Why You’re Not Successful Hunting Public Land

It might sound counterintuitive, but to be better at e-scouting, you have to put dirt under your boots. By combining e-scouting on the maps with seeing it in person, you’ll begin to correlate the map and the landscape with more ease and efficiency. Then, when you get back home and are scouting maps late at night in bed before you go to sleep on a weeknight, you'll know what to look for.

People often ask me about how to locate bedding and native food on maps. First, I go find it in person, and then I see what it looks like on the map. I’ll mark it, and once I get home, I can scour the map and find every habitat just like that and assume it's the same.

It’s surprising how often those things correlate and how often you can find a certain flora, pin it on the map, and go back in person later to confirm your assumption was correct. We often use this technique with persimmon groves, which works well in the early season all the way up to the rut.

You can do it with certain types of warm-season grass habitats or lowland wetland habitats. You can also correlate pretty accurately how tall these grasses are in the same general area. It can help you know if it is a suitable cover for a whitetail or if it's something that they’re going to want to stay out of during the daylight.

Another tip: I leave my topo lines on almost 100% of the time. It helps me to understand how big or wide a draw is or how many lines it takes to visually hide a deer from cars on the road or other human activity. You might also quickly figure out how steep that next hill is (which should give you an idea of how many guys are going to want to walk up it).

More commonly, topo lines help you infer ways that deer might travel around the easiest topography, so I always keep them on. It helps me a ton, whether I'm in the field or just on the maps at home. There are a million different reasons to have topo lines on while perusing the map.

Lastly, you have to spend as much time on the maps as possible if you want to get better at scouting and better at hunting. It's just like anything: if you want to get better at it, do it as often and as much as you can. If you want to get better at shooting your bow, you go out in the yard and shoot all summer. If you want to be a better football player in high school, you go out and practice all the time. Map scouting is no different. The more you do it, the better you’ll begin to understand correlations between the outside world and what’s displayed on the map, and the more success you’ll have this fall.

For the other two tips, watch the video below and then go have a blast finding deer!