JASON>>Hey everyone, Jason Zimmer here with Mass Wildlife. In this video, I'm going to be going through how you can accomplish some online scouting for deer. The purpose of any online scouting is really to help you focus in on properties, and in particular specific features on those properties that you believe will attract and hold whatever game species that you're going to plan on hunting—in this case deer—or features that are going to funnel deer movement on the landscape so that you can then be more efficient when you actually go out and scout the properties on the ground.
To be able to scout online effectively, you really need two things. One is a knowledge of, and a basic understanding on how to utilize, various online mapping tools. And then the second thing is basic understanding of the game species biology so that you know what to be looking for when you're doing your online scouting.
To gain familiarity with basic online scouting tools, please first go and watch our basic online scouting tutorial video, which you can find on our MassWildlife YouTube page or on our website. That basically goes through the basics of using a variety of different online mapping softwares that you can do online scouting with, and I'm going to be using those a little bit later in this video to demonstrate how to online scout for deer.
So I'm going to start by laying out the types of things that can be learned through online scouting, and then I'll provide a basic brief overview of white-tailed deer biology, and then go into a demonstration on how you can put to use your understanding of deer biology to do the online scouting using several of the different mapping sites or software that are available.
So first off, what can you learn online or by doing online scouting?
One, you can find land that's open or available to hunt. But you can also find or identify on the landscape different types of habitats. For example, deciduous trees versus coniferous trees, wetlands versus uplands, open water features. You can identify fields and other early successional habitats. And early successional habitats are ones that have been disturbed in some way and then are in early stages of regrowing from a cleared habitat into eventually forest.
You can identify agricultural lands on the landscape. Other landscape features that are important to look for and you can identify online scouting would be basic landscape features like hills, ridges, flats, and saddles—and then funnels. So anything on the landscape that's going to concentrate or funnel game species movement patterns. These can be natural like a saddle or a river crossing or a narrow pinch point in a wetland, or human-associated things like development, agricultural areas, and other features on the landscape that are going to kind of funnel deer movement patterns.
So to jump right into biology, or basic review of deer biology, your approach to online scouting and on-the-ground scouting is going to be very similar for any game species. So you want to understand the basic habitat requirements for the species. With deer, it's really going to boil down to food and cover, water, and space. Water can be important—you know, all species need water, deer need water—but they can also get that through vegetation. In drought years in particular, water sources can be particularly important features to key in on, so I will show you how to locate those.
And then space is more of a general term. When it comes to deer, they really just need patches of forested habitat to be able to eke out a living.
Other things to keep in mind, and that are good to know when it comes to deer biology, are some of their behavioral patterns: activity patterns, how they move through the landscape, when they move through the landscape, some of their defense mechanisms like their sense of smell, their hearing and eyesight, and then breeding behavior, which can change how they move and how often they move through the landscape.
Food is by far the most important thing you're going to want to understand about deer, and their diet can change throughout the year. So spring and summer they're going to be keyed in on succulent vegetation, grasses, forbs, early clover, things like that. And as summer progresses and you get towards the early fall, they'll take advantage of apples and other soft mast, berries that are going to come ripe. And then agricultural crops—anything from corn or pumpkin or squash or soybeans—deer will take advantage of and hit all general agricultural crops on the landscape. So I'll show you how to find those.
And then as we get into the hunting season, really your fall and then into the early winter, they're going to transition to hard mast—so acorns, beech nuts, hickory nuts, hazelnuts. They still will hit apples that are out there.
One thing that I mentioned, because where I live in Southeastern Massachusetts, and I'm sure in Northeastern Massachusetts, there's a lot of greenbrier that you wouldn't think that animals would eat—but deer absolutely love it.
And then as you get later on into the winter, late hunting season, they're going to transition to what's available, so woody browse—young succulent stems and new growth on shrubs and saplings—and they will also dig and paw for any remaining acorns and northern nuts that might be underneath the snow or on the landscape.
Acorns in particular are a key food source for deer, particularly in the fall as they're approaching the winter and they want to put on as much weight and fat to help them get through the winter. Their favorite acorns are white oak acorns, and the reason being is they have less tannins in them, which is a chemical that's found in all acorns, but white oaks have the least amount of it, so they're the most palatable—or they taste the best to the deer.
So when white oaks are on the landscape, they're going to key in on those and pound those until they're gone, and then they'll transition off to red oaks, black oaks, scrub oaks, and other acorns on the landscape.
