00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, and now your host, Tony Peterson. Welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, brought to you by First Light. On this show, it's time to take a thirty thousand foot view of your deer ground. Literally. This is all about big picture east scouting and how it can set you up for deer hunting success. I've noticed in my personal deer hunting life that I get excited about all kinds of scouting, but the most consistent is EA scouting. And that's because it's just easy, of course, but it's also so dang effective. The ability to learn ground fairly well that you've never seen is like the biggest leveling agent out there for all deer hunters. But it takes a little bit of time to understand how to east together a plan when you're looking at satellite imagery. That's really the gist of this show, and I think it's something that every white tail hunter should master or I don't know, you know, just like try to get better at Hey, everybody, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson. Today's episode is called Big Picture Eat Scouting to Kill More Bucks, plain and simple. Right On this episode, it's all about that big picture digital scouting that we all start our started scouting efforts with. On later episodes, I'll center on the nitty gritty details of your digital scouting and how you can master them. But this show is really all about the macro and how this type of e scouting is really the foundation upon which an awful lot of deer huntings excess is actually built. When I started bow hunting white tails in way way back when I was in sixth grade, my dad would buy a county plat book and we would use it to find landowner names and locate chunks of public land. Those black and white layouts of properties and their property owners. They were the best we had, and we were happy to have them. Later in high school, when I went on my first out of state trip to hunt Missouri public land for turkeys, I had a paper map in hand, a map that I actually had to order through the mail from the Department of Conservation. Even later than that, at least a couple of years later, my buddies and I got obsessed with the pheasant population in northern Iowa. At that point, we would actually write the addresses of chunks of public land down on the side of shotgun shell boxes, or maybe if we knocked on a door and we got permission to run a slew, we'd write that person's address down. It was a crude system, and in some ways it's kind of easy to look back that time with nostalgia because I don't currently have to recognize how much of a pain in the acid actually was. If you spilled a cup of coffee on a paper map, or open your truck door on a windy day and it simply blew away like a like a tumbleweed, we were out of years of research. Sometimes compared to today's technology. It was absolutely archaic and worse yet, the best maps and map books of the time, they were always kind of in this like steady process of devaluation, sort of like when you stroke a big check for a new F one fifor a Silverado and you drive it off the lot. With those maps, the more time that passed, the less relevant the information became, because both private and public properties always being bought and sold. Hunting wise, it might have been some sort of the good old days, but scouting wise, it really wasn't it sucked. It wasn't a stretch then to envision staring up at the night sky and wishing for an easier way to not only find land, but to be able to understand it on a deeper level. And if you had done just that, you might have actually seen way up there in the cosmos, faintly glowing the answer to your frustrations. Circling the Earth even then and especially now, our satellites that are traveling at thousands of miles per hour while snapping NonStop photos. Those images and others captured from aerial survey planes are then stitched together through a process called photogrammytry. This creates a seamless image of the world, which includes all of the places you and I like to hunt for white tails. Satellite imagery has been around for decades, and it's now so ubiquitous that we all have at least one or two apps on our smartphone that offer an entire look at the world in an instant. And while you can make a solid argument that smartphones haven't been the greatest asset to hunting overall, you'd be hard pressed to claim that easier EA scouting isn't a benefit to most of us. The ability to develop an understanding of deer ground from the comfort of your favorite recliner is truly incredible. In fact, I think it might be the single biggest leveling agent out there for all hunters, because we don't all make the same amount of money or even want to devote the same amount of our cash to hunting, which means gear wise and and specifically opportunity wise, we're all in different places. The same goes for the amount of free time each one of us has. Some folks can devote months of their lives each year to deer, while others are lucky to car vote a few days here and there. And of course there is always the question of experience and skills as well, which very wildly based on the individual. In other words, there are a lot of differences between each one of us, but we all have access to the same information, and somehoters argue that this is a bad thing. Most often, this particular case is made by someone who has watched a one secret public land hotspot suddenly turned into a camel clad goat rodeo. Everyone having the same East scouting abilities is a little bit of a curse amongst a pretty sizeable individual blessing. The best hunters take that for what it's worth, and they use East scouting tools to become better hunters overall. As we covered in last week's episode, fostering a deep love of scouting is the most direct path to consistent success in the woods, and all the killers do this at least partially through obsessive East scouting that starts, of course, after identifying the land they want to hunt. Modern tools like the on x app make finding public land a breeze without question. Locating a horrible ground has never been easier, and it's a baseline level to East scouting, and of course you can use on extra Google or is to scout private ground as well. It doesn't matter what type of land you hunt, because the value of East scouting transcends the minutia and allows you to quickly develop a broad understanding of a specific parcel of land. Most of us already know this. This isn't revolutionary stuff anymore, but a lot of the East scouting advice that's out there in the hunting media right now. It takes the audience right from the macro to the micro without giving the former it's due credit, and sure it's really satisfying to look at a specific tree or maybe a promising river crossing and then hike in, hunted and kill a deer. I've done this a few times in my life on public land, and it's safe to say I absolutely don't hate it when it happens. The first time this actually happened to me, it occurred twice in the same season. Initially, it was just a hasty, last second decision to sit a specific tree on a parcel of public land in Oklahoma. Not only did I arrow a deer from it, but I saw several bucks and I nearly killed a hundred forty class stud at night. Later that same season, I chose a tree next to a pond on a public land in South Dakota. The first sit there after, I just walked in and I took a quick in person look around to confirm that my digital recon was close enough. I shot an awesome, non typical