, hunting media and somebody who had always just loved white tales and bow hunting white tales, I was like, I want to see more public land stuff, and I want to see more do it yourself stuff. And I ended up doing that job a couple of years and then going out freelance, and I just thought, I'm gonna just try to give the audience what they want, and so I started focusing on public land I don't know, twelve thirteen years ago now, and it really just lit a fire in me. It made me realize how much. I love that part of white tails, and so that's kind of where that's kind of where I came from. But it's always just I've always been rooted in a love of deer, Like it's something that has kept me awake my entire life, ever since I was a little boy and my dad was hunting and you tell me about it, I just couldn't get enough of it. And then when I actually was old enough to hunt, it was just consuming for me and it still is. And it's just it's different now than it was then, but it's something I just love so much. Yeah, you know, it's it's funny you were doing the public claim before the public thing was cool. You're you're really one of the O. G. S. Tony um as the kids would say. And um, it's it's always interesting to hear your perspective on stuff because you've got more public land deer hunting experience than almost anybody out there, at least anyone who's talking about this stuff publicly. You really have a tremendous amount of experience. Um, But you're not limited just in that experience. So one thing I really appreciate about you, and that I've always found particularly helpful is that you can talk the talk and walk the walk on the public land thing, but you've also done private land stuff. You've also done the management stuff. You've kind of put your your toe into all those waters and experienced it. And then you're not just in one place all the time. Either You've done You've hunted in Florida, you've hunted in North Dakota, you've hunted in Oklahoma, You've hunted it in Wisconsin. Like you've crossed the country too, So you've got this wide swath of experience. You've tested your ideas in many different settings, and I think that gives you a lot of credibility and authority on this stuff, which is why you know, over the years, I've always looked at you as like one of the absolute top people I could ever talk to you because you just had this um, I don't know, just a really helpful set of experiences you could point back on that always helped me learn. And so, you know, as we started thinking about what's next for Wired to hunt, where are the new opportunities, Where are the holes that we need to fill? Where are the opportunities where we can build what we've done and make it even better. Um, you know, you were that person who I saw as as being a really good fit to do that, Tony. And and I think with this podcast that we're launching today, this new podcast miniseries, I guess, um, I think you are uniquely fitted to to do this particular thing as well. So that's that's a long wind up to me basically saying I want to I want to lay out a real simple explanation of what we're gonna do, and then I want you to give me like the long winded explanation of of why and how. But here's here's the basic gist. This new mini series is going to be. You know, it's gonna be a second episode every week, so they're still gonna be the regular Wired Hump podcast episodes that I'll be hosting, but each week you're also going to get this extra episode from Tony. And these are gonna be short episodes featuring just Tony talking about just one specific foundational thing. So that's like the that's the first paragraph of the article. Now, Tony, give me the how, what, why, when details on exactly where this is going. What you have in mind, this is your this is gonna be your baby. Uh what do we have in store every week from here on out from your podcast? Well, man, this is this. This came from many many conversations you and I had about, uh, the questions we were getting asked by our audience, and there's there's just certain lanes those questions fall into, and they might involve scouting, or they might involve gear, they might involve you know, hunting tactics, and so this podcast will really be a breakdown of these concepts of everything that is involved in the white tailed world. And it's not just a public land thing, it's not just a private land management thing. It's it's a lot of these topics that transcend and so, you know, you and I were chatting and saying, hey, how do we kick this off the right way? What's what's like one of the most transcendental topics out there? And it's scouting. You know, like everybody who's a really, really good deer hunter has some love of scouting and engages in it year round to some extent. Well, then we look at that and we start breaking that down into what's what's the most beneficial for the largest amount of deer hunters, And you start getting these topics that range from East scouting to you know, long range glassing and all these all these sort of umbrella categories. But then you start breaking them down and going, Okay, how does this really benefit you know, a hunter down in Louisiana versus a hunter in the north woods of Michigan. And that's been the whole goal of this thing. And these episodes that come out are going to be a real breakdown of these these topics. It's gonna be just me nerd ing out on so many of these different things that are so important to deer hunters down to a real granular level to just try to make them as accessible as possible to the most deer hunters out there and help people just learn on the on the process of white tails. You know, I think one of the one of the great things about podcasts has been that it is allowed folks within the hunting community