How to Use Your Spotting Scope to Be a Better Hunter

That might be good enough, but it doesn’t have to be. There are ways to utilize long-range glassing to not only monitor critters, but figure out exactly how you can either ambush them, or crawl into range before you run out of daylight. One of the best ways I’ve found to do both is to utilize a phone scope to film the action, and then review it in real time.

For the bulk of my freelance writing career, I carried an elk-hunt-sized pack with me almost everywhere I went. This was simply so I could lug along my DSLR camera gear. It doesn’t take long with a camera body and a couple of lenses to fill up a daypack, and it was a nonnegotiable part of my hunting.

It also made me realize that if I spotted a bedded mule deer in the breaks somewhere, I could take a high-resolution image of it, no matter how far away it was, and then zoom in to see not only the deer, but the trees around it. The lay of the land. The routes I might take to get into bow range, and often, whether he had any buddies with him that might blow the stalk.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the same option existed with whitetails. Whether I was trying to dial in an exact tree to kill a velvet buck in early September, or figure out what cottonwood to set up in for a cruiser on a western river bottom, the option to take a picture and zoom in just helped me understand my potential setups before ever going into the red zone.

Nowadays, I don’t need to use my high-end Nikon for that job. I can just use a phone scope adapter, which is way better for a couple of reasons.

Two years ago, I posted up on a peak above the Little Missouri River in western North Dakota to glass for whitetails. I saw a pile of them, and I filmed every decent buck I saw when I could get them to stay visible long enough.

In the moment, it was just fun to see a bunch of public land bucks doing their thing, but later in my tent while I was planning out my hunt, the videos showed their true value. I could watch them, and zoom in to fence crossing to analyze potential stand trees and ground blind sites. I could see exactly how they crossed the river, and which trail they took up the bank to feed.

While I could see all of that in real-time when I was watching, I wouldn’t be able to remember specifics from each potential location by the time I walked in to hunt, which might be days later due to the weather or some other factor. The buck that crosses the river half a mile away looks so simple until you hike in three days later and realize that in a 200-yard stretch, there are five crossings, and you’re not confident on which one he took.

The downside of having a spotter fitted with a phone scope is that it’s distracting. You’ll want to film every critter and take pictures. There is nothing wrong with that, but it can result in a little mission creep. The goal is to figure out how the deer or elk or antelope or whatever you’re after, use the land, and then capitalize on that.

What I do to keep myself from missing important moments is film when an animal is on the move. Where a buck jumps a fence, or five bucks jump a fence, is far more important to me than where they spread out and feed in a sage flat.

How they approach a stock tank, or how they exit a high-country basin an hour into the morning, is the information I want to know the most. That’s the movement I want to be able to watch a few times, so I know if I can slip in and set up there. This also allows me to make a note of the wind direction tied to specific travel, and factor that into my setups.

In this way, a good spotter, with a phone scope, and then a cross-check on onX to see the land from above, is the best way to figure out not only how animals use the landscape, but how you need to use the same landscape to get in and stay undetected.