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.

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.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought to you by first Light.

I'm your host, Tony Peterson.

I'm your host, Tony Peterson.

Today's episode is all about really truly understanding deer trails. Look, I get it, scrapes, I don't know scrapes and rubs anyway a matter a lot.

Today's episode is all about really truly understanding deer trails. Look, I get it, scrapes, I don't know scrapes and rubs anyway a matter a lot.

I like buck sign just as much as the next hunter.

I like buck sign just as much as the next hunter.

But if you put a gun to my head and said, what's the key to killing more big bucks and more deer in general than really anything else, I'd probably say that truly understanding how to read deer trails might be it when the deer literally show you exactly where they might walk at any given times. A huge piece of the puzzle. But it's not so simple. It's also what I'm going to talk about right now. It is a popular belief amongst humans that there are animals and there are US fish and US bacteria In us virus in us whatever to the deer. There is probably no distinction between us and the coyote or the wolf. It's just them and the animals that try to kill them. Predator and pray. We really don't think of ourselves as predators, and truthfully, as animals at all. We think of ourselves as special, sentient, and generally better than the rest of the animals, even other primates. When civilized cultures started bumping into wild apes, which wasn't that long ago, really, the natural reaction was that they were uncomfortably like us. So those researchers and the people interested in science set out to prove that those primates were nothing like us. But it didn't work that way. Primate attitudes toward making new apes and monkeys made researchers very uncomfortable, because we've been told for a long time by the authorities that that kind of situation should be kept in the dark and left largely unspoken and unseen. Researchers watched them fight and didn't make the connection between that activity and ours. Chimpanzees which share ninety nine point six percent of their DNA with ours or ours with them, and bnobo's, which share just slightly less than that have mostly erased the idea that there is truly an US in them. Most people don't want to hear that, but consider this. They make tools and they use them. They engage in trade, They play, they make art, they make music, they engage in politics. They kiss, They engage in face to face little monkey making where the females uh also get their cookies. They laugh, They can be altruistic. They play, They have their own language, and they reason out problems, some of which involve many steps of planning. Makes a lot of us uncomfortable to think about the traits we share with gimps and bonobos, many of which we view as uniquely human. Now, this morning, I drop my daughters off at their school, and while much of our snow is gone, not all of it is. And if you look at the grounds around their school, you'd see trails leading from various streets and parks, connecting the school to the greater world around it. I'm not proud of this, and I want to make sure that everyone listening knows I absolutely do not want to bowhunt humans. But when I'm out with the dogs in the park, or you know, at the canoe landing or on the river, down the road wherever. I often look at the trails people have created by hunting around a fence, or to go across the corner of a soccer field or whatever. Then I like to look at the trees and I think, where would I hang a stand if I had to hunt the folks who use the trails, so that not only would I have a good shot, but also wouldn't get busted by approaching soccer moms or other dudes with their dogs. Again, this is not something I'm interested in. It's just something that occurs to me often, probably because I have a lot of zombie apocalypse nightmares, so subconsciously, maybe I'm preparing for the end of