to have these these deep conversations with somebody. Right, we'll brand some expert and we talk for a couple hours, and we go into all these different topics and we get deep into these ideas and strategies that you know, you just can't get when you're reading an article or when you watch a twenty two minute TV show, um, and so that that lends itself to a lot of interesting stuff. But the downside is that those most important nuggets are those most important takeaways sometimes get lost in the soup of all the other things you talk about over the course of two hours. So it takes a long time to get to those most important ah ha moments. And it's also you know, sometimes lost in the noise. And what I'm hoping and what I'm pretty confident that we're gonna be able to do with this is get straight to the aha moments, get straight to those key takeaways. You know, instead of listening for me ramble for two hours of somebody, you can listen to Tony for fifteen minutes, give you, like a straight shot right to the Maybe this is a bad metaphor, it's gonna give you, it's gonna it's gonna give you a just a I don't know, I'm lacking for metaphors completely, not Tony, but it's gonna give you exactly what you want in the shortest amount of time, very clearly and concisely explaining a topic, an important topic, without all the beating around the bush, so that if you've got fifteen minutes on the treadmill, or if you've got twenty minutes to get to work, or if you've got twelve minutes before the kids wake up from their nap, you can look and find Hey, you know what, I really need to get a better understanding of the scouting in this kind of way. Bam, here it is. Tony is going to give you the low down in in about as detailed and helpful of ways you could find anywhere on the internet, but you're gonna get it through your headphones or your speakers in a way that's easy for you to to consume. Um, I don't know. I mean, that's that's the side of this thing that's got me excited. I think it's just gonna be so. I don't know. These days, time is more important than anything to a lot of us. Right. We're always busy, We're always running all over the place, and I'm always trying to think, like what's the best bang for my buck when it comes to how I spend my time. So if I'm to choose between you know, watching this show or watching this five minute video or whatever it might be, I'm always thinking about, Okay, what do I want to get out of this and how much time do I have to give to it? And I don't think there's gonna be any better use of your deer hunting learning time than one of these straight shots of Tony Peterson. Man, I hope you're right by what else? What else? What else do we have to look forward to? Here? Like? What do you want folks to know about? Um? You said you're gonna nerd out every week? What does that mean? So? My my strategy with content like this is I want to I want to give people ideas, right, Like people often reach out to us and they want to know, how do I hunt this spot? Or why don't I kill you know, big Bucks more often? Or I travel somewhere and I fail? Why? But hunting is like so individual, it's so subjective, and it's hard to sit here and give advice to and you you know this better than anyone, and give advice to the whole range of of white tail hunters who are going to check in. But the idea is to take these concepts, these foundations that are that that are found no matter where you hunt, no matter how you hunt, and really give people like a deep dive into them and give them some ideas how how to how to do them better, or how to apply them to their white tail scouting or their white tail hunting, or maybe they're they're you know, post shot recovery, and just give people something to think about and consider to level up their white tail game. I think in addition to that, the world that can to my mind, as you're saying that is actionable, Like these are really actionable. It's it's not a bunch of fluffy Oh you know, I went out and did this thing and it was kind of interesting. No, it's like, hey, here is one specific thing. Here's a few really important things I've learned along the way, and here's something you can do tomorrow. Here's something you can do two months from now that is going to help you, and this is exactly how to do it. Um, you don't get that in the audio world a whole lot. This is where you will find that. UM. I gotta tell you what, I'm putting a lot of pressure on your Tony. I'm really I'm really really shining the spotlight on what I'm hoping and thinking this is gonna be. So you better, you better, Dan well produced, Tony. You know I'm trying, but you keep cutting out all my good jokes in my in my script. That's the truth to that. Uh yeah, man, I mean everything said it's true. I can tell you that I've always find that the best podcast podcast episodes of Wired Hunt are the ones where I personally am like, genuinely thrilled to learn from this person or learn about this topic. And now I know that every single week there's gonna be something like that coming from you, because I can honestly say, and this is not me tooting your horn and blowing smoke up your butt. Um, I value your experience and opinion more than just about anyone else there in the deer hunting world. So I selfishly am excited to learn from you and to get refreshers on a lot of these things, and probably some new stuff too that I haven't thought about. I guess the only other thing I would say, Tony is maybe you know, are there any other do you want to tease? I guess what we have to look forward to, any specific topics or episodes coming down? Like what can people specifically look to be popping up in their podcast feed over the coming weeks or months? Well, yeah, for sure, man. You you can think about it