I Just Don't Get it

For every crazy instance I have in the past 30 years of deer busting me at some un-believable range, I have one or more crazy stories about deer that walk up on me while I'm taking a dump or eating my lunch, coming to watch me erect a stand, or while I'm climbing into my stand.

My point here is that we've all had these various mindsets, mostly around a deer's fantastic senses of hearing and smell. Now all of a sudden we find out the fancy scent suits weren't working. Instead of being invisible to the deer, thousands of hunters over 20 years were running round the forest in overpriced rain suits. That has to say something about the original premise.

Here's a mind bender for you. Let me set up a situation. This has happened to me more than once. The property I'm on is divided roughly down the top of the ridge by a treeline following an abandoned road that follows the top of the ridge. It affords the easiest access to the back of the property. It also passes across the top of several hollows, and it frequently happens that I'll bust up deer on my way down that road, either bedding or loafing at the tops of these hollows.

Now, I try my best to get past them when I'm on the way to the stand, but sometimes it just doesn't work. I try to keep my scent managed as well, but sometimes I slip up. I may have grabbed yesterday's shirt by accident or whatever. The deer are quick to let me know. But here's the weird part. Often times, the deer don't run away. They snort, they stamp, but then they follow me a hundred yards down the way and they bust me again, and will keep this up for a half mile. It's like they're playing a game of "You Stink!" and I'm the stinker.

We see a similar version of this when we're camping. The deer know we're there. The deer can smell the campfire and the other various stinks plainly. Yet, they come up close to the tents and bust us as if they're surprised. On a 3 day campout, it gets to be a quite humorous--the same deer, the same time of day. It's a variation of the You Stink! game.

To a lesser extent, I see a third variation of "You Stink." I will bust a doe when I'm out and about on the farm. That doe will then circle and come up on me 2-4 additional times, usually circling from upwind to downwind, and repeatedly bust me. Once should be enough for a deer, especially when it's a hard bust.

Now what's up with that? If I am really perceived as a threat, why keep coming back? It's me. You know it's me. I've been this way lots of times before, what's your point?

Why I think it is important that we keep questioning all this is that deer don't seem to think about us the same way we would think of a predator. If they're deliberately encountering a potential predator, that speaks of a different sort of motivation. I'm not going to fall into the trap of saying "You Stink" is really a human-type game. However, there's got to be a component to it that is different from our way of thinking.

Along with the buck-in-the-bushes chestnut, there are two more that stick in my head from my early days. Maybe you've heard them. One involved the idea that you could lure deer in by playing a radio, soft and low in the woods. The idea was that you took a transistor radio, tuned it to a music station and then put it on a stump and stood back and waited. The other was that a deer hunter could lure in deer by cooking his lunch over an open fire. The former was one I never got around to trying. I did try cooking my lunch in the woods a couple of times. Nothing ever showed up, and then I got into the whole scent reduction kick and figured it was not a good idea to be sitting around a campfire if I wanted to stay scent-free.

Let's just say for a second these worked. Let's just say deer really do get out and play "You Stink" and saw the radio trick and the hot lunch trick as a chance to count coup on us. For the past 25 years we've been poo-pooing these tricks as superstitions, sitting there all fat and happy in our Scent Lok suits, sprayed down with UV Killer. It makes you think, don't it?

BTW: I saw a version of the radio trick a few years ago, but I don't think the hunter had it right. He rode out on his ATV, parked by the property line and turned on his boom box and played heavy metal head banging music as loud as he could while glassing for deer. After 15 minutes, he rode off, and you could hear the heavy metal playing over on the next ridge and the next until it finally disappeared. My guess is that he had been watching TV too much and thought you had to bring your own background music on the hunt.