To talk about cover briefly: thick cover is important for deer. They like it for security, for bedding cover—so anywhere they feel safe and feel hidden, they're going to bed down. You can particularly find thick cover in certain portions of the landscape, whether it be a recent timber harvest—anywhere from two to six, seven years post timber harvest is going to have dense young growth, young saplings and shrubs that deer are going to key in on to bed, but also because it has a diversity and abundance of food available in it.
Old abandoned agricultural fields, as they grow up, they're going to have a lot of good cover. Wetlands tend to be areas that have a lot of good dense cover where deer feel secure and will bed down. And then any edge habitat—so an edge is a transition between one habitat and another, so a forest going into a field or a forest going into a shrubland—that tends to have a lot of sunlight hitting the ground, so you tend to have good thick cover in those areas. Anything really that looks really thick is going to be considered good bedding cover for deer.
And lastly, before I get into demonstrating some of the tools, I'll talk briefly about deer activity patterns and the rut, which is the breeding season. Deer by nature are typically crepuscular, so that means dawn and dusk, and really a couple hours either side of dawn and dusk is going to be their peak activity and movement patterns.
As we get into the rut or the breeding season, which can last anywhere from late October through mid-December, with a peak generally falling between about November 5th and 15th, bucks are going to greatly increase their movement and their home range will increase in size. So that's when it becomes really important to key in on funnels—areas where bucks are going to be traveling through when they're moving about a lot to try and intercept receptive does. And I'll show you how to find funnels on the landscape.
And it's also good to key on areas where there's a lot of doe, so good feeding areas. Those will be bedding close proximity to areas that have acorns that time of year so that they can put on weight to make it through the winter.
And all of this information you use to kind of piece together the puzzle on how to find good areas that you think will hold deer through your online scouting, and then put that to use when you go actually walk the properties and look for deer sign and deer activity.
So you want to find the food, find out where the cover is, think about what you know about their seasonal behavioral patterns, and look for terrain features that might funnel deer movement between feeding cover and bedding cover.
All right, so the first tool I'm going to demonstrate for online scouting is the MassMapper tool. Again, I'll refer you back to our basics of online scouting video on our YouTube channel and links through our website to learn how to access these tools and learn the basics of operating and turning on and off layers. But for the purposes of this video, I'm going to jump right into it.
I already have preloaded my open space layer, DEP wetlands layer, my 3-meter contour lines, property tax parcels comes preloaded when you open it, and then my 2021 aerial imagery.
So what I'm going to start with here, I'm just at the—this is the October Mountain State Forest out in Washington, Mass. So I'm going to turn on my aerial imagery and just my DEP wetlands layer to start.
So with this you can see that all the wetlands pop up here. So one of the things—zoom in a little bit—I’m going to be looking at, and you can pick up—I'll actually turn the wetlands layer off quickly. So this is a good non-growing season aerial photo. I can tell that because all of this area would be just green—everything would be green—but in this photo you can tell that it's leaf-off condition.
And why that's important is because I can tell the difference between all of this where my cursor is, which would be deciduous trees—so your maples, your oaks, your beeches, anything where the leaves are going to fall off—as opposed to this area here, this area here, and these over here, which are coniferous. So those are going to be your pines, hemlock, spruce, that sort of thing.
So then what I use that for is I immediately know that these are deciduous trees and they could potentially be oaks in there. Oaks are, for the most part, other than some certain species like swamp white oak, an upland species.
So the next thing I will turn on is the DEP wetlands data layer. So now I can see that this area here is a wetland, this is a wetland here, this is a wetland here. All this is clearly uplands. So there's a very good likelihood that these areas are going to contain some oaks.
It's not a guarantee, but in Massachusetts forested deciduous uplands are very likely to contain oaks.
Next thing I'll turn on is the contour lines. So this is another thing that you can use to determine. So this looks like a hill up here, and then you have a nice slope coming down. So I know that this is definitely a good upland area that could potentially contain some oaks—red oaks, white oaks. It's tough to know for sure.
I'd then be able to key in on, okay, this is a nice upland area, I've got some wetlands down here. There's a good chance that there's going to be oaks and deer feeding activity in this hillside here.
Point out here with the contour lines on—you've got what looks like a little smaller hill here and a larger hill or potentially even considered a mountain here, and then this low area here. This is what's referred to, and if you watch any YouTube hunting videos or done any research, a saddle. So deer will regularly travel through saddles because it provides an area of easier travel to cross across a ridge or across a mountainside. They can come through here.
