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, everybody, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about putting in the work right now to kill a giant, mega, huge, pretty good buck during the rut. As much as I like to talk about hunting the early season or spending my time in a saddle during the middle of October when everyone else is running out the clock to get to the rut, I know something about us as hunters, well not all of us, but a hell of a lot of us. Anyway, we are going to put in most of our effort, most of our time during the rut. We can't help it. And that's okay. If that sounds like you or you just don't have as much faith in the earlier part of the boast season as I do. Consider this, you can do an awful out of work now to prepare yourself for rut hunting success, which is something I'm going to talk about right now. Sometime last December, I found myself standing in a cattail slew with the wind just whipping across the prairie, and I was thinking that my limit bird was laying out there somewhere, and not only could I not see it, obviously, but I couldn't see my dog and I couldn't hear her. I knew that Sadie was in the ballpark because the rooster had gotten up while cackling his displeasure at being forced to fly, which is almost always something that happens after the dog gives them a really good chase and they finally decide to use their wings instead of their legs, and they honestly just kind of sound like they're pissed off at the whole situation, which is understandable. That bird had crumpled well enough, but anyone who hunts wild roosters knows that it isn't always a sign that the game bag is about to get a little heavier just because you knocked one down. But Sadie did find that bird, which meant it was time to unload the shotgun and do the long hike back to the truck. Sometime during that whole episode, I missed a phone call, which I didn't care about because it was a Sunday afternoon and I figured it was probably a scammer. It wasn't. It was Steve Vanella, which might sound super exciting to you guys. To me, I figured I was about to do some extra work somewhere. When I called him back, he asked me if I wanted to do a rut hunt with him, which, in the interest of keeping my job and making Mark Kenyon a little jealous that he didn't get the call, I said yes. In typical Steve fashion. He'd lucked into a ranch in Nebraska that has been real light on hunting pressure for over a decade and should be real heavy on deer yours truly was brought in to scout it set it up, which is a process that began in the end of June when I put four hundred and some miles behind me to head down there and take a look around. As you can imagine, I had spent quite a bit of time on on X scouting out the ranch as best I could, but I knew a couple of things. You know. The first is that east scouting for deer in the sand Hills cattle pastures of that region is a far different thing than on my home ground. And the other thing was that I would have to constantly remind myself when I was down there that all of the work that I was doing should be designed for a payoff during the rut. This is harder to do than a lot of us like to admit, or maybe even really consider. With boots on the ground, you can make some of those connections that you might miss through east scouting alone. So when I met up with a landowner to take a look around and start dropping some moultries on the place, I expected to be surprised by what I had gotten wrong through looking at satellite imagery from seven hours away while sitting at home. And that's the first disconnect. It's a big one because as valuable as eastcouting is, there is still a disconnect there. You got a ground truth, but then you have to factor in the timing of the year and the disconnect that exists there as well. This last one is a big one, and it keeps a lot of us from doing some of the work now we should do so that when we get to the rut, we aren't scrambling or left with too few options. This was front and center on my brain as we hopped into the side by sides and started cruising around. The temperature felt like it was about one hundred and ten degrees in the shade, but at least the mosquitoes were pretty terrible. We started on an obvious location in the ranch where a good sized but shallow river winds its way through bands of giant cottonwoods and then some kind of weirdly swampy patches of willows and pockets of brush and cedars. In other words, it was the kind of cover that hosts deer activity all year round but can really hum with sign as October gives way to November. Now, if you know anything else about rivers, you also know that they are not surprisingly, or at least I hope this isn't a surprise where river crossings happen, which is a favorite setup of mine. They get even better when you factor in the general pattern of cruising that happens in parallel to flowing water and the pinch points that come with the whole thing. Now, we stepped into a pretty interesting patch of timber along that river, and I instantly felt how much cooler it was than the surround. I also watched a dome in a fond get up out of their beds, and on each side of that patch of timber, I found areas where the topography of the river bank and the timber that framed it up formed perfect funnels. While I figured i'd get some pictures from the cameras, I dropped on both spots. I didn't really care too much, because even if they didn't produce then, I figured they would produce later. But when we loaded up to add to a different part of the ranch, I happened to catch a glimpse of a bucket out of his bed and run away, And he was really, really big, and he showed up on both cameras that first night. That was as exciting as you can imagine, but also the high point of the whole scouting trip. The rest of the time we looked at field edges and random water holes and areas of the ranch with mostly pastured sand hills, but also some scattered patches of light