this way is it is. It's gonna be tied into seasonality. So these are gonna drop every week, and you know, we're gonna be in the heart of of scouting season right now. So there's gonna be a lot of a lot of episodes on the different kinds of scouting, you know, boots on the ground, trail cameras, different kinds of trail cameras, how to use them, uh, some long range you know, glassing stuff, and then it'll get us right into the season and I'm really excited for that part because it's it'll be a breakdown of different hunting styles and probably kick off September with some some water hunting episodes and you know that's something I get asked about all the time, and you know, different kinds of water, rivers, ponds, cattle, tanks, and just move right on through October and uh cover really seasonably appropriate, seasonally appropriate topics, and I just can't wait to get into them. Yeah. Well, I, like I said, I'm I'm excited about it, interested to start listening. And I guess with that being said, Tony, I think maybe I should drop off, I should shut up, and I should let you take it from here. So, uh, that sound a good plan. Sounds like a great plan, buddy. All right, here goes episode one of Foundations with Tony Peterson. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host Tony Peterson. Hey, everybody. On this week's show, I'm going to make the case for why every white tail hunter needs to fall madly in love with scouting so they can take their game to the next level. I get asked every single week, probably every single day at this point about deer hunting, and the questions always take two paths. What can I buy to kill more deer? Where can I go to kill more big bucks? And I get it. Everybody wants they want that secret sauce. They want to know, like, what's what's the call that's going to always bring them in? Where's the public land in a certain state that I'm gonna go and see one? Forties left and right doesn't exist. The key to becoming a better deer hunter and enjoying your time out there more is just outing. It's the secret sauce out there. And if you learn to not only just love scouting, but to really really embrace the different methods of scouting that are available to us. You will absolutely fill more tags, but you'll find that there's just like a more fulfilling experience out there as a deer hunter. And this episode is just dedicated to begging you to learn to love scouting, to accept the fact that if this is the first step to becoming somebody who can really level up their white tail game, and in fact, like the next ten episodes, they're all devoted to scouting. That's how important I think this is to becoming a better deer hunter. Have you ever really thought about how some people just seem to fill their buck takes no matter where they hunt, whether they stay in their home state and hunt private ground or they had out of state to hunt some distant chunk of public dirt. Some hunters just have critter sense, and they aren't killing deer simply by growing them on exclusive ground, which is a strategy that dominates much of the white tail scene these days. These hunters seem to find success everywhere, often on ground that is open to anyone and has a reputation for not exactly churning out easy to kill deer, kind of like that public land that you probably hunt so what's their secret. It could be time. Of course, there is a tangible benefit to having days upon days to devote to all things dear. Yet many of these absolute killers are working full time jobs and they're out there raising young families, and they're just not exactly flushed with early retirement level free time. They might, you could guess, have a lot of disposable income to spend on the best gear, which certainly helps. Or they might have a vast network of people willing to share secret spots with them, so no matter where they hunt, they've got insider information to operate with. Or they might just possess, don't know, like some level of cosmic luck that just shows up during their tree stand sets and ushers big bucks into range with annoying frequency. You and I know these are all possibilities, of course, but they don't take into account the reality of what it takes to be a big buck serial killer on pressured ground. To accomplish this, you've simply got to develop, like all of the most successful do it yourself is, have ap pere true love of scouting. And now it's often said that a buck's home range will consist of no more than a section of land, and that within that square mile, a buck will settle down as a youngster, and he'll build a nice little life for himself. He'll have all the dose he needs, plenty of predator free places to take a little mid day snooze, and enough groceries to see him through the old age, provided he can survive that long. It's not so simple, though. GPS studies in states like South Carolina and Pennsylvania have shown how tricky pinning down a home range really is. Not to mention how variable they are in size. Some bucks average three fifty acre home ranges, which is pretty small, while others might call more than nine acres home, which is pretty big. Whatever specific bucks number is, his home range isn't wrapped in a nine ft tall fence to keep him right where he's supposed to be. At least that's the case with the deer you and I are hunting. Excursions are made and home ranges can shift over time due to a variety of factors. And even if there was like a hardwired genetic trigger in bucks that forced them to keep home ranges of exactly a certain number, there's there's really a problem with how we think about it, you know, as humans, we have a tendency to try to simplify complex topics for a personal understanding, just to make things a lot easier for ourselves. And so in this case we