Ep. 1007: Foundations – Why Winter Scouting is the Best Method for Pinning Down Fall Buck Travel

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 Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which has brought to you by first Light. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is all about winter scouting and what it really teaches.

00:00:29
Speaker 3: Us about bluck travel.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: A lot of these shows come to be because I talk to a lot of hunters, and of the hunters I talk to, there’s a lot of variability and experience and drive and an interest in just general knowledge. Sometimes it reminds me of what people generally don’t know, or reminds me that some things could use better explanations. One of the things that seems simple to me is winter scouting, but when I talk to most people about it, the truth is they don’t even consider it or understand the benefits of going out now to figure out buck travel in the fall. That’s a huge mistake, and that’s something I’m going to talk about right now. There’s a fell at the gym I go to who did his time in the Navy, and now, even though he’s retired from that, gig still works the early shift at the pool as a lifeguard. Since I see him quite a bit, we always have a little chat if he’s on duty and I’m at it into the steam room after a workout. That’s exactly what happened this morning, and he asked me if I’d been off on any real adventures lately. I told him the only thing I’ve done this month besides pheasant hunting for the first couple of days here in Minnesota was a Nebraska upland trip I had to cut short when my lab hit an old barbed wire fence tucked into the grass and sent us on a mission to find an emergency event. Because of that and the fact that I’ve spent most of the months stuck in the house or watching eighth grade girls basketball in random schools scattered through the Twin Cities, I’m going a little stir crazy. Stir crazy enough, in fact, to impulsively plan a trip to western Minnesota to walk some public cattail sleus for a few days.

00:02:09
Speaker 3: The mission is to figure out where.

00:02:10
Speaker 2: Bucks like to walk, and if I happen to find a shad antler or maybe bump into some cottontails while I’m carrying my twenty gage, so be it.

00:02:18
Speaker 3: That’s two more reasons than I need to.

00:02:19
Speaker 2: Actually go there and get away from the suburbs for a few days while trying to stave off this cabin fever. When I explain this to the fell at the gym, he said, you’re going to go scout deer. Now, he didn’t even understand the assignment. And this is someone who hunts deer and has for a long time. I could see the wheels turning, and he just couldn’t make the connection between walking some cat tail slews now and shooting a buck in November. Now here’s the thing about winter scouting. A lot of the folks who lead the industry in deer content don’t have to do it. It doesn’t make any sense if you have a lot of land and a lot of food plots, and a lot of trail cameras and not a lot of hunting competition. So much of the content that’s out there is built around properties where winter scouting just doesn’t make very much sense. Now, I always think about stuff like this and how much our individual circumstances vary. And it makes me think of a conversation I had with an outfitter in Texas one time when I was sent down there to film a show for bow Hunter TV. The stand they put me in was over a feeder and next to a pond, which is a one to two punch in Texas that will produce more deer sightings in a morning than a lot of us can round up in a couple of weeks on our home ground. It’s also a great way to shoot some pigs and just generally have a Candyland style hunt. But when the outfitter picked me up after my morning sit, just out a curiosity, I asked him, why do you put that set up there? Specifically, why would he run a feeder in that exact spot? And he looked at me like I just asked him why we just can’t go around petting crocodiles in the wild, or why babies wear diapers when we could just let them shit on the floor, you know, something really dumb anyway, and his response was, Uh, we put the feeders there because that’s where we want to year ago. Yeah, yeah, duh, right, no winter scouting needed with that plan. But if you’re listening to this, you might need to winter scout, and you should, but you should understand what the point is first. Now, on the surface, you’re supposed to go out and find some buck sign, remember it, and then go back to that sign next year on about Halloween and then shoot a giant.

00:04:21
Speaker 3: Easy peasy.

00:04:22
Speaker 2: Now, look, finding rubs and scrapes right now to use as a jumping off point for your hunts next season is never a bad idea.

00:04:28
Speaker 3: I do that shit a lot.

00:04:30
Speaker 2: But I’ve come to realize that it’s not just about finding that sweet staging area or a bedding area and a spot where the cottontails might live right now, it’s about mature buck travel. Scratch that, it’s actually just about buck travel, because it’s all kind of the same thing. Now, nothing piques the interest of deer hunters more than the travel strategies of big bucks.

00:04:49
Speaker 3: We like to.

