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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. Today’s episode is all about spring scouting and what you should be doing while you’re turkey hunting, and the truth about what you can learn about deer right now. I know this is a hard time to think about deer, but even if you’re in full blown turkey mode, you can learn or think a two about fall bucks. I got a reminder of this last week while I was roaming around Nebraska with all the makings of a turkey bowhunt. I got ever so close to arrowing several public land birds, but I just couldn’t make it happen. But what I did make happen, or at least what I did find, is some deer sign that really got my wheels turning in a major way. You know that same kind of thing can happen to you right now, and you don’t have to drive five hundred miles and live out of a tent for six days to do it. So listen up because I’m going to tell you how right now. But before that, let me ask you find folks a favor so I can tell my boss I did my part and he can leave me alone. We’ve launched a new wire to hunt Instagram feed and we need you to follow it. That’s it, nothing more. If you go there and you follow us, then I can stop asking you to do that and we can all move on with our lives. But you’ll also get some reminders on that feed, not only what I’m doing with this podcast and you know some of my hunting videos, but also what Mark and Jake are up to. And just so you know, I hate asking this of you, but because of that, I want to thank all of you in advance if you go and do this, and if not, it’s okay. I almost didn’t go turkey hunting in Nebraska last week. I had just gotten off two weeks on the road and wasn’t feeling a quick turn trip to the Cornhusker state. But my schedule later this turkey season isn’t great for a drive down there either, so I just decided to go to an old standby spot with good camping options and usually some decent bird numbers. So I got my ass up at four am, pointed my truck down into the left, and for seven hours kept driving and kept my eyes peeled for strutters. And boy did I see plenty of them, which is always a confidence booster when you’re heading out on a public land turkey bowhunt. Now, when I got to camp, it looked like I was the only person there, which was an even bigger confidence booster. The nearby property I planned to hunt is one that I have a long history with. I killed my first spring bird with a bow on that property a long time ago during a hunt with a buddy where he somehow unstrung his bow on a seater when we packed in, which meant he couldn’t shoot, but I could, and the loaner Jake I called into the spread twenty minutes after we set up, was plenty of turkey for me. He launched me on a course toward bow hunting a lot more turkeys, and I’m forever grateful for him. But even before that, that same buddy and I had hunted turkeys and deer on that ground I arrowed one of my first public land bucks there, a deer that also came into a decoy, which was just really cool. My biggest bucks, a pall made a ten pointer that went just shy at one sixty died on that property during a rut hunt that may have been one of the coolest hunts I’ve ever experienced. Another time, I hunted there during the rut when it was bonkers hot, and managed to hang and bang my way into a non typical ten pointer who showed up one afternoon a couple of minutes after I settled into a new spot, and I could tell you I was pretty happy to see him walking down the trail, and even happier to find him piled up one hundred yards away. The last time I hunted that property, my buddy and I slipped in between two storm systems, one of which was set to show up forty eight hours after we got there and forecasted to shut down roads by dumping a whole lot of April snow on the area. We weren’t in a position to get trapped in camp for days, so we knew the clock was ticking, and I managed to call in a tom after sitting from sunrise until six in the evening without so much as a sighting or a gobble within a half a mile. And while he didn’t die right away without a fight, he did end up in my game bag, and better yet, the following morning, I arrowed his twin, which was a public land and double in the span of a day and a half and more than I needed to be really happy. It only got better when I was butchering my birds in camp and I looked up to see my buddy with two jakes slung over his shoulders, which represented his first and second ever bow hills on turkeys. It also meant we were fully tagged out and good to get out of camp before the storm came in, which ended up delivering on all the promises it was supposed to. It was a gnarly one, so I have an affinity for that spot, like a lot of spots strung out across the Midwest, but I don’t go back there very often because I also have just a slightly bigger affinity toward figuring out new spots. Just learning the whole thing and figuring the whole thing out is what I like most about hunting, and once I sort of feel like I have things dialed, my wanderlust kicks in, and it’s just time to move on. The kicker there is that having things dialed on a piece of public land is a fleeting deal. It can be far more consistent on private land. But even then, having things dialed is sort of like being happy is truly a moving target. I thought about that as I I hiked into a few spots and walked past trees I’ve arrowed deer from in the past, and I looked at fence cross things I’ve watched deer jump and all that jazz. But it was one flock of turkeys that I played whack a mole with unsuccessfully that it brought me to a spot I had forgotten about on the property. As I listened to what sounded