the days I don't know, or I'm just bored and I miss scouting deer. Hard to say, but those trails we make around the places we congregate, they are evidence of our patterns. How are multiple trails carved through a neighborhood parked or some backyards leading to and from a middle school really any different from multiple trails carved into the woods leading to and from a small watering hole. If we had someone hunting us, it'd be pretty much the exact same thing. Luckily, we are pretty much at the top of the food so we can walk those trails relatively oblivious to the threats around us. This is not the case for white tails. They walk their trails for two reasons, to get where they are going in a manner that keeps them from burning excessive calories, and to not become excessive calories. For some other life form, the balance is always between efficiency and safety when it comes to prey animal travel during the rut. You could make the case that this is not true, and you'd probably be somewhat correct. Efficiency is a big factor in rut travel because exposure to potential estrius doze is always the goal. So as we all know, safety takes somewhat of a secondary role there mostly, but that's a couple of weeks window where the rules change somewhat. Although I would argue that an understanding of trails and how deer use them is a huge factor in being successful for the pre rut and at least partially in the peakra well in hell, the post route too, I guess anyway, I like deer trails a lot. When I travel to random places to hunt public land white tails, I generally can't glass for days on end to find them. Some environments like the big Woods don't allow for that anyway. No trail cameras can tell you a lot, but not if you don't have a lot of them or a lot of time to use them. So sure, a huge concentration of rubs or a community scrape is also you know it's going to get my attention. But what if it's the end of September and the buck sign is almost non existent, or what if it's the late season for that matter, And even if I do find some bucks sign, I can't ignore how valuable is that without knowing how the bucks will get there and where they'll go when they leave. Understanding deer travel throughout the year and definitely throughout the season is the base upon which a lot of great hunters are built. We often think it's about finding the right deer, that's a huge component, but finding how that deer goes from place to place is how you kill him. Knowing how existence alone is usually not enough, especially considering how everyone is pretty much running trail cameras these days and can generally be aware of most, if not all, of the mature bucks using their area. It takes more and The easiest way to get more is to start thinking about deer trails scratch. That's to start going out in the woods and not just noticing trails, but figuring out the why behind them. Shed hunting and winter scouting are perfect for this task because we often generally default to the strategy of walking deer trails during both activities. There's also just a lot that goes into learning deer travel, and if you want to learn how to use deer trails more effectively as a hunter, it's got to be a priority. I'm going to get into that, but the first thing I want to talk about is understanding trails in your specific world. Now this might seem dumb, but think about this. When I first started hunting the big woods and scouting big cranberries, bogs and swamps and wetlands and huge swaths of tamaracks generally wet, soft conditions, I was blown away by the trails. They were all cut deep into the moss and mud, so easy to read it seemed almost fake. What I realized after a few years of hunting there was that the deer population was really low, and that didn't jive with how well worn and used the trails. Looked while they were certainly carved into the landscape, it wasn't because there were tons of big bucks walking them every day. It was because generations of low density deer used them some and the landscape just holds those memories.

