HOW TO HUNT BIG WOODS BUCKS IN THE PRE-RUT | Mountain Buck Scouting Series | Ep. 08

beaumartonic here with the east west

hunt

ing podcast and we'll dive into another part of the

mountain

deer

scouting

series

and last episode I covered early season

hunt

ing and this will be the pre-rout, mid October. It's one of the most beautiful times of year in the Appalachian Mountains, the leaves turn golden yellow, fire truck red and burnt orange as the latter part of October arrives, those leaves start to turn brown , they begin to fall and at the same time. The deer's testosterone levels are starting to increase. It's hard to argue that late October can possibly be one of the best times of year to hunt and really target an old

mountain

deer, especially if you know a lot of information about this deer.

Spend more time in daylight checking scrapes and going on walks to see where the does hang out before the chaos of their routine hits. This time of year is about hunting big community scrapes more than any part of the season. I love community scrapes all the time. of the year, but this time of year I am concentrating and focusing on them specifically when it comes to e-

scouting

to locate the scratches. I always start by looking at a map with the technology available now I'm using the Onyx Hunt App so I can identify potential scrape areas. I am looking for travel corridors in relation to terrain and vegetation features and bedding edges and then will put my boots on the ground to eventually confirm that community scrapes are used.

A lot of deer use the

buck

s, they use the mass and that's why it's so important to find where the terrain and the vegetation features meet to give you a good starting point on the map, so I'm looking at a map. here, the easily identifiable edges of the terrain and the vegetation is this newer clear cut that you have here and you have a train crashing into it, so when I go to zoom in here on this map, I'm looking at areas that have a potential to find us in these places, so one of them would be for me.

I would pick a place like in this general vicinity, so name that scrape and mark it on the map there and I'll try again to find those edges and be We can go in and look on this side, so for different winds, you've got some here that look like a good place, a small flat place with something steep underneath and the other vegetation there will mark all those places and you will be able to go in and check it out if I have a suspicion that there is a dollar betting at that point then I will also go there even if the vegetation terrain does not It's so easy to spot on a map. to strictly watch the train for this feature, so in the last video I would mark some potential betting areas for

buck

s while I'm looking here, let's say if a buck lay down at this south end of the point here at this southwest point I'm looking here and As you get up, say this summit, I confirm that it has oak trees.

Well, up here it starts to get a little flatter, the scratches of which tend to be on the banks and not the actual slope. The side hills will be more on the flatter points there, so I'll also be able to identify that mark down there as a scratch and get in there so I can see some other different features of the train besides the benches. Towards that top or third of the hill there are saddles and also crick bottoms where there are a bunch of different points or even draws that go to a certain bottom. I'm trying to look for those types of areas and mark them as possible scrape areas.

At the bottom the scratches show up a lot more, it's usually a little wetter down there so the scratches look bigger, there aren't as much covering leaves, they're easier to find, so as I look this specific map here and I'm looking at the saddle, so I marked a bench below, but also here you have a tiny little saddle and I'm looking at a map. It's not very defined here, but you can see that there's a little spot there that would be considered a saddle and also, if you're moving around here, we have another bench over here that could be.

You have a saddle right here so you can see it has the hourglass function and if I turn it on, look at that, that's right. on the edge of this clear cut and you have the saddle there, so I'm just going to place this waypoint in the middle here and I'll walk this entire part of the saddle in an hourglass shape and I'll be able to check. So much for looking at qrik bottoms, so I want to find areas again that have multiple drop spots in the early season video. I have marked this apple tree hole as it is called on the map down here in this place. having one, two, three, four different points where the funds come together would be a good place to travel, as they leave this point and go to another, perhaps working for the correct fund, so actually, right where it is this apple tree where he had that place marked.

It could also be a good place for scrapes, so that's another area I'm going to check and I want to confirm my thoughts when I get into the field, since I've already found the bedding and marked some potential scrape locations. I'm also going to work backwards and try to find between 75 and 3,300 yards from that deer bed. This is just again to give you an example that can vary depending on what the vegetation looks like to find those scratches and I did it without I say it on the first map, the first waypoint that I marked here, so let's say this dollar was betting .

