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 Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how to find and more importantly interpret big Bucks Sign in the days leading up to the pre run. The thing about Bucks sign is that it seems pretty straightforward. Bucks go out and they make some scrapes, and they make some rubs. You go find them, you sit over them, and you shoot the rightful creators of that sign, right and the lungs, and then you celebrate simple right. Well, if it were, finding sign would be the equivalent of snapping the last piece of the puzzle in place, but it's often not. It is a huge step in the right direction, but you need to know what the sign really means and how you can use it to make better decisions. 00:00:57 Speaker 3: That's what I'm going to talk about right now. 00:01:03 Speaker 2: There are a lot of memes out there about how people aren't good at picking up the signals of other people who might possibly become potential partners. If you get my drift, I can speak on this from the side of a clueless man, and it's not impossible for me to relate to some dude who finds himself well, I don't know, fishing or mowing the lawn or something, and suddenly realizing that an old coworker who he had a great relationship with was actually flirting super heavy, you know, during his time at the company, maybe during a Christmas party, and he missed every signal, like he was not only blind, but deaf and possibly just a little bit slow. In other cognitive ways, we often see what we expect to see, and that helps us deal with life. If we figure something is going to go wrong with the car at some point because it has over one hundred thousand miles on it, well, guess what something's going to go wrong with it? And when it does, we can say to ourselves, I knew it. I just knew it, and then we can bitch about it and feel a little better about living under this NonStop rain cloud that follows us around everywhere like a duckling imprinted on us after hatching. In life, it's not only about recognizing the signs, but reacting to them in the right way. In the deer woods, the sign literally is deer sign, and how we react to it will poortend our big buck futures. Let me tell you how this usually goes, or at least how it goes for an awful lot of hunters. They start out in the early season and there's very little sign, at least when it comes to rubs and scrapes. As the season progresses, they go back to the box blind on the food plot, or they go to one of their favorite ladder stands, and they start to see a few more rubs show up, maybe a few more scrapes. The field edge they like to sit gets picked and generally has less food to offer them previously, but it also has far more sign on the edge. So how do they interpret that? Well, they think the bucks are getting more active. And since they are getting more active and clearly visiting this spot on this very food source or this very logging road that I take to my favorite stand, my comfort stand, if you will, then that is evidence that I should one hundred percent keep hunting. Here because now the bucks are coming to me. We advance that line of thinking a little further by using it to justify hunting areas that might be totally burned out, especially during the rut. 00:03:08 Speaker 3: But what does that sign really mean? 00:03:10 Speaker 2: Well, it definitely means that some bucks are using that area at some point, and some of those bucks, hell, probably all of them, have been laying down some sign. Now, if you are hunting a load deer density area, all this might matter more than if you're hunting a spot that has seventy five dear per square mile. But still, what does it really mean to you? If deer laying down a lot of sign around a destination food source, we usually know what that means, and if not, we can sit that food source in an evening or two and see exactly what's going on. They are either there in the daylight or not. And the more pressure in your area, which includes the pressure you put on that exact food source, the more likely it is that that sign is appearing in the middle of the night. Pretty simple stuff, right, and yet we often kind of look past it so we can hunt in a way that is really comfortable for us. 00:03:58 Speaker 3: But does that usually. 00:03:58 Speaker 2: Result in mature bucks dying from our actions. Not really, and listen, I love seeing rubs and scrapes when I'm hunting, no matter where I'm hunting. I wouldn't be much of a deer hunter if I didn't. But it often doesn't mean that much to me because I've learned that finding deer sign isn't just a passive thing for me, because when it was, it really didn't change the outcomes of most of my seasons. 00:04:20 Speaker 3: Now let me frame this up a different way. 00:04:22 Speaker 2: Even an awesome concentration of sign around certain spots won't convince me that I need to hunt there, while in other areas, if I find even a little bit of buck sign, I will hang and hunt almost instantly. Why is this, Well, you have to sort of gauge the value of the sign. Let me give you an easy one. Up in the big woods, where I mostly get my ass kicked, I don't usually find a lot of sign because the deer density is low, so I really like finding any rubs up there. And since it's well big woods, the rubs are generally in the timber, so that's something I have to parse out and decide whether it matters or not. So take a random single rub on a hillside in ten thousand acres of public land. That's a great find. But does it mean anything to me? Maybe that depends on which way it's facing, and if that can tell me where he likely came from when he made it. Again, pretty simple stuff, But you can decide if rubs were made in the mornings or the evenings a lot of times by the way they face. 00:05:23 Speaker 3: And that's a good start. 