envision a buck living in an actual square mile. But it hear's home range isn't all about living dead center in the middle of a specific amount of land. It's all about what that land has to offer the deer. Habitat or quality habitat is really the name of the game here. This is easiest to understand when you think about this in terms of a western white tail like picture the stereotypical five inture out there in the Milk River in Montana, in one of those places that for like ten years, when you turned on the outdoor channel or you started watching a hunting video, you saw these bucks crossing that river coming out into an alf alfa field. Picture that buck that was so popular back then. He might have lived in a river bottom that is framed on both sides by cottonwoodwood lots and you know, just thicker than the surrounding area patches of brush and shrubs, or to put it another way, just generally the best habitat in his region. Even if he might have chased a dough out through the prairie at some point during the rout, or had to cross a mostly featureless pasture to get to food right now. You can find this scenario in the Big Sky State, of course, but also from the western Dakotas on down through Oklahoma and farther west into other states more known for elk and mildeer opportunities. What you won't find, generally is a solid block of sixty acres of sweet deer cover, even though we're all looking for that. Right. You'll find thin strips of cover along the water, and fingers of it stretching up into the hills. You might be able to lump in the disused corners of an irrigated alfalpha field or some other agriculture, But no matter what, you're just not going to find a simple square land that is the right size and consists of everything a buck needs. And even if you did find that unicorn out there, you're probably not gonna get permission to hunt it anyway. Those river bottom bucks might very well have a home range that sixty acres or real close to that, but it could consist of three miles a thin creeker river bottom which might serpentine its way through three or five different properties. These regions, with their limited cover are at least easier to narrow down when you're on the hunt for a good box home base. Those hunters in the deep South, or up in the far North, or plenty of places out east have have a totally different task. How do you find a specific DearS home range in thousands of acres of unbroken timber? Or a bigger ask, how do you find the fifty or hundred acres a core area where a specific book really spends most of his daylight hours through the hunting season. In my life as a die hard bow hunter, this is the biggest challenge I've encountered out there so far, and the answer to it, the answered a lot of these questions, just involves scouting. This is the great intangible that you can't buy at your local sporting goods store. It's not a magic grunt tube that doubles as a fawn bleeding snort, wheezing guaranteed to call in only dominant five and a half year old bucks to boot looking range super call. It's not a simple hunting strategy either. Like I don't know, posting up on a soybean field in September, rattling on Halloween morning, or heading into sit a sweet terrain pinch point on November seven. Instead, it's a year long pursuit of deer knowledge that allows you to pick up not only on an individual bucks clues, but the evidence that all of the deer leaving behind every single day of their lives. And there are many many methods of scouting, and the best hunters learned to love them all. But just like the best hunters don't rely solely on one hunting style. This willingness to expand their trusted bag of tricks into which falls all types of scouting, allows them to not only start honing in on an individual book if they have the option, but also just develop layers of understanding on deer and build the confidence they need to get into the kill zone when the situation presents itself. These hunters, in their time spent ea scouting, hiking through the woods in the off season, they're sitting on the glass in August check several boxes on how to become more consistently successful at filling tags. They do this by gaining a real understanding of the ground and they find actionable sign on that ground, which adds to the list of clues on just how the deer use it. And lastly, they put themselves in a position to actually watch deer both in and odd of the season. They then mix all this together to create a picture of usage on any given tract of land. This allows them to take that knowledge to a new property or to a new state and imply what they've learned. The benefits of this experience if you want to become a better deer hunter, are hard to put into words. It's the secret sauce to all d I Y big buck killers. It's in their DNA. It's in the DNA of every single hunter who has made a name for himself as a successful public land hunter. It's the reason guys like Eddie, Claypool or Andy May can show up in a new state on ground they've never seen before and put together an actionable and often successful hunting plan, even if they only have a few days to work with. The knowledge levels they've built by loving to scout allow them to apply tried and true templates to just about any spot of white tail calls home, and then they can cater their strategy to sync up with regional specifics. In other words, their love was scouting allows them to fast track the process so that they can layer in east scouting, a quick turn and burn boots on the ground mission, and then pivot to a hunt in almost no time. Drawing on their past experience and putting it to good use in the moment is their strategy, and it works. When I first started traveling to hunt white tails and random states on public land, this point was