Deer and Wind

From Deer and Deer Hunting SHKYBoonie writes:

I have been doing a little study of my own through the past 4 years. I have been keeping a very detailed journal of deer sightings on my farms in West KY. Now this is just observation from me and the couple of buddy's that hunt with me. The way my farms lay and the food plots we have out are best with any variance of a North wind. We have stands set to hunt just about any wind we get although some winds make it hard to get in and out of stands without getting busted. We seem to have more deer activity with Northern winds than with Southern winds.

When I was young and learning to hunt I remember some of the old timers saying,"deer always travel with their nose to the wind". As I grew and became better in my own rights I figured out that must have been an "old wise tale", but after really paying attention, I think they may have been on to something.

To elaborate on the question a little, if you had a place to hunt and you knew the deer bedded in a certain place and there was a food source to the South of their bedding area. You know that the deer use this food on a regular basis at this time of year. The wind is blowing out of the North so the deer will have to travel with the wind to get to this food source. Do you think the deer would use this food source even though they couldn't use the wind in their favor or do you think they would go somewhere else that lets them use the wind to detect any danger?

I've read alot about using the wind in your favor when hunting but never heard anyone talk much about how wind direction alters the deer movement in any given direction. My journals show that we have way more deer sightings when we have Northern winds and Southern winds pretty much shut the deer down. This year we had Southern winds all season long except for a few days. On the days when the wind changed to the North, deer where seen and taken. There were no deer killed on days when the wind was coming from the South and very few seen.

I would just like to get everyone else's opinion on this and see if any of y'all have noticed the same where you hunt.



Dear SHKYBoonie

There IS a small shred of truth to the idea that deer always travel upwind. During the seek phase of the rut, bucks will roam around looking for doe with their noses in the air, and they generally travel upwind if they don't have ground scent to follow. Outside of that the idea is groundless. I always scratched my head at this "Old Wise Tale" (I like that!), and I heard it a lot when I started hunting. With a 3-day east wind, you could have all the deer in Ohio getting blown to and piling up on the Indiana border.

My Doe seem quite immune to wind influences when it comes to moving to feed. I have food plots that will get deer coming into them from all quarters regardless of wind. However, I do see a preference regarding bedding. There are some bedding areas that get used in certain wind conditions and not in others. They seem to like to bed on the lee side of ridge tops. If it's really windy, they're at the bottom of the ridge. If it's calm, they stay more to the top.

It's taken me a few years now to conclude that there are some stands that just are not going to work in some wind conditions. I have one really good stand in an oak grove that has never and probably will never produce a deer with a northerly wind. I have another that works well only in east winds.

The Shamanic Law of Conservation of Venison
Deer don't disappear. Weather neither creates nor destroys deer. Deer just move elsewhere. The trick is to find out where. It may not be on your property. It may not be someplace you care to hunt them, but they have not vanished.

My best example of this is this story:

http://blackholecoffeehouse.blogspot.com/2006/11/shaman-gets-doe.html

The first part of the story tells about Opening Day 2006, one of the worst pieces of weather I'd ever been in. It's the only time I've decided the weather was too bad to chance trying to climb down from a tree stand. The point is that I weathered a massive toad strangler up in the stand followed by a 180 degree shift in wind and a 20 F drop in temperature. The deer I'd expected to see all morning were holed up about 100 yards away from my stand in a small thicket of cedars. I found them as I was still-hunting my way back from the stand.

Just as a BTW: That little cedar thicket is right next to my best food plot now. When the wind is really bad, I know some deer will be holed up there, and will try and make a beeline for the plot as the wind dies down a little at sunset.

To answer your question succinctly, my guess is that the food source will be used no matter what wind conditions, and from all directions (upwind, downwind, crosswind) . The problem will be that the deer will bed in different places depending on the direction and severity of the wind. Not every wind will be the best for where you have placed your stand. In my example of the oak grove stand that never produces in a north wind, The problem is that the oaks are in a penninsula surrounded by pasture, and the most likely access is from the south by way of the woods. In a north wind, my scent cone is focused directly down the trail, and it is also from the south the deer get the best view of the stand as they approach-- the result is Bust City.