Is Summer Scouting Overrated? | MeatEater Wired to Hunt

While summer scouting might benefit you come October, do you really need to burn the boot leather during beach season to have success this fall? After all, plenty of hunters fill their tags on quick out-of-state hunts with no prior experience in a place. Here are a few reasons to consider whether or not you need to spend a ton of time summer scouting.

Getting a buck on camera in August is great, but that hardly guarantees you’ll wrap your tag around him come October. Unless you’re planning on hunting an early September opener, your scouting intel from August probably won’t tell you where the deer will be this fall.

That doesn’t mean summer scouting can’t offer you valuable intel. You could look for historical sign, travel routes, and potential bedding cover to determine if you should revisit a spot in the fall. But you could also do that in February when the snakes, ticks, and spiders aren’t out. Besides, if you’re scouting an area where deer are browsing on new green briar shoots, honeysuckle, and other seasonal vegetation, that will change after summer.

I’m not saying you should procrastinate your scouting duties. Instead, you should be more methodical in how and when you execute them. I enjoy watching a velvet buck slip out of a cutover or cross a field, but I’d much rather find a big track as I’m scouting my way into an evening hunt in October.

Prioritizing a few intentional days of scouting just before the season opens (or even during) can give you more real-time intel than hacking your way through the middle of summer. It’s easy to think that you have to spend as much time on stand as possible during the season, but that time on stand doesn’t really help if you aren’t hunting the deer where they’re at.

Instead of hanging and hoping in a random spot, go in super early and scout your way into a place. Done right, this is the true benefit of mobile hunting. Look for fresh tracks, droppings, and feeding sign to tell you where to set up.

If you’re hunting acorns in early October, you should find this feeding sign under a tree that’s dropping. Now, you might not know the caliber of bucks in that area, but some fresh tracks might give you a clue.

Dropping a few cameras or hanging stands during the summer is one thing, but you should already have these spots marked from historical data. This might seem counterintuitive, but finding fresh rubs or scrapes at the end of deer season is much closer to when you’ll actually hunt them as opposed to the middle of July.

Winter scouting gets talked about a lot, but it’s something that few hunters actually do. I get it, you’ve slogged through an entire deer season, burned all your brownie points, and probably feel slopes-of-Mount-Doom levels of exhaustion. But even a few days of winter scouting can go a long way.

Assuming nothing drastic happens to the landscape or local deer herd, there’s a good chance the intel you find winter scouting will show you how to hunt a certain area the next year. That way, you can focus on the archery range and dialing in your setups during the summer months.

For most folks, you don’t need to make a special summer trip just to scout. Even if you’re planning a multi-day out-of-state hunt, take a day to scout a few areas instead of going in blind. You’ll have hot intel on the deer come fall without skipping out on a few cold ones this summer.