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Phillip Gentry

A deer’s sense of smell is one of its top defenses. Learning to hunt the wind is important to being a successful hunter.

This past weekend I was sitting in my deer stand, watching the leaves drop and the few scatterings of acorns periodically fall, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a deer “blowing.” I hate that sound. It’s worse than one of those game show buzzers that tell you your answer was wrong. Actually, the situations are similar because chances are, you have done something wrong.

In this case, although I couldn’t understand why, this deer knew it was being hunted before I knew he was there. Not until the deer jumped a barbed wire fence and headed toward me did I realize that I wasn’t the one who was busted. It was one of my hunting partners who had insisted on hunting a grove of hardwoods about 300 yards north of me. The deer winded him and came towards me. He’d made the mistake of not hunting the wind because although the stand was a good one, you had to walk right through the area to get to the stand and the wind had a bad habit of swirling through the area when it blew from the north.

It’s a given fact that a deer’s sense of smell is its best form of defense against predators. A deer’s sense of smell is many times greater than that of a man. Because of this, wind direction and scent elimination go hand in hand. How many times have you been sitting quietly, hidden and still in your stand and heard a deer suddenly go crashing through the woods or worse, blow and stomp, thereby alerting every other deer in the area that you were there?

Most hunters don’t realize that the hunter’s scent trail to the stand gives them away more times than the scent coming from the hunter. Scientists have done studies with hunters in elevated tree stands and a deer’s ability to detect the hunter. The tests showed that a deer normally didn’t pick up the elevated hunter’s scent until he was within 50 yards of the hunter. Based on this, the deer that winded you did so from your scent trail. Don’t overlook the value of elevation when hunting.

Wind direction plays an important part in stand selection because you need to know which direction the deer will come from when approaching your stand and when crossing the path you took to your stand. You’re better off selecting a stand site where your approach is from downwind and where deer will approach your stand from upwind.

In recent years there has been a trend in the use of chemical suits, scent-free footwear, cover scents and spray-on scent eliminators to combat the problem of scent detection by deer. The best advice is to hunt the wind to your advantage and utilize the clothing and sprays as an insurance against detection.

Hunting a trail that leads to a bedding or feeding area will assist with not getting busted because the deer are passing through rather than hanging around. One of my most tried-and-true tactics during a full moon like we had last weekend is to hunt a trail that leads into a bedding area. My experience is that a full moon causes deer to be more active after dark and thus return to the bedding area after daylight.

Bedding areas are thick and hunting over one is not only difficult but unwise because bedding areas typically have limited sight distance so a clean kill is tough. Deer feel most protected in a bedding area and spooking deer out of one can cause them to relocate, which means you start the scouting process all over again.

Good luck this season and send me those pictures when you get one. I’ll try to post the best photos along with a hunter profile once the season is over.

Got outdoor news or photos to share? E-mail Phillip Gentry at pgentry6@bellsouth.net.