I have somewhere around this ring here, if you go up and use the line distance tool, you can understand how far away it is, so that's cool. particularly or that area I marked is just over 200 yards away so that's the kind of thing I'm looking for when I'm trying to identify scrapes or scrape areas on the map, understanding how to read survey lines is critical in when you're hunting in the mountain country along the Appalachian Mountains, when you look at it, it moves a lot, especially like, for example, during the pre-rut and even in the rut, they're trying to look for females trying to find. that first one that is coming into heat and many times, from their bets to feeding, they go up and down in elevation to move vertically, so bucks must be efficient with their time.

This is just my assumption, I don't know if they are really trying to be efficient with their time, but they like to move horizontally around specific survey lines and try to catch those trails that go towards one that may be in heat, so I like to understand how the survey conducts y If I find a couple of beds on a specific survey line, I'll walk that line and be able to check it when I'm in the field by having the x hybrid layer on. to see again those differences the train and the vegetation when you find those places of the flesh and a scrape together that is an ideal place when if I can see a hemlock or a pine some type of conifer an old cut wood with an edge beaver pond in the bottom crashing into one of these bingo train features I'm in the game and ready to start scouting in the field one of the last points I wanted to make in e-scouting before diving into the boots on the terrain is using the 3D feature in Onex to be able to confirm some of the points you marked, so while I'm looking at the web map here, just going off the survey lines, I marked some bedding and some scratches that might be a good thing for the time period anterior to the furrow, so by looking at this specific bed that I've marked now, you can really get a good picture, like around this topographic line, of how you can see from this steep edge and where you don't necessarily. it flattens out completely, but it's definitely more gradual terrain and the same with scrapes, that's how you can get a more visual picture, especially if you're just learning topographic lines and trying to understand how they correlate. this helps you get a better look at how it works, taking that information and putting boots on the ground is the next step and being able to really confirm some of those things that you found on the computer and because counting on a computer is great for a Great tool , but it is not the only tool you should have in your toolbox.

Spring scouting will help you find scratches within these areas, but making sure they are warm only happens during the season and that is imperative to see if they really go. to cause conditions to change and you also have to adapt. I'm using trail cameras as much as I can to confirm my suspicions. I'll let them set up in a scrape and just soak for as long as possible, sometimes even the whole season if I'm hunting a new area, it'll take me a few years to figure it out anyway, you can learn an area in a year, but generally I put the things into sort of a three-year strategy to really understand how deer move.

The scraps are the real scraps of the community, I mean, those are things that you can capture by instinct and by experience, but at the same time I make mistakes a lot and without cameras it is difficult to confirm it unless you go. I go back every year and check out these different places, so how to do it with the cameras is to take the time and do a mock scrape on an area or freshen up some of the ready ones there and I'm doing that by applying a gland to the forehead. So the ones I'm using are the buck rush synthetics, I bought them online, I sprayed them on the branch and then I just scraped the ground with my boot and you, so you can do them any time of the year and not only. during October, so if you say you can only get a chance to scout it in the spring, you won't be able to come back until you hunt it during the fall, do them in the spring, do it the same way and if you do. that scrape in a good area where they can overcome some of the conditions that I explained.

I really think they will work again come fall, analyzing the data you get from your trail camera can help. You're more for the future than necessarily the present, so a lot of times bucks will revisit those same issues around the same time of year, so let's say you're getting shots of a nice buck on October 28th and 30th. daylight. year, pay attention to the weather conditions, what else is happening during that time period and try to figure out next year what do you know, on and around those dates, was it a cold front, was it a certain wind direction, what was happening that can help you.