buck. Since then, there have been a few others, and it's always a rush to pick a very specific spot on aerial photos and then hike in to see that all of the digital research was spot on that last pick your spot stage of the process is of course located at the bottom of the funnel, and I'll give it some serious love in future episodes of this podcast, but for now, the focus is at the top of the funnel, where the aperture is much wider and we are more concerned with just general research. This is where e scouting begins, and it's an important part of the process for public land hunters. It might be the most important part, I would argue for private ground deer hunters might be less important, but there's still plenty of value to unlock. And big picture views are just that, and they give you an overlay understanding of what you're working with. You can clearly see timber, wooded fence, rose, water, food sources, all of it exactly how it exists on the land, and this is not something you can see in the same way or understand fully from ground level. Better yet, for all deer hunters, is that you can snoop into properties that you can actually walk in and hunt or look around on. If you're wondering why the bucks on your forty acres always seem to cross one corner of your land in the evening, you can use satellite imagery to figure out if your neighbor has a food plot, or because the technology has gotten so good, you might even see an automated deer feeder in there. Maybe you'll see that it wasn't food after all, that was promoting specific buck movement. Maybe it was just a subtle ridge that extends through your land that you never really recognized as being more than a slight rise, when in reality it's a high spine of good cover that threads its way through multiple sections of timber. The goal is satellite imagery, whether you're looking at a private farm you've hunted for decades or a three states over piece of public land you've never actually seen in person, is to first develop a total understanding of the habitat and land features. You want to connect big picture dots as far as likely deer movement on all ground. If it's somewhere you're looking to hunt, the goal is to set yourself up for either a more informed hunt or a more efficient boots on the ground scouting mission. If you know where the food is, where the best cover is located, you're already well on your way, but you'll also see how your ground connects to other properties, or how a larger river bottom really lays out. Maybe you'll see how one particular area that contains a vast network of wetlands actually features some patches of decently high ground, like the kind that mature swamp dwelling bucks love to bet on. The value of these findings can be extremely high. But what's better is that a bird's eye view shows you not only potential dear travel routes, but also potential human travel roads. This is so important on public land. For example, a little green ribbon showing a two track winding its way through a piece of public dirt could very well be the easy access through the valley that the hunters travel on. You might see through your digital recon that the path never really even approaches a nearby bluff, which is a bit more difficult to get to and clearly not indirect line of the no hassle travel that that little path offers. Info like this matters so much, you know, just as it matters to see how each parking area or access point is positioned in relation to the entirety of the parcel. If most of the pressure is likely to originate in one corner of a property where there are a cluster of parking areas. A good bet for deep dive eat scouting and later boots on the groundwork is to focus your efforts as far away from that high traffic corner as you can get. And I know, I know it's cliche, but you might also find a patch of cover close to a parking area but not directly easily accessible to features some deer. I had an AHA moment like this a few years ago while I was shooting some photos on a piece of public ground in the Twin Cities. To reach the closest deer cover, I walked straight up from the parking area instead of along the pounded with boot tracks trail that leads farther back into the heart of the parcel. Two yards into it, I was looking at rubs, I found a bed, and I even watched a buck bostata there. I know for a fact that that property gets hunted ridiculously hard, but at least a few of the deer and at least one buck set up shop unbelievably close to where most of the hunters begin their hunt on that property. Another light bulb moment in this vein happened to me in Wisconsin a few years ago. I've been hiking deeper and deeper into a huge timber track of public land while walking right by good By sign on a whim. I set up so close to the access that I could see into the trucks that passed by. I also saw a legitimate hundred and sixty in Northwood stud and later aarrowed a great eight pointer there. Dragging that buck back to my truck took maybe ten minutes, which is an absolute gift when you're hunting big woods bucks. Finding those potential spots is what big picture east scouting is really all about. You want to get a feel for what generally should be going on deer wise and people wise on your chosen hunting properties before you really start to dig in deeper to individual ambush sites. And one good trick for accelerating this process is to disable the landowner layers and the property lanes in your east scouting app. This allows you to turn down the volume on all the static and really see the land for what it is, regardless of who owns a deed to certain property or where a parcel of state land ends. Better yet, this type of east scouting is something that is so easy to do throughout the year, and it can really help you build a better base of understanding when stepping into a property for the first time. It can also help explain some of the dear mysteries and properties you've hunted for years and that you know extremely well, probably sometimes almost too well. And you don't even have to leave your couch to do it. I mean, come on, you know you're going to stare at your phone a million times this year to stave off boredom, so why not devote some of that time to doing something good white tail wise, Just like with target shooting, EA scouting is something that you should consider as a year round part of being a successful deer hunter, and it doesn't have to consume hours upon hours of your life during any given week. By taking a bit of time throughout the year to look around from an eagles perspective can really bring a level of clarity to the entirety of the properties you currently hunt and any ground you're interested in exploring. And once you start doing that, you'll start to zone in a little hider on things you know, give you an idea of this spot looks really interesting to me. I wonder what the X on the X is here? That's what next week is going to be all about digging into individual spots through your East scouting and really taking advantage of your mapping apps and your digital scouting apps, and this this high tech stuff that allows you to really really see what's going on out there. This is not something you're gonna want to miss. That's it, my white tail loving friends. Be sure to tune in next week when I break down East scouting to a granular level. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wired Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, I cannot thank you enough for your support and we will see you right here next week