But if you put a gun to my head and said, what's the key to killing more big bucks and more deer in general than really anything else, I'd probably say that truly understanding how to read deer trails might be it when the deer literally show you exactly where they might walk at any given times. A huge piece of the puzzle. But it's not so simple. It's also what I'm going to talk about right now. It is a popular belief amongst humans that there are animals and there are US fish and US bacteria In us virus in us whatever to the deer. There is probably no distinction between us and the coyote or the wolf. It's just them and the animals that try to kill them. Predator and pray. We really don't think of ourselves as predators, and truthfully, as animals at all. We think of ourselves as special, sentient, and generally better than the rest of the animals, even other primates. When civilized cultures started bumping into wild apes, which wasn't that long ago, really, the natural reaction was that they were uncomfortably like us. So those researchers and the people interested in science set out to prove that those primates were nothing like us. But it didn't work that way. Primate attitudes toward making new apes and monkeys made researchers very uncomfortable, because we've been told for a long time by the authorities that that kind of situation should be kept in the dark and left largely unspoken and unseen. Researchers watched them fight and didn't make the connection between that activity and ours. Chimpanzees which share ninety nine point six percent of their DNA with ours or ours with them, and bnobo's, which share just slightly less than that have mostly erased the idea that there is truly an US in them. Most people don't want to hear that, but consider this. They make tools and they use them. They engage in trade, They play, they make art, they make music, they engage in politics. They kiss, They engage in face to face little monkey making where the females uh also get their cookies. They laugh, They can be altruistic. They play, They have their own language, and they reason out problems, some of which involve many steps of planning. Makes a lot of us uncomfortable to think about the traits we share with gimps and bonobos, many of which we view as uniquely human. Now, this morning, I drop my daughters off at their school, and while much of our snow is gone, not all of it is. And if you look at the grounds around their school, you'd see trails leading from various streets and parks, connecting the school to the greater world around it. I'm not proud of this, and I want to make sure that everyone listening knows I absolutely do not want to bowhunt humans. But when I'm out with the dogs in the park, or you know, at the canoe landing or on the river, down the road wherever. I often look at the trails people have created by hunting around a fence, or to go across the corner of a soccer field or whatever. Then I like to look at the trees and I think, where would I hang a stand if I had to hunt the folks who use the trails, so that not only would I have a good shot, but also wouldn't get busted by approaching soccer moms or other dudes with their dogs. Again, this is not something I'm interested in. It's just something that occurs to me often, probably because I have a lot of zombie apocalypse nightmares, so subconsciously, maybe I'm preparing for the end of the days I don't know, or I'm just bored and I miss scouting deer. Hard to say, but those trails we make around the places we congregate, they are evidence of our patterns. How are multiple trails carved through a neighborhood parked or some backyards leading to and from a middle school really any different from multiple trails carved into the woods leading to and from a small watering hole. If we had someone hunting us, it'd be pretty much the exact same thing. Luckily, we are pretty much at the top of the food so we can walk those trails relatively oblivious to the threats around us. This is not the case for white tails. They walk their trails for two reasons, to get where they are going in a manner that keeps them from burning excessive calories, and to not become excessive calories. For some other life form, the balance is always between efficiency and safety when it comes to prey animal travel during the rut. You could make the case that this is not true, and you'd probably be somewhat correct. Efficiency is a big factor in rut travel because exposure to potential estrius doze is always the goal. So as we all know, safety takes somewhat of a secondary role there mostly, but that's a couple of weeks window where the rules change somewhat. Although I would argue that an understanding of trails and how deer use them is a huge factor in being successful for the pre rut and at least partially in the peakra well in hell, the post route too, I guess anyway, I like deer trails a lot. When I travel to random places to hunt public land white tails, I generally can't glass for days on end to find them. Some environments like the big Woods don't allow for that anyway. No trail cameras can tell you a lot, but not if you don't have a lot of them or a lot of time to use them. So sure, a huge concentration of rubs or a community scrape is also you know it's going to get my attention. But what if it's the end of September and the buck sign is almost non existent, or what if it's the late season for that matter, And even if I do find some bucks sign, I can't ignore how valuable is that without knowing how the bucks will get there and where they'll go when they leave. Understanding deer travel throughout the year and definitely throughout the season is the base upon which a lot of great hunters are built. We often think it's about finding the right deer, that's a huge component, but finding how that deer goes from place to place is how you kill him. Knowing how existence alone is usually not enough, especially considering how everyone is pretty much running trail cameras these days and can generally be aware of most, if not all, of the mature bucks using their area. It takes more and The easiest way to get more is to start thinking about deer trails scratch. That's to start going out in the woods and not just noticing trails, but figuring out the why behind them. Shed hunting and winter scouting are perfect for this task because we often generally default to the strategy of walking deer trails during both activities. There's also just a lot that goes into learning deer travel, and if you want to learn how to use deer trails more effectively as a hunter, it's got to be a priority. I'm going to get into that, but the first thing I want to talk about is understanding trails in your specific world. Now this might seem dumb, but think about this. When I first started hunting the big woods and scouting big cranberries, bogs and swamps and wetlands and huge swaths of tamaracks generally wet, soft conditions, I was blown away by the trails. They were all cut deep into the moss and mud, so easy to read it seemed almost fake. What I realized after a few years of hunting there was that the deer population was really low, and that didn't jive with how well worn and used the trails. Looked while they were certainly carved into the landscape, it wasn't because there were tons of big bucks walking them every day. It was because generations of low density deer used them some and the landscape just holds those memories.