So this is an area that I’d be looking at that could potentially funnel deer movement. And then coupling that with the wetland data layer, you know you have a wetland here, wetland down here. So you might have deer following the edge of a wetland.
And then I'd be looking here for them to either funnel up through this saddle or if they're going to funnel up this way and come up on this side slope to feed in the oaks and then come back down and bed in the edge of this wetland.
Another thing that funnels their movement are wetlands themselves. So regularly they will travel the edges of wetlands. So I can see this is fairly steep right here and then it's going to flatten out as you get down to the edge of the wetland. So those deer are going to travel right along the edge of this wetland and then filter off in other directions.
Here's another very good feature on the landscape that could funnel deer movement. So you have a steep ridge, you've got one significant wetland here, another significant wetland here, and then you've got this strip of what is likely upland—or could still be the DEP wetland data layer isn't necessarily 100% accurate—it could still be wetland right in here, but it's definitely going to be drier.
So this little narrow finger of upland that comes down through—that's another spot for sure I'm going to be going out and scouting on the ground.
Not only because there could be a lot of good deer bedding cover down in here, but then I've got a nice open upland ridge and flat here that could have oaks on it. So I'm going to go out, scout this property.
You could park down here on what is a road. I'm going to get up in here, I'm going to field verify that this could be oaks, and then I'm really going to be looking at this area for a funnel to possibly set up this area over here coming up into this saddle as something that might funnel deer movement.
And then the edges and the points of these wetlands where, you know, this is a big nondescript kind of mountain hillside that's got a lot of oaks, but then I know these are features that are going to draw deer movement or funnel deer movement through the landscape.
Other things that you can do with MassMapper that I actually like—Google Earth, which I'm going to demonstrate a little bit more for you in a second—but when I mentioned how this was a non-growing season photo, you can add other years of aerial photos in this. I'm not going to do it, but you could.
You can add other years so if you get a growing season photo where everything just looks green, keep adding different aerial photos until you get to a non-growing season photo. That'll help you be able to identify between coniferous stands of trees and deciduous stands of trees.
Because that's really what you're going to use to determine where there's oaks on the landscape. You can also do that, and again I'm going to demonstrate this in Google Earth, but you can do that to look for clicking on different years. You can look for changes in habitat.
So if I clicked on multiple years and all of a sudden I see a big timber harvest right here that happened in say 2016, I would know that that's a six-year-old cut that might have really dense cover, might have a lot of good food in it.
Another thing that you can do with this—and it is covered in other areas—but with the property tax parcels on you can actually click info on here and then it'll come up and tell you who the landowner is. In this case it is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But if it was a private piece of property you could find out who the landowner is, what their address is if you want to go knock on the door and get permission.
So now I'm going to transfer over to Google Earth and demonstrate that tool and some of the features you can use on there.
All right, so now I'm going to demonstrate Google Earth and some of the tools that are available or functions that are available in Google Earth that allow you to identify some features on the landscape that will hold deer, provide food for deer, or funnel deer movement.
First of all, just to show you some of the basic tools that I'm going to use: this one right here, if you click on this little clock with a green arrow, it's called the timeline feature. What that does is it pulls up this bar here and then you can toggle through, click to travel back in time, and it'll actually show you right here—it’s not always 100% accurate—but it'll show you the month and year that a particular photo was taken.
So this can be used to go back in time, and I'm going to try and get to what I referred to a little bit earlier—a growing season photo—and show you the difference.
Perfect. So this says September 2019. This is what I would call a growing season photo. The leaves are all on the trees, they're green. If you've got a good eye you can kind of pick out that there might be some conifers in here. This might be conifers maybe over in here. But you can't really tell 100% what's pine trees, what's oak or maple trees.
So this here is a great example of a non-growing season photo that can then show you the difference between deciduous and coniferous forested habitats on the landscape.
So here this is all very likely white pine because this is an area in Southeastern Massachusetts. And then these are areas here that could be oak. And why that's important is they could hold some oak-producing red oaks or acorn-producing red oaks or white oaks that are going to provide food for deer.
So that's a really good tool for in Google Earth. You can change back and forth quickly and then get to a photo that looks good like this where you can decipher, okay, here's an area I can tell by the look of this that this is a wetland area.
