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. Today's episode of Foundations, which is brought to you by First Light, is all about scrapes and how to hunt them correctly. Buck signed, buck signed, buck sign. The questions roll in by the week, and most of them center on scouting and how to use buck sign. The thing is, most of the buck sign I care about comes in the form of rubs and tracks. Scrapes don't really get me going a whole lot, at least until a certain time of year, which is right free can know if you want to kill a buck on a scrape. Mid October is your window, as long as you know which scrapes to hunt and when. Which is where we are going with this whole episode. I'm guessing that more than a few of the folks listening to this podcast right now are thinking this is a good time to hunt some wood ducks, or maybe get in some last nights on the water catching smallmouth before getting really serious about white tails. Here's the thing, at least from my experience, mid October is underrated. I'm not going to pretend it's as exciting as the rut because it's not. But it's not a lost cause either, and it's an opportunity for public land hunters as well as anyone who shares the woods with other hunters, to have a last week or two kind of to themselves before the rut. Hunting army marches into the hardwoods with their brand new grunt too and bottles a dopee, ready to post up on every pinch point and funnel in the forest while taking sunrise selfies for Instagram and filming themselves dipping donuts into their coffee for TikTok. If you want to get out before that on slot, do it, but do it in a way that takes advantage of last week's staging area advice and something else. Scrapes. This is purely anecdotal on my part, but let me tell you a few things I really believe about hunting scrapes. The first is that when I started bowl hunting, I didn't know anything about scrapes other than bucks made them, and I wanted to sit over them because I knew bucks made them. I hunted them for years without ever killing a buck on a scrape, let alone seeing one use one, or make one. At least to a young, mostly clueless Minnesota bow hunter, they were like crop circles. They just showed up in the middle of the night, and that was at In fact, I don't think I saw a legitimate buck use the scrape until I was probably in my early twenties. Then it was a scrapper and it didn't register as anything meaningful at all. It wasn't until I was on the hunt for a monster buck on public land in the Twin Cities in two thousand and eleven that got a real lesson on scrapes. While the really big boy had disappeared on me, his younger sidekicks suddenly showed up right where they had been all summer long. It was mid October, it was hot, it was windy and really bad weather for white tails, and the timing sucked if you believe in that sort of thing. I was tucked into an overgrown fence row, mostly just watching when he popped out of the cat tail slue and worked his way down a woodline. That nine pointer. He didn't make it too far before a smaller eight pointer stepped out. They squared off, but didn't fight. Instead, they stood ten yards apart and both made scrapes in the dry, sandy soil. It looked like a whole digging contest from my vantage point. The bigger buck worked his antlers into an overhanging pine bow, took a leak on his tarslo glands, and then made his way back to the cat tails and out of sight. The following day, it got hotter, it got windier, and less likely that anyone else would go in there to hunt, so I grabbed a stand in some sticks and I hiked in. I set up seven yards from his scrape in the best tree I could find, and settled in to sway in the thirty mile per hour wind. It wasn't all that much later when a doe came out, which got my attention because I was hunting hungry and I had ant los tags. I also thought the odds of the nine point returning were very low. As she fed closer, I looked around and saw times coming out of the cat tails, which meant my focus shifted in a hurry. The wind meant that calling was out of the question, so I just had to cross my fingers and hoped the buck returned to a scrape. When I lost sight of him. I figured that wasn't going to happen, but it did. With fifteen minutes of shooting, light left and at the shot he took off cartoon level fast, and although I didn't see it, ended up dying in the middle of a pond that was deep enough to make me nearly swim to retrieve him. Killing a really good buck in those conditions on public land on a scrape left the mark on me. It changed how I looked at hunting at scrapes, which was further solidified a few weeks later when I aarrowed a great ten inner as he worked a scrape in Illinois. That buck, traveling after a five days stretch of rainy, nasty weather that finally blew out, was working a scrape when he was supposed to in the morning after the rain during the rut. Together, the two bucks made me realize that I was looking at scrapes as fools gold. Yet in a span of three weeks, I turned a clunker of a season into one that looked pretty good, all because of scrapes. Since then, I've spent a lot of time thinking about and hunting scrapes, and I really believe this is the time when most white tail communication happens with them, but not all scrapes are created equal. Just like the field edge rub, a scrape on the edge of the soybean field is probably not your best friend. It was probably made at night, probably gets visited at night, and probably doesn't do you much good as a hunter. Now, if you're in a secluded spot with low hunting pressure, this might be worth setting up over. It could really concentrate any movement you're likely to see during shooting hours, and since you're already hunting over food, you might as well get in a downwind position to shoot the scrape just in