00:05:24 Speaker 2: But what if that rub also happens to be facing a crossing, you know, one that I know exists between two swamps. Now I have a direction of travel tied to a spot that should further funnel deer travel. That's kind of like hunting an early season spot that not only has water but also acorns dropping. The more reasons they have to be there, the better. Now, what if that single rub leads me to scout that pinch point and on the other end of that I find a good sized scrape with a licking branch hanging over. Now I have evidence of a buck crossing there, and evidence that he's not the only one, because you don't usually have a community scrape without a community of deer. If you get my drift, the scrape is there because multiple deer does and bucks are using that crossing, and now they are getting serious about keeping tabs on one another. That's not nothing, and that's worth hunting to me. But I'm not likely to find that if I don't go look for it. So let's take another example here. Let's start with that single rub from before. It's cool, but it's only on an inch thick sapling. That's great, but anyone from a forky to a booner could have made it. It's not the kind of sign that is likely to get a whole lot of folks to carry us saddle and some sticks in there and see who's hanging around. But I view that slightly different because I've literally never seen a buck make a giant rub, but I've seen a few giants make small rubs. I take all sizes of rubs seriously because I don't believe they are highly correlated to the size a buck that made them. Now, granted, that wooden fence post rub is probably not from a spike, but most of the rubs aren't giant. They're small, and overlooking them is a mistake if you just attribute them to Now, with that rub, that's okay, it's nothing special, but maybe you can walk it out and find some more, all generally in the same direction. Then you have a rub line. And rub lines are a totally different thing because they generally exist in the woods, and to me, they generally signal a direction that bucks travel in the cover, often enough to leave a viable trail of breadcrumbs for me to follow. Those rubs will exist between two general locations, betting and food. There is nothing we want to find more than the spots in the cover where bucks move from point A to B, because when you find that, you find your opportunity to kill those deer. 00:07:43 Speaker 3: That's it. 00:07:44 Speaker 2: And while we can try to solve this academically by using our brains to decide where they sleep and where they fill their bellies, hard undeniable evidence will always trump what we think. Now you can predict to some degree of certainty where they are going in the mornings or the evenings, although I often find that it's not both. I feel like deer in a lot of places have routes that are more of a circuit than a straight line. I actually think when you start to think about their movement this way, you realize how much more important boots on the ground scouting is especially in season boots on the ground scouting, and that kills big Bucks. But to further muddy the waters, I absolutely believe that they're not straight. Line routes are heavily influenced by conditions, primarily the wind. So what you read off a smoking fresh rub line might be his travel route only when the wind is blowing from the west or the north or whatever. But it's still really valuable information. You can make your best guess and then go there to sit, and what they show you will tell you an awful lot about how good you are at interpreting sign This is part of the equation that we really under sell, but it's maybe the most important thing you can do if you want to get better at killing big Bucks. You have to understand that the solution to your problems will be found mostly internally and not externally. You can listen to me Yam or On or Mark talk NonStop about a property you'll never hunt and how we figured it out, and that's great, But what you do on your ground is what matters the most. How you scout and how you hunt it, and how you interpret that data to make future decisions. 00:09:33 Speaker 3: That's how you level up. 00:09:35 Speaker 2: The easiest way to do this right now is through scouting bucks sign, but only if you're going to take action with it. Like I said before, it's not enough to just get excited that you see sign popping up in places where you usually already hunt, because that will get you predictable results, which often aren't multiple seasons of big taxidermy bills. Now, I realize this is counterintuitive to most your hunting advice, which would just have you stay out of the woods right now. I believe the opposite. I believe the sign you find right now is the ticket to hire odds hunts throughout the pre rut and to a lesser extent, the rut. The reason I say this is because the sign you find right now, if it's the right stuff, can put you exactly where a big one will move on October twenty seventh when a cold front hits, but it might not matter when he's chasing a hot dough on the neighbor's place a week or two after that. The more years that go by, the more I come to value the last week of October the most. That's because where I live, that's the pre rut, just through and through, you know, down south and the southeast. The pre rut might be way later, but the same rules apply. Now, let's take a little different look at buck sign right now. You know what other type of sign I really really like? A concentration of sign in a small area in the cover. No shit, you might say, and you'd be right. But here's why. Where I generally hunt, there's a lot of hunting pressure. By the middle of October. That pressure has influenced your behavior more than the weather the moonface ever could. It's the driving factor behind most daylight movement in my opinion. So when I sneak through the woods with a stand and sticks on my