Well.

Well.

Now take a twelve or fourteen hour drive from there to some of the stuff I've hunted in Nebraska and Kansas. Then you have a different story. Suddenly you have much dryer ground, you have way less pronounced trails, and you have way way more deer using them. While this is probably easy enough to do on your home turf, recalibrating your understanding of the land and the likely amount of deer using trails, it's an important skill to possess. It's important to understand that a deer trail in some area might only have a handful of travelers on it in any given week, no matter how well used it might appear. Just as it's important to understand in some places the trails might not look great but might have a bonker's amount of activity on them due to the high prevalence of deer in the area.

Now take a twelve or fourteen hour drive from there to some of the stuff I've hunted in Nebraska and Kansas. Then you have a different story. Suddenly you have much dryer ground, you have way less pronounced trails, and you have way way more deer using them. While this is probably easy enough to do on your home turf, recalibrating your understanding of the land and the likely amount of deer using trails, it's an important skill to possess. It's important to understand that a deer trail in some area might only have a handful of travelers on it in any given week, no matter how well used it might appear. Just as it's important to understand in some places the trails might not look great but might have a bonker's amount of activity on them due to the high prevalence of deer in the area.

Then you have the reality of.

Then you have the reality of.

Parsing out the trails that are mostly for all the deer and the ones that are more likely to witness some big buck activity. I'm going to get to that first. I want to talk about figuring out trails in general. There is a common thing people do when they are scouting or out on a summer stand hanging mission that walk through the woods or along a field edge and they'll notice a super well used trail. They'll say, hot, damn, found my But and believe me, you can kill a pile of deer by not doing much more than this. But a better bet is to find that trail and figure out what they use it for, not just walking, but to and from what and when. I love spring scouting for this very task. If I find a trail that was definitely in use last fall, then I want to walk it out both directions if I can, as far as I can go until I either hit a property line or the trail just peters out or it ends up somewhere at a destination. I try to think of, you know, think of it kind of like a road system or the way a city could be laid out. There's interstates, there's two lane highways, there's back roads, gravel roads, and they all lead from betting areas to food sources or water sources. The ridgetop trail that goes from the thick betting knob to the egg field. That one might be simple enough, But what about the secondary trail that's quarter of the way down the hill. What purpose does that one serve? And why does that one have a few more rubs on it than the main trail above it? Walk that one out, figure out why. Maybe that trail leads to a betting nob that is just ideal for catching the early October sun. Maybe it has a perfect dead fault to lay against while prevailing winds deliver any old factory news that might portend to visit from a predator.

Parsing out the trails that are mostly for all the deer and the ones that are more likely to witness some big buck activity. I'm going to get to that first. I want to talk about figuring out trails in general. There is a common thing people do when they are scouting or out on a summer stand hanging mission that walk through the woods or along a field edge and they'll notice a super well used trail. They'll say, hot, damn, found my But and believe me, you can kill a pile of deer by not doing much more than this. But a better bet is to find that trail and figure out what they use it for, not just walking, but to and from what and when. I love spring scouting for this very task. If I find a trail that was definitely in use last fall, then I want to walk it out both directions if I can, as far as I can go until I either hit a property line or the trail just peters out or it ends up somewhere at a destination. I try to think of, you know, think of it kind of like a road system or the way a city could be laid out. There's interstates, there's two lane highways, there's back roads, gravel roads, and they all lead from betting areas to food sources or water sources. The ridgetop trail that goes from the thick betting knob to the egg field. That one might be simple enough, But what about the secondary trail that's quarter of the way down the hill. What purpose does that one serve? And why does that one have a few more rubs on it than the main trail above it? Walk that one out, figure out why. Maybe that trail leads to a betting nob that is just ideal for catching the early October sun. Maybe it has a perfect dead fault to lay against while prevailing winds deliver any old factory news that might portend to visit from a predator.

I remember reading about.

I remember reading about.

Dan Infalse Bedhunting Strategy a long time ago, and he talks about climbing into a buck bed to look around. At the time, I thought that was bullshit, but I didn't understand it. I walked trails a lot, and I look around when I'm walking trails a lot to see how visible I might be and how visible nearby openings are. I try to think about the wind and what directions it would have to be blowing to make that trail the best one for travel or make it kind of a no go.

Dan Infalse Bedhunting Strategy a long time ago, and he talks about climbing into a buck bed to look around. At the time, I thought that was bullshit, but I didn't understand it. I walked trails a lot, and I look around when I'm walking trails a lot to see how visible I might be and how visible nearby openings are. I try to think about the wind and what directions it would have to be blowing to make that trail the best one for travel or make it kind of a no go.

Now.

Now.

You can definitely reinforce these findings with trail camera recon and you definitely should, but you won't learn the purpose of any given individual trail just through trail camera work. Take some boots on the ground effort. This will also give you a chance to pick out really good ambush sites. I cannot stress this enough, but understanding where deer walk and when they should walk there is important. But without identifying the spot along the way where you have an ambush advantage, it just leaves you with a lesser value plan. So let's give a nod to the Southern hunters who don't get much love on this podcast because I mostly don't know what the hell I'm doing down there. But there's a lot of big woods and a lot of swamps in that world. Just like in the northern parts of the Midwest, those wet areas might be ankled deep to a deer or something they just don't want to wade or swim through. If they don't have to, you might scout there and you might find parallel trails around most of the water, which just makes sense. But you might also find a trail that it just cuts through some part of the swamp through the wet stuff. There's a reason, and you want to know that reason. It might be just because there's a little bit higher spine of land under the water there. Even if it's an elevation chain of a single foot, just allows for a shallower, lower effort crossing. There might be a difference in bottom composition there where it's sucking stinky mud everywhere else. But for whatever reason, the one spot has a vein of sandy or a rocky bottom, whatever it is. You now have a situation where two trails meet, the one going around the water and the one going through. One offers an easy path around the landscape, and one goes.