You don't have a wetland data layer like you do in MassMapper on Google Earth, but you can tell that this is a wetland area here. Here's some coniferous forest. And down in this area here there's very likely some oaks mixed in.
So you've got good wetlands, water source, likely good succulent vegetation, good cover where deer could bed right next to an area where you have very likely some oaks that could produce acorns.
So in terms of scouting, you can again pick up your wetland edges, potential narrow spots where there might be good crossings across this wetland from one upland habitat to another.
And then when I mentioned earlier human or unnatural landscape features that might funnel deer movement—something like agriculture, cranberry bogs, developments—where you've got areas where you've got some natural habitat up here that could come down through and funnel deer movement.
So you could look here. You've got a stream, got some cranberry bogs, you got some development, some agriculture. Deer movement might be funneled right down through here.
And then where you get narrow points in this kind of wider wetland that deer aren't going to want to go across, and then you get to that first narrow point here where there's uplands on either side—that's going to be a great spot to potentially look for deer movement being funneled through the landscape.
To look at a couple other ways that you can use this tool is the toggle landscape feature. So looking at this area here it's all just kind of nondescript forested habitat. Same thing here. But as you go through the years—this is perfect—you can see it's all forested, still forested. You go through the years, oh all of a sudden here we have a clear timber harvest. This was a thinning that was done.
And why that's important is then I've got a lot of nondescript forest out here and now I've got this thinning that happened in 2016. So again that's at this point five, six years old. That's going to have a lot of dense shrub and herbaceous growth in here that's going to provide good food and cover for deer.
So that's going to be something that you could key in on to go scout because it's going to provide, in an area where there's not a lot of early successional habitat, you're going to now have some early successional habitat here to look at.
To look at a couple examples of good funnels that I had pre-marked—I'm going to bring this right to present day.
So this is a good example where you have a natural and an unnatural feature that could funnel deer movement. So you've got a large area forested habitat here, even bigger one here. You've got some forested habitat and some streams, and then you've got this wetland corridor that definitely has a stream channel in it.
Cranberry bogs and a cranberry bog reservoir—deer are going to funnel their movement right along through here. They're not going to cross this open water and tend to not cross this stream. There might be crossings, but right here would be a great area, if I had permission or if this was public land, that I would scout because it's very likely going to funnel deer movement.
When you're thinking about the rut, when you might have does and all of these different pieces, you're going to have bucks that are going to be moving through to go check out and see if those are receptive. So that's an area that these types of funnels you can find on the landscape are going to be great places to set up and hunt.
Another example of a funnel over here—this is a funnel for a particular reason because of the growing season.
Okay, so now you can see here we obviously have a big wetland. So toggling through here can also help you find wetlands. We have a big wetland, small little patch of wetland, another big section of wetland, and then we clearly have some upland—a narrow strip of upland through here that's surrounded by a bunch of wetlands.
And a little pinch point here between this wetland and this wetland, and actually really either side and anywhere in through here I would consider a good funnel because you have wetlands, probably some thick cover on the edges of the wetlands, and definitely these are very likely white pines.
You definitely have a narrow strip of upland along the edges of multiple wetlands that could be a three-way funnel right in here that would be a great spot to go out and scout on the ground.
And then one other feature that you can't pick up all the time but it's pretty—it’s up in the Northeast here—a feature that you can pick up if you're hunting in open marshy wetland areas is you can pick up on trails.
Now some of these right here are waterways, so some of these darker ones might be waterways, but for sure some of these features in between here—so some of these are waterways—but a lot of these, you'll see this is uplands, this is a big marsh, you've got this narrow little strip and maybe a little kind of an island, and then you've got these strips that come across here.
You'll be able to pick up, particularly in open marshes or phragmites, which unfortunately is common in a lot of our wetland areas, you'll be able to pick up on these deer trails that come across.
So what you can use that to your advantage—you've got this big piece of upland here and then you've got this little point and you've got these trails that are coming across.
So more often than not a great place to go try and set up is going to be somewhere at the edge here where you have all these trails coming into this one point.
Now you can't do that in most habitat types, but again if you hunt in open marshy habitats that can be a really good tool in Google Earth, and you have to toggle between years to really pick it up and see them on the landscape. Sometimes they don't show up if it's a growing season midsummer photo.
So now I'm going to transition over and show you one more tool, which is a paid tool called OnX Hunt.
So this is OnX Hunt. This is a paid service. It's available on the computer, which I'm going to demonstrate right here, but it's also an app that you can have on your smartphone. And the reason why it's so good to use on your smartphone—and there's other apps out there that do similar things—is that you can actually have it with you in the field.