00:04:50
Speaker 2: Predict locations they might show up at, which we mostly get wrong because of many reasons, and that’s great. But learning how bucks move through the woods and fields and swamps and whatever is what kills big bucks. When I head to western Minnesota to see what I can do about finding a buck. Next season, I’m just gonna walk trails. I’m going to look at on x a lot and try to find the spots where the travel will allow them to stay dry when the sleus are full of water, and stay hidden when the cover around them might be full of hunters. This is something really any white tail hunter can do and should. It’s really something you should do if you hunt someplace where the hunting is well tough. I hear a lot of people in my home state of Minnesota and across the river in Wisconsin talk about how the North Country absolutely sucks to hunt because of the wolves, and they’re not wrong. But the wolves aren’t going away, and neither are the deer. But they also aren’t going to let you get away with hunting on memories of times when the deer population was higher and the wolf population was lower. The same rules apply for all the Deep South hunters, many of whom like to tell me that their hunting is much harder than anything I’ve ever done, you know, which is tied to their sense of pride that I actually really like until they start talking either asked about hunting regions of the country they’ve never been to, but a lot of them do have really tough hunting, and a lot of people in between them and myself and out east have tough hunting too. There’s a lot of difficult hunting out there, and a lot of that tough hunting isn’t because it would be tough for someone who is really good to go there and fill some tags, but because they aren’t really good at figuring out where bucks like to walk and then getting in there to shoot them. And I don’t mean that as a slight, it’s just reality. And I know this because I travel a lot, and I get to enough places where I can’t easily find where big ones like to travel because it’s tough. But that gets easier the more I get to winter scout certain places like the mostly barren land in western Minnesota that is pock marked with small woodlots and wet slews, where deer walk in those spots now they will walk during the rut. Now not saying February travel is exactly the same as November travel, because it’s generally not. But there are spots you can find in February where the bucks are walking now, and those same spots are where those same bucks will travel in November. Let me give you an example that I found pheasant hunting at the end of the season here in Minnesota that I’m going.

00:07:20
Speaker 3: To go walk in a couple of days.

00:07:23
Speaker 2: In fact, it’s a property A hunted for our second season of one week in November, where I had a few dos living right around me, but never saw a buck. I also talked to a hunter who I was sharing the same woodlot with, which didn’t.

00:07:34
Speaker 3: Help at that hunt.

00:07:35
Speaker 2: Now, that property is big, like nine hundred acres big, and it contains a couple of small woodlots, a huge amount of cattails, and two different sleughs, and along a meandering stream, and it’s just surrounded by aggfields. So in September, some of the bucks in the neighborhood probably live on the private land around that public because there’s, you know, just enough cover everywhere. But when the crops start coming out and the woods stind up a little bit, they likely move into that public it’s just the best cover.

00:08:03
Speaker 3: And they certainly live there.

00:08:04
Speaker 2: Now because it’s by far the best geothermal cover they have available and they’ve needed it in the last few weeks. Now, that spot I found while looking to round out my limited roosters. It’s just a thin spine of ground that connects two wooded ridges. It’s long, probably like a third of a mile of that spine of land, with very few trees, and it’s just not very visible. But the trail through there was pounded, and I mean pounded. The plumb thickets along the edge of it were all rubbed up. It was just one of those travel routes where you realize that if you could post up there for a week in the beginning of November, someone interesting is eventually going to walk down the trail. The downside is that from what I saw while following my lab through there, you know that ambush options were very limited.

00:08:50
Speaker 3: There are just very few suitable trees.

00:08:53
Speaker 2: And being on the ground there means being low and probably wet not ideal. So I need to figure that out and I’m gonna try. I’m also going to see if there are spurs off of that trail that might allow for me to set up just off of it, or in a way where I’m not directly in their line of travel every time I hunt there. Essentially, that spine of land is one location where bucks will certainly travel during the rut. But I need to walk it now and figure out not only how they might use it, but where I could get in and shoot them. If I can hunt just walking in and seeing lots of tracks and rubs, it’s great, but that doesn’t put me at a huge advantage for next season. That’s the thing about winter scouting. While you can get a false read now, especially if you live where the winters are real and the deer going to survival mode, you could also use this time to figure out where bucks are most likely to travel during the pre rut and the rut. A simple way to think about this is to understand the value of walking a trail out now. While we off in summer scout or in season scout, and we see trails that we walk a little ways down or mostly just cross, it’s not all that to walk them out when.

00:10:01
Speaker 3: It’s close to the hunting season.

00:10:03
Speaker 2: You’re just not going to backtrack a trail off of the beanfield to where the bucks might be betting in the middle of September, because that would be a great way to ruin your chances. But in February that’s exactly what you should do. This is an exercise in figuring out the why behind travel, and not just that travel happens in certain spots. Sometimes. Think about a fence crossing. For example, You might never need to know anything more than deer like to hop across a fence in a certain spot because the barbeyre SAG’s low there.

00:10:32
Speaker 3: That’s great.

00:10:33
Speaker 2: But what if you find that fence crossing now and you backtrack it into the cover. What if it leads you to an island, a high ground in a swamp, or a little water hole tucked into the cover, or maybe just to a spot where a washout funnels them through a specific not too steep section. Now, what if that spot is good for a south wind, but the crossing, that fence crossing is only good for a west wind. Instead of being like, well, I can’t hunt the crossing because of the wind, you have a backup plan for another set of conditions.

