Whitetail E-Scouting: Read New Ground Before You Hunt It

It’s a great time to be a whitetail hunter tackling new ground. We’ve got more electronic tools at our fingertips than ever before, and whitetail e-scouting can save hours—even days—of wandering around the way we did 30 years ago.

Boots-on-the-ground scouting is still critical. But now we can use satellite imagery, aerial photos, LiDAR and mapping apps to zero in on the places deer are most likely to use before we ever set foot on the property.

Before we talk about the apps, websites and programs that allow electronic scouting, let’s talk about what we’re trying to accomplish as whitetail hunters. The first step I take when breaking down a new property—or a new section of property—is identifying the boundaries.

Where can I go? Where can’t I go?

Whitetail E-Scouting Checklist

• Confirm property boundaries and ownership.
• Find field edges and other habitat transitions.
• Study terrain for funnels, saddles, benches and creek bottoms.
• Identify likely bedding and security cover.
• Plan entry and exit routes before hunting.
• Verify what you see on the map with boots-on-the-ground scouting.

Start With Property Boundaries

There are many sites and apps that show property ownership and boundaries. That might even include an online mapping resource provided by the county where you plan to hunt. My home county in Pennsylvania, where I do most of my hunting, has a Geographic Information System (GIS) department that maps public and private parcels within the county. It’s a great resource that many counties across the U.S. provide in some fashion.

Keep in mind that when you’re identifying property lines on a map or in a mapping program, electronic boundaries might not align perfectly with physical boundaries. If you’re going to be hunting near a boundary, it’s always a good idea to physically inspect the area to determine exactly where the line has been marked—if it’s been marked.

I’ve certainly been in situations where my mapping app told me one thing, but the POSTED signs hung by the neighbor indicated a different line. I’m not looking for fights when I hunt, so if the signs and the app disagree, I’m backing out and verifying that boundary before I hunt near it.

Find the Edges

Once I’ve verified where I am allowed to hunt, I’m going to start looking for edges. Aerial photos and satellite imagery are huge benefits here. I want to find any and all field edges — places where agricultural fields or simple grass fields meet woods.

While some of these field edges are easy to define from a road, there can be fields, food plots, clearings and swamps buried in the middle of forested areas. They can be hidden from ground-level view, so satellite imagery or aerial photos can show you features you otherwise wouldn’t know existed without walking the property.

Other edges I’m interested in include places where a new timber cut meets older forest, stream corridors, significant storm damage — really, any break in the natural vegetation.

Deer love edges. So I want to identify those edges before I hit the woods.

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Use Aerial Imagery and LiDAR to See More

After identifying edges, I’m going to call up one of my apps that offers high-resolution aerial imagery and LiDAR — light detection and ranging.

High-resolution aerial imagery is captured much closer to the ground than conventional satellite imagery, so it can offer more detail. You can really zoom in and pick out fine features, like the spot where a game trail meets a field.

LiDAR uses laser pulses to measure the ground and build highly detailed 3D models of terrain. Those pulses can reach the ground through openings in forest canopy, allowing you to see terrain features beneath the trees rather than simply looking at the treetops themselves.

If you’re studying the side of a mountain, for example, you might be able to pick out a bench near the top that could serve as a preferred travel route for deer.

If you can identify a high mountain bench on a map, then walk it and find oak trees on that bench, mark that spot and come back in October with your saddle. It could be a deer magnet.

Read the Terrain Before You Walk It

Topography is another property feature I’m looking for using electronic maps. The 3D models and topo maps can show you land variations that could create potential deer funnels.

A saddle between two hills, that high-mountain bench, a creek bottom — all of these topographical features are places worth checking out that you can identify before setting foot on the property.

As I’m picking apart the various deery-looking places within a property using mapping tools, I’m also looking for access.

OK, I’ve found this nice-looking bench at the top of a ridge. Now how would I get to it for a morning hunt or an afternoon hunt? Where do I think the deer will be before I get there? How can I get in there without bumping those deer?

Of course, this access information is preliminary until I actually walk the land and search for deer sign to determine if my suspicions were correct about where deer might be feeding before daylight or bedding before dark.

You can’t always tell from a map that there’s an impenetrable thicket blocking what looks like the most obvious path to a spot.

When E-Scouting Pays Off

There’s a fairly large tract near my house that I have permission to hunt along with several other hunters whom I don’t know. My main goal in finding a place to hunt there is to get away from the other hunters. I like to find the places they’re avoiding, figuring those are places that might hold some deer.

Using satellite imagery with a LiDAR overlay, I picked out a stream corridor that I knew no one hunted, including me. The LiDAR showed slopes coming down from a field on one side of the stream and from a row of houses on the other.