And anything you can see right here on the computer, and during my demonstration you can see on your phone, and you can see your location with a little blue dot. And you can even change that dot so that it'll show you the direction that you're pointing your phone or you're looking, which can be really useful for a number of reasons.
One, you can determine where you are on the landscape. You can make sure that you stay on the property that you have permission—whether it's staying on a Wildlife Management Area or a state forest, or if you have private land permission, making sure that you're staying on that private land.
The other thing that is really cool about the phone app is if you mark things either in the field or if you mark things doing online scouting like I'm going to demonstrate, those will show up on your phone and you can navigate directly to them.
So if I find, for example, I find out that right over here is a great crossing, I can make a mark and then find my way to it. Or if I determine I really like this—it looks like a good funnel or a past stand of oaks—I can mark it and I can navigate right to it.
So that can really help you become more efficient and save time scouting when you go put boots on the ground.
So to just run through how to use this, very similar to the MassMapper and Google Earth, you can decipher between different types of habitats. It's not as easy because the data layers tend to be the most recent aerial photo, but there's some other features on here that are particularly useful, and I'm going to show you.
So the layers that are available: so Massachusetts has a private lands layer, government lands, wildlife management zones, and possible access. And then the one I particularly like is the trees, crops, and cover.
So let me show you what I have on. So acorn-producing oaks is one of the layers that is particularly useful, and you can also turn on deciduous tree distribution.
So that'll show you, based on interpretation of aerial photos, where there are deciduous trees on the landscape. So for example, you zoom into this area here and it'll actually say what it thinks it is. It's not always going to be 100% accurate, but it says maple, beech, birch. So there might be beech trees in here, and deer do eat beech nuts.
So that's something to keep in mind.
One of the features that I use this for as well is once I've identified with these other tools—MassMapper or Google Earth—where I believe there are upland deciduous forests that I suspect might have some oak trees that could produce acorns for deer, I will then come over to OnX.
And then they have all these layers. So under the trees, crops, and cover layer there's a couple layers that I use. One is the acorn-producing oaks, which I'll turn off briefly, so deciduous versus coniferous—actually the deciduous tree distribution.
So then that will also, it's based off interpretation of aerial photos, it'll give you an idea and confirm what you think from your other online scouting where there's deciduous versus coniferous forest.
So this is all deciduous. It has a guess on what they are—so elm, cottonwood, oak, hickory, oak, hickory. So it'll tell you to a degree.
But then this other layer, acorn-producing oaks—that will tell you where it thinks, based on the interpretation of aerial photos, where there's oaks. And sometimes it'll even tell you here it says red oaks, mixed oaks, red oaks, mixed oaks. Some places it'll say white oak.
But what I use that for is, say for example I've identified this portion of this WMA is deciduous and might have oaks, I can then, using this app, go and put a point on there.
But also when I'm out in the field with my smartphone and I see my little blue dot—just say I'm walking down this trail and my arrow is the blue dot—I can then walk right in and say, oh are there oaks here?
So it can even help me key in even more when I go out and do on-the-ground scouting to try and find these patches of oaks that, if they are truly this scattered, and if there's a good little patch here or a good little patch here, those are certainly going to draw deer in to feed in this large area that might not otherwise contain a whole heck of a lot of oaks.
So this area here I definitely key in on, and this section over here I would key in on. And in particular I'd be moving myself towards these clusters to see if, in fact, in the field there are oak trees there that are going to funnel deer movement.
The other thing that's really cool about this is that you can mark your tree stands, so you can mark your stand locations, you can mark crossings, you can mark deer observations, other wildlife observations—anything that you see out there you can mark in the field using your smartphone and come back to it.
And you can also mark your trail. So if you walk a trail you can turn on a tracking tool to mark a deer trail. So say you're walking on a deer trail and you want to mark where that and remember where that trail goes, you can actually turn on the tracker and mark that track in the field just as if you had a GPS unit with you.
And then it'll show up, and that's a really good scouting tool because you can keep those trails on your phone and then as you hit other trails you can mark intersections and it can help you really key in on where you're going to hunt in the field.
With that, I'm going to wrap up the video on online scouting. Hopefully being able to put together what you learned about deer biology and the demonstration of these few tools will help you become a more effective hunter and save you time when you actually go out and scout with your boots on the ground in the field.