00:11:01
Speaker 3: And what if you walk that spot out and you.

00:11:04
Speaker 2: Find that ravine crossing and you go back there to hang a camera in July after you already hung one on the fence crossing. What if those two cameras show you that the doughs always come out first, but the bucks linger back in the thick stuff. Now you have a trail big bucks use, but you start to understand the details that allow you to target them on that trail in a specific spot when they are most vulnerable, instead of crossing your fingers and hoping they hit that low spot on the fence when you’re there, you can set yourself up so much better by just walking that trail out. A lot of times, when I do this kind of thing in the winter, I’ll find a trail I want to walk out that will spoke out in some sort of hub back in the cover. Now you’re onto something that is really interesting, and it’s generally a matter of very little effort at a time when there isn’t a hell of a lot else to do. Now, this strategy works really well in spots like western Minnesota because the deer generally have to go through certain areas. But what if you hunt the big woods it’s pretty flat. What if you hunt an area where the terrain just isn’t going to give you easy pinch points? Again, this is a situation where winter scouting is a better idea for figuring out big buck travel than just about anything else you can do. When I get the chance, even though it might not be until March, I’m heading over to northern Wisconsin to do do this on a huge chunk of public land I started hunting last season. It’s almost all timber, but there are some trout streams, you know, some valleys, some hills, and some interesting terrain. What I don’t know really is how the bucks use that terrain in the spots I want to hunt. And what I know about low density deer in a lot of woods is that they generally have no problem staying hidden, and I generally have a hell of a time finding them. But this time of year will show me where they side hill, where they might be scratching up what’s left of red oak acorns, how they cross those trout streams, and where they go once they do in that situation. When I walk out trails, I’ll walk a lot, and if I find something interesting, my mind always goes to the wind over there. They are in a predator dense environment and they live in thick cover.

00:13:07
Speaker 3: Their nose is.

00:13:08
Speaker 2: Their safety and they use it to travel all the time. Finding a tree to get into super easy because trees are everywhere. But finding a tree that allows me to be on the trail when they travel it while thinking they can’t smell danger is another thing. And This isn’t just a public land strategy either. If you want to learn how to kill deer on your home farm, you need to learn how they travel on it and through it. You should ask yourself why they come from the neighbor’s property at this spot, or at this time of year, or what they do when they don’t come into your food plot. You’ll still find plenty of time to leave a bunch of rubs one hundred yards off the clover back in the thick stuff. To be a good deer hunter, you have to understand how to go to them and not just expect them to come to you, if.

00:13:53
Speaker 3: That makes any sense.

00:13:54
Speaker 2: I think a lot of current deer hunting advice centers on finding situations where the bucks will eventually show up. That means a lot of sits in a lot of days where they won’t show up or we won’t be there. Making an honest effort to understand where they travel and why is a way to get yourself into the mindset that you’re never really out of the game, or at least you won’t be out of the game nearly as much as someone who has a spot or two and likes to hunt while crossing his fingers and toes. I like to try to understand why deer do what they do, and not in a general sense, but in a property specific kind of sense, because that’s what I have.

00:14:29
Speaker 3: To work with.

00:14:30
Speaker 2: And I know that even though a buck in western Minnesota isn’t living in the same kind of cover as a deer in a pine desert in Georgia, they both generally want to live as long as they can and breed as many does as possible, and spend their year hydrated and not too hungry and as relaxed as possible. They do this by knowing the ground better than we ever could, because they live there and we just don’t.

00:14:51
Speaker 3: We also walk.

00:14:51
Speaker 2: Into the woods confident nothing is going to shoot us or eat us, and that means their reasons for walking somewhere are just different from ours. They don’t want us to know how they do it, But the truth is we can learn this stuff, and a really easy way to do this is by getting out now and figuring out where they.

00:15:07
Speaker 3: Like to walk, because they’ll show you.

00:15:09
Speaker 2: And once they do and you spend some time putting in the miles, you’ll realize that this isn’t just a winter thing, it’s a window into their habits and their thought processes on how to survive and move efficiently and find those and not find humans who want to kill them. It’s a crash course on buck behavior and you should attend if you can. You should also come back next week because I’m going to talk about e scouting and why so many of us get it wrong and kind of underutilize the tools we have available to us. Today, that’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always, thank you so much for all of your support. If you need some more hunting content, got a little cabin fever going on and you just need to be entertained, Maybe you’re looking for a little education, I don’t know, go on over to the mediater dot com. We dropped new content literally like every day. I’m talking podcasts, films, articles, recipes, news stories on what’s going on out in the world of the outdoors. Go check it out at the mediator dot com. Tons of stuff to keep you occupied this winter, and thanks again for your support.