Speed Scouting with Hunting Apps
By Mark Melotik
Where will you be hunting come the early season? Some states have already kicked off their deer seasons, and many will follow in the coming weeks. Do you have a solid plan? If you own a hunting app subscription, your smartphone can help lead the way.
As many of you know quality habitat and food are two of a whitetail’s greatest needs, and today’s premium hunting apps can help clue you in to clues that can make a huge difference in how local whitetails relate to certain areas. To say that quality, accurate, real-time info has the potential to make or break a hunt doesn’t quite get it.
As a longtime public-land hunter, I’ll never forget the impact that a tornado had on my favorite bigwoods area in far northern Wisconsin, a summer storm that leveled literally miles of stands of ancient, mature trees including a half-dozen of my most productive stand sites.
These were locations I’d fine-tuned for more than a decade. Over the years I was able to piece together the favored travel patterns of local deer and felt supremely confident in those setups, while hunting nearly any wind condition or stage of the rut.
And then, suddenly, they were gone.
Maybe even more devastating was the extensive clear-cut logging operation in the years that followed, cleaning up the fallen trees but further altering the surrounding landscape.
Because I traveled regularly to the area from my home in Minnesota, I could more or less keep abreast of the many changes, but today’s hunting apps make keeping on top of even the most drastic habitat changes a matter of a few easy clicks on your smartphone.
With HuntStand’s Monthly Satellite Imagery layer, for instance, you can keep track of things like logging operations/clearcuts or wildfires, and you can know before you hunt whether the local farm fields hold corn or soybeans, or have now become CRP. That’s some serious knowledge that can help you plan your hunt before you even leave your home.
The Monthly Satellite Imagery layer is just that — a monthly satellite snapshot of your selected hunting area that is not what you’d call high-definition, but still shows pretty much all the detail you’ll want to know. You will likely be able to see whether a large marshy area is wetter than usual this year, or whether that remote pond you stumbled on two years ago is still holding water.
I’ll be among the first to agree with those who believe there is nothing like boots-on-the-ground scouting for accurate, up-to-date intel on your hunting tracts of choice. But if you are among the many who hunt several different areas — whether they be private or public — investing in the power of a premium hunting app can offer some serious speed-scouting advantages to help you plan your hunts more effectively, and make the most of your precious hunting time.