like about six or eight gobblers and a whole lot of hens fly down and then feet away. One morning, I pulled up my ONEX to try to figure out not only where exactly they had all roosted, but where exactly they were all headed. The thirty thousand foot view of the land via satellite imagery showed me a long, skinny meadow that hugged the base of a bluff and kind of framed up a woodlot I hadn’t set foot in in a long time, maybe over a decade. So at noon one day I decided to pack up my blinds and my decoys crossed a smallish river on a downed cottonwood that was pretty sketchy in the daylight, but really sketchy in the dark when I came back the next couple days and I went in there to try to find a spot to be in closer proximity to that flock. But the meadow I found while e scouting wasn’t a meta. It was a cattail sleugh, which is about as out of place on a property like that as you could get. I mean, you have to consider that I could walk up the hill from that cattail slough and be in cactus pretty quickly. Once I saw those cattails, my dull memory turned over, and I remember that not only was there a slew there, but it had always struck me as kind of a big buck spot that I had never hunted. And as I walked the edge and I looked at the trails crossing the water to get to the wood lot, I realized that it was a big buck spot because well, duh. Most folks aren’t going to wade to get to deer, let alone hike to the back corner of a property when there are good looking spots much closer to the parking area. The trails were clear as day, and they all got swallowed up by the cedars that book ended the woodlot. It’s a perfect scenario not only for a buck to get to a good spot to bed that is very difficult to approach, but also to stage and to lay down some sign and of course, when the weather cools enough and the trigger treaters are out, the cruise around looking for a fight or a girlfriend. What does this discovery mean, or I guess rediscovery mean for my future to yourself, I don’t really know yet. I’m going to try to go to Nebraska to arrow a public land buck in Velvet this year, so maybe that spot will play into my plans, but I don’t think so. I have other options with more limited water to work with on a hunt like that. But the discovery of those well worn trails leading into a little sanctuary that has a moat around it, like a literal moat, It’s got my wheels turning. Maybe in two seasons I’ll go down there for a rut hunt and try to work the edges of that spot before diving right in. Or maybe I won’t, But the whole thing was a really good reminder that our work as white tailors has never quite finished, and that even if your sole focus right now is to shoot a gobler in the face, you can still pick up a thing or two deer wise. This is simple on a few fronts, but the most obvious is that if you’re running and gunning for turkeys right now, you probably aren’t all that concern with stepping foot in the primo betting ground on your deer lease. After all, who cares if you bump a buck out in April or May, or maybe you get on a long beard that likes to strut on a ridgetop. You rarely hunt because the wind is never quite right, or you just feel like you have better options. But when you go up there to try to secure a fresh round of turkey nuggets for the kiddos, you realize that there are several last seasons rubs along a well worn side hill trail. You know, the kind of trail that no one including you, ever hunts, because you can just sit at the top of the ridge or down in the valley below. The best year hunter’s out there, the ones who can go anywhere and get it done regardless of hunting pressure. They’re just students of the game. Now, that’s not some cliche thing to say that means nothing. It means a whole lot. They aren’t as obsessive as you’d think in that sort of single minded focus way, even though some of them present that image on social media because it’s good for business. They are students in that they are always paying attention some to what the deer tell them, And what the deer tell us this time of year is the story of their daily lives and the story of where they feel most comfortable living out there in the woods in which they call home. Now, that’s big picture stuff that doesn’t really do you much good, though. Instead, what they also tell us, often just by the trails that are etched into the dirt from enough hoofs traveling along them, is where they prefer to walk, not only in April, but also in November. All deer trails lead to somewhere, and you might not find a time when the trails are more obvious than they are now. But the window is closing as the whole world greens up, And for a lot of Southern hunters it might already be closed, but for a lot of us it isn’t. And what’s better than that is the fact that you might not have a single time of year where you’re more willing to cover ground without a real plan than you do if you load up a shotgun and you know, throw on a turkey vest and head out for a day of roaming and chasing gob It’s the perfect combination to learn something about the deer and to think about what the deer trails on your ground actually do represent, where do they lead to, and why would the deer use them. It’s pretty safe to say a well worn trail as a physical, real world representation of a route. Deer use a lot. That’s obvious, But ask yourself why. Most hunters look at a trailer and they think about how it’s a good spot to set up twenty yards down went from, but they don’t ask themselves why it’s there and why enough deer would use it to make it obvious. Sometimes it’s as simple as a means to go from thick cover of food and vice versa. Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes in the case of the cattail trails I found in Nebraska, it’s a clue to an area where the bucks have a real terrain advantage. Understanding these types of spots and how to use them is like ninety two percent of the battle if you want to be in the game all season long, no matter where you hunt or what kind of ground you have access to. This can be nullified some on really good private ground, especially with a food plutter or two. But for anyone who is trying to learn deer and is also dealing with some hunting pressure, it’s a chance for you to peel back one of the layers and have the bucks show you what they like. And that’s not nothing, my friends. What this is really is like taking the stairs when you could use the elevator on any given day, that might burn like three or four more calories than the easier choice, but if you do it every day or five days a week, it becomes something over time. It’s like giving up drinking soda, or doing one extra set at the gym during each visit, or you know, one time of day not doom scrolling the second boredom hits and instead finding a task to do that requires your hands. In your mind, hunters want something that just quickly and easily fixes the problem of not killing big Bucks. But that thing doesn’t exist. I’ve talked about it a million times, and I’ll talk about it a million more, because if you want to find that product or that strategy, no scratch that, if you believe that product or strategy exists, you’re not going to stop looking for it and throwing money at it. You won’t find it, but that belief will carry you along on a current that carries most of the hunting population, and you’ll all head straight for that cartoon waterfall. All right, that’s too dramatic, But what it does is keep you from looking at hunting like it will get easier through the cumulative experiences of being in the woods year round and trying to take in the lessons that Bucks can teach us. I don’t know how to put it any other way, and I don’t know how to make hunting any easier for any of us without that being a real component of it. Now, the good news is that you don’t have to go out and do any real extra work to start gleaning the benefits from it. You know, just like using the stairs when everyone else is using the elevator while going to work. You’re going to go to work anyway, so why not make a small, slightly better choice. You’re probably going to go turkey hunting this spring, if you haven’t already. That’s a time to be in the woods and learn something. And even if you sit in a blind for all your hunting, you’re probably gonna see some deer, and you also have to walk in and you have to walk out, and both of those times probably won’t happen in the dark. Maybe you plan to go catch some I don’t know, trout on a nice little stream that winds its way through the bluffs, and when you do, you find a crossing or two that teaches you something about how deer get from one bank to the other. I can’t tell you how many times trout fishing has taught me something about bucks and has actually helped me kill bucks. But you know, I get it. That’s a regionally specific example. Last year I spent time in Arkansas, a far cry from a lot of my usual deer in turkey hunting and fishing haunts, and what I saw in that floodplain heavy region of the South was that the deer were using the slightest elevation they could to get from point A to B without getting too wet, and that they were definitely okay waiting from spot to spot too, probably because they just have to. I also saw a hell of a lot of trucks with john boats parked on random gravel roads that bordered areas with muddy backwater lay full of large mouth and panfish and probably catfish. Most of those good old boys and girls fishing in those areas are probably also deer hunters, and a day spent tossing spinner baits in the down timber. Now it might not look anything like a deer scouting mission, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some deer scouting that can be done. This is the thing about this stuff, and I think my takeaway lesson is this we often don’t look at the world around us with any level of real curiosity, and in the case of deer, that’s a huge mistake. This is only easier to do when our focus is on long beards, or maybe morale mushrooms, or maybe catching a limit of crappies for a little fish fry. But we are capable of doing both. You just have to remind yourself that there’s value in looking around when you’re out there, and when you do see a well worn deer path that you’ve never paid attention to, ask yourself where it leads to, Because even if you aren’t able to definitively answer it, merely asking the question and engaging your mind for an answer is a good thing. It’s a good exercise to do. So don’t forget that as you all get lost and all these spring activities that are on us, and don’t forget to come back next week as I talk more white tails or maybe a little bit about turkeys or both, or who knows. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation’s podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always, thank you so much for listening for all your support truly means the world to us at med Eater. Without you, guys, we are nothing, so thank you for that. If you need some more content to check out, you know where to go the medeater dot com. We literally drop new content every single day. I’m talking hunting films, I’m talking tons of podcasts, I’m talking articles, you know how to articles, the latest news articles on conservation, maybe a recipe. It’s all right there at the mediater dot com. Go check it out.
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