Try to predict that movement, so like I was talking about in the early season video, I showed an example of an apple tree at the bottom and a tree that I would show to set up and where the stream crossing was long after we finished recording it . The segment literally walked another 20 yards along the creek and there are two giant community scrapes right here, we have a nice big broken hemlock branch and the scrapes come together in one big spot and then even a little further down there is another big scrape so a big scrape line at a junction with the food source here I talked about it in the e-scouting when I marked the place where I thought there would be apple trees there there is good potential because of the way the valleys are unite that they could It was a community fight and there ended up being two of them in this area that seem to be getting used quite a bit.

I'm going to set up a camera here and see what the tree I had looks like during the season. The location chosen for the start of the season is actually still ideal for exactly the same setup in the pre-furrow, so again this is combining the different seasons in one area to be able to help yourself, it is still at the most far away that you are looking at. a 35 to 40 yard shot, but the trails lead from the scrape right in front of the tree to 15 yards or if coming from the other direction again around 15 to 16 yards, it's a spot that channels movement into this fast bottom. that can be good early in the season if you have apple trees and definitely in the pre-scrape furrow.

I would go down here if I was specifically focusing on scrapes in that late October, even early November period. a great example of a folding bed which is actually a bit rare for me to find one that is just knocked over and worn out on the floor, I mean a lot of beds I find, you could tell they are being used but not very often or this. one looks like this particular deer or maybe it's a couple different bucks. Are you using this bed enough? We are about 15 meters from a new clear cut and just above it you can look down, there is a bench and a drop below with a large cherry tree on its back and each way that leaves these trails there is a heavy trail that leaves this way a heavy trail going out that way with rubs on each side and even in the front some good sized rubs and then right around the side From the point here, about 80 90yards, there are also a couple of really big scratches, so this bed, although I wouldn't hunt specifically on the bed, I would look for those scratches in the morning in the pre routine and honestly, it wouldn't be like that. a bad place to hunt during the rut just because of the way the train goes through this place, so we have vegetation edges, we have terrain edges, we have a deer bed and it's really the perfect storm, so relative with this bed, I would set up on those scrapes that are about 70 or 80 yards away in the morning during the pre-rut hunt those big scrapes when you come back or come back from outside on these finger ridges, we have a lot of oaks that are falling and when it comes back to bed hopefully I can catch it in that process another point about this bed that We are noticing that it is early afternoon when we find this place and the sun is high and trying to get shade is also an important part when it comes to clothing bedding for the males, as you can see, this cherry tree keeps it shaded here and it will probably be throughout the afternoon because the sun is already on that side, so in the middle of the day it will probably spend some time here.

It has a little shadow. When the wind direction will cross this open cut, let's say a westerly wind would pass through here. it's blowing on your back and then from the front there's a draw going up and also the tip of the ridge and you can feel the thermals meeting each other as they come up here and it's not one of those places where they feel completely safe. As far as the wind is concerned you are not sneaking around this deer in his bed and that is why he spends most of his time here and on the way to this bed I found a group of three large scrapes and then also a large lone one . a big licking branch broke off, it's all there, so when he gets out of this bed and heads up, there are some oak trees that are behind, this way you can see his scrape, he hits the scrape line of her and there is where he would plan to attack in this place.

It's, uh, the group of three scrapes is probably about 120 yards or so away and I think that's far enough away that it wouldn't spook them if you came hunting at night or if it was a morning hunt. I would look at this closest location that is only 50 yards away. Here's the tree I'd set up right there for a good mid to late October hunt. A cold wave arrives. I want to be in this place, so there is an opening here. Here's the A big scratch that I just showed you and some trails leading out of here through the trailer coming out of that scratch that sits right above that knob and then another trail that cuts through there, you see a little bridge that goes over and ends.

At this point, why this is such a good place for mid to late October, it would be kind of a cold search to try to figure out where the females are, maybe to see if one will come into heat and might stay out a little longer. late. until the morning before he goes back to bed, so I'm hunting very close to his bed. Big scratch here. I think this is one of those places. I think you'll either see the money or you won't see much. deer at all