I had a hunch there’d be a pretty good deer trail paralleling the field on that side of the stream, just above the spot where the slope steepened.

I went out to that area in August, found a good trail through some nasty brush and hung a stand in an opening that offered shots in a few places around the tree.

Come the second week in November, my cameras around that stand blew up with buck activity. I slipped in the following Saturday morning, and barely 20 minutes into legal shooting light, I arrowed a giant, 4.5-year-old 6-pointer walking on the trail beneath my stand.

That’s e-scouting doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Study Maps Before — and After — You Scout

Hunter Hogan is a professional archer who makes videos about hunting whitetails on public land for his own YouTube channel. His whitetail-hunting adventures take him all over the Midwest, and he hits new properties every year.

To prepare for his fall adventures, Hogan spends plenty of time studying mapping programs and apps during the late-summer.

“I’d say I spend a solid five hours studying maps before going out to put my boots on a new property I plan to hunt in the fall,” Hogan said.

But his map work doesn’t stop once he visits the property.

“After I visit the property, I spend a ridiculous amount of time studying maps,” Hogan said. “There’s a lot of places I’ve hunted for years where I still study maps and recent imagery.”

Find High-Stem-Count Bedding

Something Hogan uses high-resolution aerial imagery for in late summer is finding what he calls “high stem-count bedding.”

High-stem-count cover is dense vegetation whitetails often use for bedding and security. These are among the most important areas Hogan wants to identify before he heads into a property.

Not only might he want to hunt near them or even in them, but he also wants to know exactly where those bedding areas are so he doesn’t set up with his scent drifting into them based on the wind direction on a given hunting day.

High-stem-count areas can be easier to identify with detailed aerial imagery. You can zoom in and get a better idea of just how dense the vegetation is in a particular area. Sometimes, depending on the vegetation and image quality, you can even spot game trails winding through it.

Whitetail E-Scouting Apps and Mapping Tools

The programs and apps Hogan and I use on our phones and computers range from free online tools to subscription-based services available by the month or year.

Subscription apps and programs usually offer a lot more than mapping. They might include weather information, GPS capabilities that allow you to plot routes to stands, moon phases, journals for keeping notes about specific stands or hunting days, trail-camera integration and much more.

You can research each app or program to see which one best matches your needs. Here, we’re focusing primarily on the mapping capabilities useful for electronic scouting.

Google Earth

Google Earth is a free mapping tool that lets you view areas using satellite and aerial imagery in both 2D and 3D. It’s one of the simplest places to start when you want to get a broad look at unfamiliar ground.

Apple Maps

Apple Maps is another free option that offers standard map and satellite views. It doesn’t have all the specialized hunting tools of dedicated hunting apps, but it can provide a quick aerial look at a property and the surrounding landscape.

County GIS

Many counties across the country maintain Geographic Information System resources that provide free online maps of individual tax parcels within their jurisdictions.

These can be excellent for identifying property lines and ownership information. Many GIS maps also include aerial imagery, allowing you to study property features along with parcel boundaries.

BaseMap

BaseMap is a subscription-based app and mapping platform offering high-resolution satellite imagery, nationwide land-ownership information, 3D mapping and offline maps for places where cell service is spotty or nonexistent.

onX Hunt

onX Hunt is one of the best-known hunting mapping platforms for identifying property boundaries and ownership, but it offers much more than that.

Its mapping tools include satellite, topographic and 3D views, along with LiDAR and Leaf-Off Imagery for eligible membership levels and areas where those features are available. Leaf-Off Imagery is currently limited to select states.

It can give you a very good idea of what the land looks like before you head in on foot.

Spartan Forge

Spartan Forge is one of the most robust subscription-based mapping platforms on the market, with UAV imagery, LiDAR, 3D mapping, property boundaries and ownership information.

If you’re looking for one mapping tool with an extensive collection of e-scouting capabilities, this is a strong option.

HuntStand

HuntStand offers subscription-based mapping tools including property boundaries and ownership data, satellite imagery, 3D mapping and offline maps. Its regularly updated satellite imagery can be particularly useful for spotting changes such as timber cuts, agricultural activity and other habitat alterations.

Maps Don’t Replace Boots on the Ground

Electronic scouting today can help you scout smarter, scout faster and cover way more ground than we could in the old days of paper maps alone.

But the goal isn’t to replace walking the property. It’s to make those boots-on-the-ground scouting trips more productive.

Use these tools to pick apart the places you want to hunt this season. Identify the boundaries, edges, terrain, bedding cover and access routes that look promising. Then go see what’s really there.

You’ll head into the woods with a much better idea of what you’re looking for — and where you might find it.