case. A scrape in the woods might be a different story. Might might be a different story, especially a good size scrape, because this often indicates you're in a travel hub. If the scrape has a licking branch, then you're in business. If it doesn't, forget it. It's worthless. If you don't know what a licking branches, walk up to a scrape and all hell, just google it. But when you're on the woods and you find a scrape, look at the ground, then look up four or five six ft in the air and there will be a branch that was chewed on and it looks like it's expertly twisted to hang right over the scrape. That's real important. Now, A dished out scrape in this scenario is one that is worth thinking about. Usually it will be in a place where dear end up as they travel through and stage, and it will be communications central the licking branch, which is more important than any amount of exposed dirt provide. It's a spot for all bucks to leave their calling card via the preorbital glands on their forehead. In both in person observation and after running trail cameras on video mode over scrapes. I've never seen a buck work of scrape that didn't rub his face on the licking branch. It seems to happen every time, actually pawing out the dirt and peeing down their hawks to carry the scent away from their tarso glands. That's another story. Sometimes they do this, sometimes they don't. You might ask why, which is a good question, and I don't know the answer. I also don't know why you occasionally see a buck walking through the woods making what looks like random scrapes along the route, you know, every Maybe it's just a natural inclination that allows them to saturate the area with his scent. But it's a different behavior than visiting a community scrape and adding to the matrix of scent deposited there by visiting bucks and does And that's right. The ladies use scrapes sometimes too, but it seems like they are almost always interested in the licking branch and not the piste soaked dirt to white tails live by their noses, and scrapes sure seem to be away for them to check in with daily updates, sort of like the dear version of social media, without all the ads or selfies or humble briggs or other bullshit. The key takeaway here is that, dear, do visit scrapes at night and sometimes in the day, and if you find one that is ripe, you might kill a buck on it. But how do you know. You know by location and through trail cameras. I'll get to location in a second, but let me first dive into monitoring scrapes with trail cameras. It's fascinating. It's also dangerous because this is often a here this week but gone the next week's strategy. If you have a cell camera and they're legal to use, setting one up over a scrape in October will tell you a lot. If you're on a traditional camera or three, you can learn a lot from them too, but you have to go in to check them, which means more intrusion in the woods. Obviously, when I'm in this position, I tend to slip in as if I'm going to hunt. Then I check the camera, and if it's some daylight visitors, I actually probably will hunt if the setup is right. If not, it's time to slip out and head somewhere else, or back off and just observe the area. Now, as far as good scrape locations go, they have to be where the deer want to walk first and foremost. It doesn't matter if you find scrapes where you want to hunt. If it's not where the deer are likely to walk during the daylight hours. What happens there is that they visit at three in the morning, and that's totally worthless to you. Scrapes on wooded ridges, deep in the swamps, where three fingers a slightly higher ground meet next to the lowlands, or where a hardwood point next down to feed into distant egg fields are all spots where a scrape could really round out your hunting plan. Now, don't just get excited when you find a car hood sized scrape with a licking branch hanging over it, because it has to be in a great spot and you have to be able to hunt it. This is trickier than it sounds because it's so easy to find a scrape and decided to climb up ten yards away so that you can arrow any heavy beam visitors who are surely coming. Because you're hunting in middle to late October, you've got to consider the cover. Consider the reason for a buck to be in the area and moving in daylight. Is their security cover around? Are you fairly close to some known or suspected betting areas? Does he have to put himself in any real danger to get there, like by traveling through openings or simply covering a lot of ground. If he can get up in the late afternoon and work his way to the scrape without getting into trouble, you're onto something. But now you gotta think about the wind. This is a big one because you want to be down wind, but so does he. Most bucks I've seen approach a scrape to work it, and they just come in from downwind, it's just how it happens. This is where a lot of hunters get into trouble because they think they have to be within easy shooting distance of the actual scrape. If you can get that and play some type of train feature like a steep drop off or a lake that simply won't allow a buck to get down wind of view, then by all means hunt that sucker that way. But if you can't, which is really common in flatter areas like you'll find in many plain states, or when you're dealing with big woods bucks in a pile of different regions, you might want to back up. This is a hard thing to do, but instead of planning to shoot the scrape, I sometimes set up fourty or fifty yards down wind. This might sound like I know that bucks will always approach from twenty five yards down wind, and therefore I've played chest to their checkers. That's not the case. What I'm doing is just playing it safe, and I know that the bucks that visit scrapes are often in a staging mood. They often