timber. You know, the kind of places that are nearly devoid of here now but should host some activity. In about three or four months. This is where some are scouting for rut hunts. Gets really frustrating. We want to see deer now, whether we are glassing or running cameras. While glassing this time of year is a different thing, because you know you're not glassing areas that you expect to be hopping during the rut. You're looking at places where deer should be now, which often doesn't translate very well. Cameras are a different story. You can use cameras now to figure out your rut plans, but you have to accept something about these setups. They might not be very productive for a couple of months. I'll give you an example here on this ranch in Nebraska, there are a couple of pivots in eggfields. If you know how those work, you know that the field will be a perfect circle that exists inside a square of land, and on each corner of that square there will usually be some kind of brush or trees are covered that isn't grown to feed cows or people. I'm one of those corners on that ranch. We walked up to a small water hole that was absolutely teeming with life. I mean it was covered in frogs and nakes, turtles and generally what you'd expect on a water hole where water is generally pretty limited. There were a handful of deer tracks on the edge, too, but they were old and not all that promising. The water hole looked deep enough to always hold something, and it was about forty yards from a small patch of cottonwoods on the edge of a hayfield. It doesn't look like much and wouldn't draw a second glance if you were hunting in most of the Midwest or East. But on one gnarl pine sized willow tree, I cleared out a section of the trunk to hang a camera, knowing that I might not get a picture of a deer there for quite a while. But I firmly believe that some buck will claim that little corner as part of his fall range. He'll drink from that frog pond, he'll walk by those cottonwoods to head out to eat. If you looked up the definition of a dead unproductive trail camera in the dictionary, you'd see a picture of that exact setup. It's just not right yet, but I believe it's going to get there, and I honestly think that one of us will kill a good buck right in that spot sometime during the rut, although we might have to throw a dough decoy out there to make it happen. Now Here is where this scouting trip in your situation probably varies quite a bit. Since that ranch is seven hours from me, and I only plan to head down there one time in August to hang stands and set blinds. I'm not in a position to adjust my strategy on anything other than an infrequent cadence, or really pretty much not at all. I need cameras in those spots so I can watch the progression of deer visitors as they go hard antlered and start to spread out in the fall. I want to see who shows up and where, and if I can tie in any real patterns to the overall intel. If you're gonna run cameras now for the rut, you're working on your home ground. Probably you can go in and move things around when you feel you need to. But the catch with that is that we often write off spots too early, or don't understand that the buck that walks through once every three weeks now is telling you something really important for your rut setups. Think about it this way. Say you're a hit man and you have an assignment to whack someone. Would you think that monitoring that person's daily routine for a week would put you in a good enough position to pull it off without getting caught. Wouldn't two weeks be better? Or a month or more? Could you have too much information on where they buy their coffee when they go to the gym, and what their favorite restaurants are, and what roads they drive to and from work. Probably not. When it comes to where a buck might travel in his home range, can you have too much information? Probably not, even if you believe that the rut is full of randomness. I'm not one of those people. And the reason I say that is because even the bonkers days, when they are chasing and all hell is finally broken loose, it breaks loose in a controlled manner, they still cruise the routes that keep them safe while increasing the odds of running into a hot dough. They still chase and corral doos and the patches of cover that offer them some type of advantage. When they move, they move through areas that force their travel. When the dose they are running totally ragged give into their thirst, they visit the water that's available. If that's some random frog pond on the edge of a pivot field, so be it. I want to know when they are there, where they approach from, and how often they might get there. While I think trail cameras are really valuable for this type of intel gathering, I also think that getting out and just looking at the land is probably the best way to prep for your rut hunts right now. But before I get into that, I'll say this, I know a lot of hunters don't think they need to do this. When you hunt a property for years, this mindset is easy to adopt, and you might be right too. You might have some kind of pinch point or funnel or dough betting area where they always just go and you know it, so there isn't much of a need to go out and sweat your apple bag off to figure out what you already know. But I also know that things change in the deer woods all of the time, and they happen on a fast scale and so slowly that we often don't realize it. On the fast scale, that might be a tree falling across a fence and a certain spot that affects movement right now, or it might be the difference between the neighboring farmer planting corn this year versus beans last year. On a slow scale. This is stuff we really want to understand. A good example of this is some of the big woods hunting some of us too. If you hunt where there is timber production still, you might focus on this year's clear cut and the fresh growth that follows. But that clear cut in three