00:00:01 Speaker 1: 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. 00:00:20 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. 00:00:24 Speaker 3: I'm your host, Tony. 00:00:25 Speaker 2: Peterson, and today's episode is all about summer scouting and the mistakes we almost all make. 00:00:34 Speaker 3: This is an easy one for me. 00:00:36 Speaker 2: 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. 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, and then go post up somewhere to watch a hayfield or a beanfield or. 00:01:28 Speaker 3: Some other food source. 00:01:29 Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 when things start getting a little feisty. 00:02:35 Speaker 3: In the woods. 00:02:36 Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 00:06:40 Speaker 3: Think about it this way. 00:06:42 Speaker 2: 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, 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 set up just may not cut it. 00:07:28 Speaker 3: Most people wouldn't limit. 00:07:29 Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 at least not enough going. 00:12:57 Speaker 3: Right, they were pretty high. 00:13:00 Speaker 2: 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. 00:13:05 Speaker 3: Us are looking for. 00:13:06 Speaker 2: 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 to think about the conditions and how they relate to your findings. 00:13:31 Speaker 3: This is kind of hard to do. 00:13:32 Speaker 2: 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 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, 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. 00:14:36 Speaker 3: On a lot of this stuff. 00:14:38 Speaker 2: 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 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. 00:15:19 Speaker 3: The season, then you should now. 00:15:21 Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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. 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 you covered. 00:17:09 Speaker 3: Go check it out.