Ignore the wind at your own peril.
Pennsylvania’s firearms deer season – the busiest two weeks of the hunting year, still, as has been the case for decades – is just about here. It starts on Monday, Nov. 27 and goes though Saturday, Dec. 9.
As many as 700,000 or more people will take to the woods looking for a whitetail.
Whether they fill their tag can depend on smell.
Meaning, your stand can be on a hot spot. You can be practiced and competent with your rifle. You can be dressed for the weather, ready to sit all day if need be.
But if a deer – especially a cagey old buck that’s already survived a few seasons – smells you, it’s all over.
“You cannot kill them unless you’re hunting where they’re at. But you can’t kill them if the wind is wrong,” said Mike Stroff, host of Savage Outdoors TV and operator of Southern Outdoor Experience Hunts, a Texas-based guiding service.
A powerful sense
There’s no denying how well deer can small, said Duane Diefenbach, leader of Pennsylvania’s cooperative fish and wildlife research unit at Penn State.
In a post on the unit’s deer-forest study site, he points out that humans have about five million olfactory receptors that enable us to smell. Whitetails have 297 million.
Given that, Diefenbach – an admitted skeptic – said it’s unlikely cover scents or scent-absorbing clothing fool deer.
Stroff agreed. They can perhaps minimize your scent footprint, Stroff said.
“But is it the tell-all, be-all? Because I sprayed it on my clothes are the deer not going to be able to wind me? No,” he said.
Don’t bank on cover attractant scents either. That’s the advice of Tom Richardson, a hunting guide from Carson City, Mich.
He believes that, if anything, they may give hunters away.
“I don’t put anything down that wasn’t there to begin with,” he said.
Such scents can smell like anything from acorns to corn to apples. Using them – especially if there’s not already a lot of that smell in the woods – clues deer in to the presence of something different.
He compares it to walking into his home at 4 p.m. and smelling coffee. That’s a common scent, but only in the morning, not late afternoon, he said.
“That’s a red flag,” Richardson said.
Play the wind
The key to staying hidden from deer, scent-wise, is to play the wind, Stroff said.
When he’s on a really hot spot, he’ll often hang multiple stands around it, he said. Which one he hunts – if any — is determined by which way the wind is blowing.
There’s more to it than just that, though.
He stresses the necessity of thinking of wind as not just something that blows horizontally, but as something that rises and falls, too. It does, especially in hilly, mountainous country.
“In the mountains, the big thing is you’ve got to think about thermals when you’re thinking about wind direction,” Stroff said.
“Wind direction is not the only player. Thermals play just as big a role when you’re on stand.”
Cold air sinks, warm air rises.
Knowing that, it’s usually best to hunt high on a slope early in the day, when warming temperatures after sunrise carry thermals uphill, he said. Later in the say, as cold air settles in and carries scent downhill, it’s best to hunt lower.
Forget any of that and a deer’s nose will do you in.
“Here’s the deal. If the wind is wrong, you’re probably going to get busted. That’s just a fact of life,” Stroff said. “It’s hard to beat the deer’s nose.”