years is a vastly different thing to hunt in five years. It's different still after ten it might be a deer desert in there. The bang and hunts you had on it in the first few years will create memories that are hard to escape, and that will draw you back to that spot, but the hunt might be forever changed there. Another way to look at this is the pressure on public land. I honestly think other than during peak times when people are just going to hit the woods like the rut, we're seeing a decline in hunting pressure overall. Now. I know that's highly variable and highly situational, but the fever that burned around being a public land hunter seems to have broken a little bit. You know, when a lot of optimistic folks realize how hard it really is. Now, whether that's true or not, the amount of people in the woods over time fluctuates a lot. We don't really have a way to understand this in the moment, but only upon reflection and through a lot of scouting and hunting. We just gather general experience out there. Now. I'm sure it seems like I've veered way off course here and should probably throw back some adderall but my point stands about boots on the ground scouting for the rut right now, in that if you do it, you'll learn something that will factor into your hunts. It's not just about the bucks and what they like to do, but the land and how it changes and how it has changed, and the amount of people crossing that land for whatever reason on any given day or in any given season. So what is the key to all of this? I'd say that it's all about learning what you can now while constantly considering what that means to your rut hunts. You got to look into the crystal ball, my friends, which is hard to do but important. The bachelor group on camera in the woods once every three weeks now is bound to break up long before the rut, and some of those deer will stay and some will vanish into the neighbor's property. So why monitor them? Now? Well, don't you want to know where they cross the old fence in the woods, or whether you're more likely to get picks of them in the morning versus the evening. What about the dos? Dough groups can be highly patternable over a long enough time window. And while you might not care at all about some ladies in their fawns hanging out in some patch of timber, now what if your camera shows them almost daily passing through a certain spot. Will that hold up during the rut? Maybe? And if it does, you know those doughs are going to draw some attention, and you know where they are likely to be and where they are likely to travel. And here's another thing about this stuff. The total answer to your rut hunting problems doesn't exist out there right now. But the information that is necessary to putting the whole thing together is allow me to explain that that spot where I saw that big buck in Nebraska, where I got him on two cameras, is bound to be covered in buck signed by mid October when we show up to hunt. Hopefully I'll have a hell of a lot more pictures of him to work off of. But also what if we had down there to hunt and we stumble across the dished out scrape two hundred yards away from the best pinch point. And what if the wind is out of the south or east, and those pinch points I had scouted so well or just out of play. That scrape might not mean anything, or it might mean I have an amazing plan B to hunt the same deer when the conditions conspire to keep him alive and keep me frustrated. I could walk into the woods and find that scrape without the summertime intel to back it up, but I'll have a better idea of whether I should hunt it and when if I have five months of recon to drop up on. This is the thing that we often miss when it comes to deer hunting advice. The whole thing hinges on a lit of information gathered through as many means as possible, and put into practice only after factoring in about a million variables on any given day. It's an inexact science that gets a little more precise with each data point we can plug in. It's great to know that deer like to drink water, and that you've found a small water hole somewhere, but it's better to get in there and look at the land and the cover and the potential ambush options for different winds, and then to run a camera on it for a few months to see who comes in and from where and when. That way, if you get the perfect conditions to hunt it during the first week of November, it's a pretty simple equation. But if the wind isn't right, or it isn't hot enough to make them too thirsty, or there are three trucks parked there where you didn't expect them, you will have a better backup plan than you could have. And that's probably the biggest reason to scout right now. For the rut, things will change and go wrong, and the dear world we envision will be nothing more than a nice thought when reality actually settles in. And when it does, drying upon months of scouting will be a difference maker, even if it's hard to make that connection right now. So think about that and do that and come back next week because I'm gonna talk about the difference between challenges and problems and how understanding them can help you kill more big bucks. That's it for this episode. I'm Tony Peterson, and this has been the wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. Thank you so much for your support. I know I say this every week, but I truly mean it. If you need more hunting content, if you need some more podcasts to listen to, maybe you're going on a road trip with a family, whatever, the medeater dot com has you covered. You can go check out Clay Speed which just keeps growing. You know. They added Brent Reeves in This Country Life first, which is an incredible podcast. But now Lake Pickles got one on there back was university. He's doing a great job. Lake's a cool dude. Check it out, or just check out the media dot com for some recipes for some articles, new films drop and whatever. There's new content every single day.