back and I see a whole bunch of rubs or smaller scrapes in a not very big area, say something less than an acre, I usually don't go any farther because that's not from one buck. It's usually a staging area, and it definitely signals to me that the local bucks feel pretty confident being in that area. I think bucks are going to make rubs and scrapes when they're on their feet at certain times of the season, regardless of where they are, and I think when they view it as a not so safe endeavor to head out to the pitcornfields an hour before dark because there's always hunters there. They just kind of sit tight but still do their thing. It honestly feels a little like when you watch a UFC event and they show some of the fighters backstage in their dressing room. You know, obviously their nerves are on fire and they are putting on a show for the cameras and all that, but they're constantly moving, constantly shadow boxing. There's just this air of pent up aggression, if you will. I think bucks in mid October are sort of in a similar mindset. And I also think a common mistake hunters make when they find this kind of buck sign concentration is that it's more of a betting area than a staging area. I'm sure that's possible, but I tend to think the more rubs and scrapes you find in one area, the more likely it is that multiple Bucks are using this area. You know, betting areas can also have multiple Bucks in them, and you can definitely find them through sign, but it's just a different vibe and I don't really even know how to describe it very well. I just know that when I find a spot that has a shitload of random, you know, rubs and some scrapes, and I hunt it well enough to not make my presence known going in. I usually have really positive results. Again, this depends somewhat on deer density, because the more deer you have, generally, the more Buck signed there will be generally, But a real concentration says something different because on properties that have a lot of pressure, that means something. Now, it's also no secret that when I usually find these types of areas, it's after sneaking in to look at a few question mark spots. It's not usually the kind of thing where they appear in areas that I've already been hunting. Now, maybe that's part psychological. You know, where I value new to me sign over sign that gradually appears. You know, like how you can't really tell how fat your dog is, but someone who doesn't see your dog for long periods of time can instantly see that it has chubbed way up. So what does all this mean? It means that buck sign is relative to a whole ton of variables. It's up to you to not only find the sign, but to decide what exactly it means To you now. While it might mean that it just reinforces the plan you've had for your season all along, be careful with. 00:13:54 Speaker 3: That line of thinking. 00:13:55 Speaker 2: It's easy to see what we want to see. What you really want to find is the buck sign that makes you ask a question, why is this rub here now? Or why is this car hood size scrape here now? And they need to ask yourself what should you do about it? How do you use that discovery to actually kill a buck in the next couple of days or next week when a cold front hits and you could go sit on the field edge on a setup that's been there since August and you probably will see some deer, maybe even a few bucks. Or you could slip into that area with a new sign when the temperature drops and the north wind blows, and you can try to answer the question of just who made that sign? I guess that leads me to my final point on all this. You won't learn what that rub line means, or that community scrape, or that real concentration of sign, know what it signifies until you put something into action around it. This isn't just time to drop a camera and cross your fingers. It's time to go looking because what you find this week is where you might kill a big one next week. A lot of hunters will say that it's not worth it to trump around in the woods right now to find that sign, but I absolutely disagree with that. I think to set up for killing a big one doesn't get much better than finding the right buck clues right now to get on them before the rut really breaks loose. In fact, other than patterning one for an early opener, I think consistency wise, this is the highest likelihood setup for most hunters. I think it's more reliable than a rut hunt on a pinch point, honestly, and I don't say that lightly. Soak it out there, look around. If you find some sign worth hunting, figure out how to hunt it, or take a look at the next ten day forecast or whatever, and make a plan to hunt it when the conditions coalesce into something favorable. Good luck, and don't forget to come back next week because I'm going to talk about shot opportunities, when to take them, whether you should stop a buck, and all that jazz. 00:15:51 Speaker 3: That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. 00:15:53 Speaker 2: This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light. I know you guys are in the thicket it right now. You're thinking about dear NonStop. Maybe you just got back from an l cont. Maybe you're heading out west for a rifle hunt something like that. If you need more content to just fill up the hours of that drive, or maybe you want to read a new recipe on how to cook something you whack last week. 00:16:16 Speaker 3: I don't know whatever. 00:16:17 Speaker 2: The medeater dot com has new content going up every single day, hunting films, tons of different podcasts on our network now, a lot of great articles going up with news stories from the outdoors as well as just how to recipes whatever. 00:16:35 Speaker 3: It's all there at the mediator. 00:16:36 Speaker 2: Dot com and as always, thank you so much for your support. We truly appreciate it here, so thank you for that