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Late-Winter Scouting: See the Big Picture
By Mark Melotik
During the past hunting season, many of us obsessed over smartly accessing our chosen stand sites, religiously checking wind direction to pinpoint the best routes in and out to avoid spooking deer. In the process, we were likely exposed to just a fraction of our hunt areas. But now, in late winter, it’s time to get back in there, cover some ground and find out what really happened last fall.
Whether you bagged the deer of your dreams or wondered where they all went last fall, smart post-season, big-picture scouting is the best way to get a jump on 2025 success. And few things will help you do that like a boots-on-the-ground foray with a good hunting app installed on your smartphone.
Today’s apps offer pinpoint accuracy and allow you to log things like food sources, rublines, scrapes and beaten trails, helping you understand how all of those relate to your chosen stand sites. On public land, be sure to log stands hung by the competition. The best apps allow you to color-code this sign by year so you can easily study year-to-year changes. That can be huge, and after three to five years you will likely have knowledge that might have otherwise taken a decade or more to accumulate.
Remember while logging sign to answer the obvious questions, starting with, why is it here? Apps let you add helpful notes, so take advantage. Was the sign found in or near a buck’s suspected bedding area? Was it likely a doe bedding area? Rut funnel? Maybe a suspected staging or feeding area? If public land, did hunting pressure play a factor? Weigh in with your thoughts while on the scene.
All this information instantly accessible in the palm of your hand will give you a great start on the upcoming hunting season. But even more importantly, when some of your Plan A stand site options come up dry this fall — maybe due to specific bucks not surviving the hunting season or run-ins with predators — you’ll be ready to pivot more or less seamlessly to Plans B, C or D — options you uncovered months previous with a bit of high-tech, late-winter scouting.