You can definitely reinforce these findings with trail camera recon and you definitely should, but you won't learn the purpose of any given individual trail just through trail camera work. Take some boots on the ground effort. This will also give you a chance to pick out really good ambush sites. I cannot stress this enough, but understanding where deer walk and when they should walk there is important. But without identifying the spot along the way where you have an ambush advantage, it just leaves you with a lesser value plan. So let's give a nod to the Southern hunters who don't get much love on this podcast because I mostly don't know what the hell I'm doing down there. But there's a lot of big woods and a lot of swamps in that world. Just like in the northern parts of the Midwest, those wet areas might be ankled deep to a deer or something they just don't want to wade or swim through. If they don't have to, you might scout there and you might find parallel trails around most of the water, which just makes sense. But you might also find a trail that it just cuts through some part of the swamp through the wet stuff. There's a reason, and you want to know that reason. It might be just because there's a little bit higher spine of land under the water there. Even if it's an elevation chain of a single foot, just allows for a shallower, lower effort crossing. There might be a difference in bottom composition there where it's sucking stinky mud everywhere else. But for whatever reason, the one spot has a vein of sandy or a rocky bottom, whatever it is. You now have a situation where two trails meet, the one going around the water and the one going through. One offers an easy path around the landscape, and one goes.

Through this feature.

Through this feature.

That's huge, But it doesn't do any good if the only tree to hang a stand in that spot also happens to be right on top of the crossing trail or just won't work with prevailing winds. You gotta walk that sucker out until you find a landscape feature you can work with, something that will give traveling bucks a reason to not look for you. This happens when they go from super thick cover to something thinner. They almost always walk through the last buffer of thick stuff and then stop at the edge to survey the easier to see parts of their world in the area I grew up hunting with a lot of bluffs. You can watch dear c I'm a trail that eventually ends up on a ridgetop. There's almost always a point when they hit a ridge where they'll look around, but mostly look in the direction they intend to travel. You can almost predict where their focus will be at certain points along a trail by walking them yourself and reading the land. I kind of look at this like how deer cross fences. While they are individuals and they can do as they please, there's sort of a template for deer behavior when they jump a fence. You know, they walk up, spend some time looking around, surveilling what's on the other side, then jump land with a couple of quick steps, and either put their head down to feed or stop again for a quick look. But mostly they get the looking done before they jump. If you're set up twenty yards away from a fence crossing, you can damn near scene into the future and when you should draw and when a buck is going to be distracted by the crossing. That stuff matters, and it's one of the reasons that when hunters have a ton of experience with pressure deer, they tend to not surprisingly be really good at hunting because they study behavior. Now, there's another thing I want to say about scouting deer trails before I wrap this up. That also involves looking into the future. When you're out there in March, walking out trails and looking for ambush sites, you have to try to understand when individual trails would be the most likely to see some usage. Why would a big buck walk a certain trail in September or October or November. A pounded trail now doesn't necessarily equate to season long travel, and I'd argue almost never does. There are windows when these trails are the best, and that means you have to scout them now, run trail cameras this summer, and still try to learn what you can from in person observation when you actually hunt them. Even more than that is the fact that some of the trails just seem to be more conducive to buck travel. I think we look at this a little bit wrong, but maybe not. I think we often think that these bucky trails are used because they offer a lot more security and predator detection advantages or whatever. And that might be true, but I think that's selling the whole thing short a bit bucks, especially big mature bucks, claim prime betting spots. There are many benefits to being at the top of the hierarchy in an animal group, humans included, and bucks bed where they are likely to be safe, They feed where the food is the best, and they travel between those spots. Does and smaller bucks have less access to high value resources, so they sometimes start and end at slightly different locations than mature bucks. All of this is to say that if you get starry eyed over a well used trail and fully expect to kill a giant on it, you should definitely try. But big bucks, at least the ones I've been around on public land and other pressured spots, seem just as likely to use a little bit more of a subtle trail than the deer highway that any hunter could identify in an instant. That's why the intersection of trails and the planning around really good ambush sites makes the whole thing start to hum. If you hunt the maten trail, great, he might walk right down it, but he might also skirt you by seventy five yards and if you let him know you're there, you might not see him use that secondary trail. Ever, again, you want to use what he just showed you as the basis for moving over to the next trail option, and hopefully several months earlier, you walk that trail out as well, so that you know when you see a toad go down it that there is a spot where he had to have jumped across a small ditch and twenty yards from that ditch with awesome access as a clump of bassboads that are perfect for a stand. That might sound like a made up dream scenario, but it doesn't have to be. You just have to put in some of the work now to start figuring out individual trails and use that to inform your fall strategy. So do that and come back next week because I'm going to talk about spring scouting specifically to find mature buck hotspots.