mill around and are highly collable when they're in a comfortable spot. If a buck walks right into a scrape and doesn't give me a shot. It might be a matter of a couple of soft grunts or bleeds to get him into range, or I might just see something to work with for the following day's hunt. What I don't want to do is blow them out of there by crowding right into this scrape if I can't get away with it. Sometimes this cautious approach absolutely burns me, because they do just march right in and work it without thinking too hard about wind direction. That seems to be mostly a young buck move, however, and not as common with older deer, So I just play the odds, and you probably should too. You should also pay close attention to the weather when you're building a scrape hunting plant. Now, this didn't come from me. It's been in the deer hunting zeitgeist for a long long time, but it's worth repeating. It seems that bucks are interested in freshening up scrapes after a rain. That Illinois buck I mentioned earlier, he was absolutely on that program when I airrowed him. I've seen other bucks do this as well, and since they live off their noses and olfactory communication is huge in the white tails world, it just kind of seems to make sense. It might also be bs, but that's okay. Deer move when it rains, and they move when fronts blow through. Now, even if they don't think, holy cow, that rainstorm last night probably removed all my sweet glandular calling cards they left for the ladies, or the thinly veiled threats of violence from my rivals. They're out there, moving around when the rain is falling and after the rain is quit it. You should hunt those conditions, whether you're on private land, public land, clued into giant community scrapes, or couldn't reliably tell a scrape from a spot where a fox squirrel dug up a walnut. Now, I have to say this as a disclaimer, Scrapes aren't the answer to all of our deer hunting problems, even if you time it right, hunt when the conditions are favorable and identify a perfect scrape in the perfect spot. Scrapes are primarily used at night. They're far from sure things. When you're stuck hunting between first and last light, they can be the ticket, but more importantly, usually just show you where lots of deer travel throughout the day and night. Now, even if you're in a low density situation, like on a big woods up north type of hunt, the right scrape can clue you into a spot where deer like to be at some point in the week. This is good news and can allow you to either focus on the spot or use it as a starting point to backtrack from, kind of like when you find a monster buckbed tucked into a small island in the swamp. Clues they are important. Maybe you won't arrow a buck on a community scrape, but given its location, it will give you an idea of direction to travel, and that will lead you to a softer edge deeper in the woods, or a benjy hillside where he sleeps away the midday hours. Or maybe just finding one scrape that checks a bunch of boxes will get you into the woods when the rest of your hunting competition is home watching football and thinking that there is no real reason to hunt when it will be on fire in a couple of weeks. That might be the best reason of all to get into the woods and set up well down wind of a scrape, So go do that. Just kill one before the red base hunter parade shows up and changes everything, or you'll just get clued into the buck concentration. Like I said, this is something just worth repeating and always paying attention to, whether you hunt private ground or public A place with a well used scrape, like I said, usually where deer concentrate and where the odds are high that multiple deer will travel through there. Otherwise what's the point of I'm trying to communicate with one another. This means that instead of thinking of just sitting over that scrape as a strategy, that that pot up dirt with a well used looking branch might just be giving you a peak into dear behavior in the moment. The bucks that got blown out of the swamp on duck opener, they might relocate to a deep woods basin where they'll established scrapes. Right now, fresh well used scrapes indicate you're probably in a good area, but that require a little fine tuning. This is why I always bring in the prospect of observation stands. You've heard me preach this over and over again. If you find a scrape that checks all the boxes, but you sit over and it doesn't produce, what does that mean? Or if you find an area where there are several scrapes in a point of woods that leads out eventually to a pickcornfield. What does that mean. It means you know something about deer concentrations right now and likely your travel roads. That's not nothing, even if it might be disappointed to think that you could just find the right scrape, sit over and fill your tag. The white tail woods are too fickle for that to be a totally consistent season to season strategy, especially if you hunt in public land. But it can happen, and if it doesn't, you'll probably learn quite a bit about how to use the knowledge of scrapes to keep the hunting fire burning and the action going. That's a sweet consolation prize. Now, next week I'll start to dive into the very first stages of the pre rod where this scrape strategy might hold out or it might die. It's okay either way, because you're going to get a lot more options when it comes to killing a buck simply due to the dates on the old calendar. That's it for this week, my friends. As always, thank you so much for listening. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast. Please head on over to our Wire to Hunt YouTube channel to check out our weekly how to videos. And take a look at the meat eater dot com slash wired to browse through a huge selection of deer hunting articles.