just absolutely driven home to me. From the very first mornings and evenings I spent glassing North Dakota River bottom bucks to killing a hundred forty eight pointer the first day I really set out to hunt mature bucks on public land, the whole thing just became clear. It's the work you put in beforehand before each hunt that matters the most, and most of that work just involves different kinds of scouting. Now you're probably thinking, Okay, so I've got to scout more if I want to kill more books. That's not exactly rocket science, dude. We've been hearing that a long time, and you're right, it's not. But that's not the case. I'm laying out here instead of just spending a couple more weekends winter scouting, or maybe running a few more cameras this summer like it's a job. You've actually got to learn to foster a love of scouting. You've got to develop a deep, unabashed, seventh grade crush on scouting. You should be writing your name plus deer scouting and framing it in a heart with an arrow through it in your notebook. That's how much you should love scouting. And you should embrace this part of the hunt because it is, without question a part of the hunt, and it's fun too. If you learn to look at as an extension of the hunt, it gets even more enjoyable when you start seeing some of it turn into the little rewards along the way. This is the key to long game beneficial activities like I don't know, getting in shape, or doing the best you can to raise kids so they don't turn out to be faeral lunatics. It takes work, but work can be enjoyable if it's rewarding, and in the case of loving the scout, the big payoffs might be a dead buck each ball, or they might be smaller things like seeing a few more deer on your sits and feeling like you're just always in the game. No matter where you hunt, that's a big deal. It's not nothing. In fact, a great way to think about it is to imagine someone posing on the beach in Florida with a big red fish in his or her hands. That instagram worthy moment looks like the best part of inshore fishing, and it is a blast. But if you can reverse engineer it, you might see that same fisherman minutes or hours earlier, working along eyeball in the way aaves that are breaking in an effort to find a rip tide or just some current seam. You might see them spots something in the action of the swells that trips a memory of past catches, and it says to them this this is the place to cast. You might see their anticipation manifest itself visibly in their body language, just like when a good bird dog gets on the fresh scent of a rooster. Or you could go further back and you might see that person fishing by a pier with a little bait catching sabiki rig earlier in the day, filling up their bait bucket. Or maybe you'd see them winging a cast net into the surf to round up some pinfish or mullet. Certainly, a bait catching mission like that isn't the same thing as fighting a big red through the surf, but it is still more importantly a fun step in the direction of the ultimate goal. And don't kid yourself, it was absolutely necessary to the process. White tail hunting is like that, and I'm not saying to you that you have to devote three in sixty five days in a year to scouting, but you could, although at some point you'd probably be doing more harm than good to your hunting, into your marriage, probably to like your sanity. Instead, just work to gradually increase the frequency of all types of scouting, not just the ones you like, and try to figure out why it's more fun than not doing something white tail related. Embracing and enjoying East scouting in time in the woods during the off season adds to the entire deer hunting process and isn't just the best way to become a more effective terminator level white tail killer. It's a way to level up on your woodsmanship and really develop a confidence level that allows for better decision making when you set down the spotting scope and actually pick up your bowler rifle It's also a way to balance out the unknowns that make deer hunting such a challenge. You can't predict what the weather will be like when you take your PTO to hunt. It's out of your hands. But you can go into that rutcation with multiple potential stand sites, or hunting spots that were littered with rubs last year, or maybe just features a season long pinch point that boasts the most well used multi generational trails on the property. You can't predict how many other hunters will pull into the management area parking lot an hour before first light, but you can't stay ahead of them and the deer by waiting out to the rubbed up island you found back in April. Instead of griping about the pressure and a lack of a plan, b a love of scouting will position you to react according to these variables that are simply out of your control and yet a part of every single hunt. Over time, and with a little extra effort, you might find that the key to that late October grippingrin was that you simply couldn't wait way back in March to go take a walk through a random chunk of public land to see if you could find some deer sign and maybe look at a few interesting benches along a certain hard to reach ridgeline, and that you know you've got to foster a true love of scouting. You're gonna want to keep listening to Foundations. We've only scratched the surface of white tail scouting, and for the next several weeks, I'll be taking a serious dive into all aspects of deer scouting, right down to the tiniest details, starting with next week's episode that focuses all on big picture EA scouting. And that is it for this week, my friends, be sure to stay tuned so you can keep developing your white tail hunting game to a higher level. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you here next week.