That's huge, But it doesn't do any good if the only tree to hang a stand in that spot also happens to be right on top of the crossing trail or just won't work with prevailing winds. You gotta walk that sucker out until you find a landscape feature you can work with, something that will give traveling bucks a reason to not look for you. This happens when they go from super thick cover to something thinner. They almost always walk through the last buffer of thick stuff and then stop at the edge to survey the easier to see parts of their world in the area I grew up hunting with a lot of bluffs. You can watch dear c I'm a trail that eventually ends up on a ridgetop. There's almost always a point when they hit a ridge where they'll look around, but mostly look in the direction they intend to travel. You can almost predict where their focus will be at certain points along a trail by walking them yourself and reading the land. I kind of look at this like how deer cross fences. While they are individuals and they can do as they please, there's sort of a template for deer behavior when they jump a fence. You know, they walk up, spend some time looking around, surveilling what's on the other side, then jump land with a couple of quick steps, and either put their head down to feed or stop again for a quick look. But mostly they get the looking done before they jump. If you're set up twenty yards away from a fence crossing, you can damn near scene into the future and when you should draw and when a buck is going to be distracted by the crossing. That stuff matters, and it's one of the reasons that when hunters have a ton of experience with pressure deer, they tend to not surprisingly be really good at hunting because they study behavior. Now, there's another thing I want to say about scouting deer trails before I wrap this up. That also involves looking into the future. When you're out there in March, walking out trails and looking for ambush sites, you have to try to understand when individual trails would be the most likely to see some usage. Why would a big buck walk a certain trail in September or October or November. A pounded trail now doesn't necessarily equate to season long travel, and I'd argue almost never does. There are windows when these trails are the best, and that means you have to scout them now, run trail cameras this summer, and still try to learn what you can from in person observation when you actually hunt them. Even more than that is the fact that some of the trails just seem to be more conducive to buck travel. I think we look at this a little bit wrong, but maybe not. I think we often think that these bucky trails are used because they offer a lot more security and predator detection advantages or whatever. And that might be true, but I think that's selling the whole thing short a bit bucks, especially big mature bucks, claim prime betting spots. There are many benefits to being at the top of the hierarchy in an animal group, humans included, and bucks bed where they are likely to be safe, They feed where the food is the best, and they travel between those spots. Does and smaller bucks have less access to high value resources, so they sometimes start and end at slightly different locations than mature bucks. All of this is to say that if you get starry eyed over a well used trail and fully expect to kill a giant on it, you should definitely try. But big bucks, at least the ones I've been around on public land and other pressured spots, seem just as likely to use a little bit more of a subtle trail than the deer highway that any hunter could identify in an instant. That's why the intersection of trails and the planning around really good ambush sites makes the whole thing start to hum. If you hunt the maten trail, great, he might walk right down it, but he might also skirt you by seventy five yards and if you let him know you're there, you might not see him use that secondary trail. Ever, again, you want to use what he just showed you as the basis for moving over to the next trail option, and hopefully several months earlier, you walk that trail out as well, so that you know when you see a toad go down it that there is a spot where he had to have jumped across a small ditch and twenty yards from that ditch with awesome access as a clump of bassboads that are perfect for a stand. That might sound like a made up dream scenario, but it doesn't have to be. You just have to put in some of the work now to start figuring out individual trails and use that to inform your fall strategy. So do that and come back next week because I'm going to talk about spring scouting specifically to find mature buck hotspots.

That's it.

That's it.

I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. If you want some more content, maybe you want to watch a hunting film, Maybe you want to listen to Brent Reeves this country life podcast and be entertained and learn something on your way to work or traveling wherever. Maybe you need a recipe to cook up a spring turkey here that you're going to be killing in no time. Whatever, the medieater dot com has you covered. We drop new content every single day, so much good stuff on there. Go check it out, and as always, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your support.

I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. If you want some more content, maybe you want to watch a hunting film, Maybe you want to listen to Brent Reeves this country life podcast and be entertained and learn something on your way to work or traveling wherever. Maybe you need a recipe to cook up a spring turkey here that you're going to be killing in no time. Whatever, the medieater dot com has you covered. We drop new content every single day, so much good stuff on there. Go check it out, and as always, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your support.

We truly appreciate it.

We truly appreciate it.

Here we have the best audience that you could ever have in the outdoors, and we love you for it.

Here we have the best audience that you could ever have in the outdoors, and we love you for it.

So thank you.

So thank you.