Next to turkey hunting, hunting deer with archery equipment is the most intense thing I've experienced in the outdoors.
The interactivity makes it so challenging and exciting. Unlike rifle hunting, a detached experience because of distance, archery hunting occurs at very close range. If you hunt from the ground, as I prefer to do, you and your quarry are relatively equal, with the quarry having a considerable edge.
A deer relies on scent, sight and sound for survival, but in my experience, it does not depend on one sense singularly. Stimulating one sense alerts a deer, but confirming a threat by offending a second and even third brings a sense to flee.
This might vary somewhat by the environment. Deer that are not used to being hunting are not as skittish. In heavily hunted areas, their flight triggers are more tightly tuned.
For example, during a recent crossbow hunt in Benton County, a deer appeared in front of me from about 25-28 yards. I sat -- seemingly invisible -- in a gillie suit with my back against a woodpile, but the deer tensed with alarm the moment it looked my way.
A deer does not see in color, but in shades of dark and light. My profile might have disrupted the symmetry of the woodpile that the deer was accustomed to seeing, but more likely, the deer didn't notice my shape, but my scent. I wore Deep Woods Off! bug spray, which has a very sweet odor, and the wind put the deer directly in my scent plume.
For the next 12 minutes the deer attempted to use a different sense to confirm a threat. I was silent, so I didn't trigger a sound reflex, but I was also still as a statue. The deer gazed at me intently, trying to provoke or discern any amount of movement that would identify me as a threat.
The deer turned its head frequently as if to look away, but its eyes never left me. It lowered its head repeatedly, but then jerked it back up. Every deer that I've ever been really near did the same thing.
The gillie and the wood background obscured my silhouette, but I am convinced my sunglasses sealed the deal, as they have many times with deer and turkey. Wild animals are acutely sensitive to eye contact, and they won't tolerate it. The sight of your eyes will trigger the "sight flight" mechanism.
Sunglasses eliminate that variable.
Exhibit A is an identical face-off I had with a mature buck on this same property one year ago at a distance of only 10 yards. The buck recognized me as a new addition to the environment. I made no effort to neutralize my scent, but I was still and silent. Unable to see my eyes, the buck relaxed and gave me a shot that I missed by virtue of a single thin limb for which I failed to account.
Exhibit B was a close encounter with a spike buck during a controlled muzzleloader hunt at Madison County Wildlife Management Area in 2013. That time I sat against a pine tree while clad in a hunter orange cap and vest. The buck walked right up to me and almost touched noses. It was cautious and wary, but my stillness, silence and obscured eyes prevented the deer from spooking.
While crossbow hunting from a tree stand in 2011 in Grant County, a 4-point appeared from a thicket. It was much more nervous and did not subject me to any of its little "tests" before rigidly walking away.
Thus, another observation. Big, incongruent masses high in trees look unnatural. Deer are more suspicious of them than they are of inconsistencies on the ground.
On the other hand, it was strictly a one-sense trigger that spooked an entire herd of deer during a muzzleloader hunt in Grant County last Sunday.
The breeze blew from the southwest. Two ThermaCells were running, and I watched the smoke rise and drift to the northeast. A bunch of deer in a thicket snorted. One dashed away, its snorts decreasing in volume with distance.
They could not have seen me, and most certainly didn't hear me.
Maybe the acrid scent of the ThermaCell, which does not mimic anything else in nature, was enough to frighten the deer. Maybe they encountered coyotes or a bobcat.
Maybe it's imprudent to hunt that stand when the wind blows from the southwest, but deer don't always approach that stand from the northeast, either.
This I know for certain. When the temperature is nearly 90 degrees in those bottoms, it's suicidal to hunt without a ThermaCell.
Sports on 10/23/2016