Playing the Wind or J-Lo and Steve find each other?

From the D&DH Forum

Cut N' Run

If deer always walked into the wind in Fall, wouldn't they all eventually end up in the Pacific northwest? Just kidding.

This all reminds me of a story:

O.D and Playing the Wind

As usual, I'm going take a completely contrary approach to all this.  I guess it's just in me.  But now that I'm starting to look at 30 years as a deer hunter, I guess I can start speaking with at least the appearance of authority-- either that or the appearance of foolishness. The older I get, the more these seem to appear the same.


I have to a large extent given up on the idea of playing the wind. I have stands that have been up now for going on a decade. I have hunted them under all conditions. Some stands probably have undergone a hundred sittings or more, and I cannot count the hours I have sat glassing the open pastures. If there is a direct correlation to wind direction and deer movement I don't see it. Oh, I know its there, but I just do not see it. I think I know why.

Any drunk will tell you it's Happy Hour somewhere in the world all the time. A good drunk will always have a list of holidays for every day of the year. The plain truth is, on a round planet everywhere is upwind of something else. Similarly, deer are everywhere. I will not say they randomly spread across the countryside, but they do wander around quite a bit. Patterns? Yes, there are patterns. There are resident doe groups that lead pretty regular lives. However, there are also a lot of deer moving from outside your immediate area onto the the property you are hunting, and those who we think of as residents do a lot of wandering of their own. The net of all this is a fairly chaotic picture. Keep this in mind as we go through things. I'll come back to it in a bit.

Then again.. . Let's say you have a really pat setup. I can remember one such setup. It was a peninsula stretching out into a cornfield. When their were crops in the field, the resident deer always used that peninsula to get into the corn. All tracks going into that corn were either to or from the peninsula, and at one point there was a 10-foot corridor at the base of the peninsula where the deer cut across a creek. I hunted that structure for several years. Wind? The deer could not care less. They came from acres around to feast on the corn or sometimes soybeans that were in that field. They came at dawn. They came at dusk. They always walked across the creek at that one point.

Now you have to ask yourself? What did the deer do when the wind changed? The other side of the corn field was a main road and a farm house (Trivia: That farmhouse used to be where Nick and Nina Clooney lived-- George's parents.) There was a junior high on another side. What? They were going to do an end-around from their beds and go through the junior high parking lot, slip across Mason Montgomery road and come in past Nick's house? Yeah, right. What did I do? I hunted that peninsula in all kinds of conditions. I changed up my approach from one trip to the next. However, I was always within 50 yards of that choke point on the creek. Yes, sometimes the deer winded me, but usually I set up one side of the corridor or the other. Did it make any difference which side of the corridor I set up? No, because I never knew which way the deer would approach the corridor-- upwind, downwind, or crosswind.

Now let's go back to that random deer thing. I know a lot of you think I'm speaking heresy. However, the deer rarely seem to cooperate with me. Maybe I'm special. If I do all my planning aforehand and pick the most likely spot the deer will come given the weather conditions at hand, I can be well assured that when the deer show up, they'll be coming from another direction. The deer I was planning for? They may have decided to go somewhere else for the next couple of days. Their friends from the other ridge have wandered in, and they see a great opportunity to feed on the acorns the other deer have left. They started out the day in a bed somewhere else, and see the oak grove I'm hunting from a completely different angle. Upwind? Downwind? Are they going to circle around the oak grove and go 500 yards out of their way just to be sure I'm not in a tree, or are they going to just go for it?

Look at it a different way. Last night I was making the haul back from S.Central KY up I-75 to Cincinnati. About 10 O'Clock, I got hungry. About that time I saw a Skyline Chili sign, and I started thinking about a Chilito. I took the exit and drove straight to the place. I didn't circle around looking for a better way in. I didn't worry about the bus full of nuns that I nearly ran off the road. I went for it. Do you really think deer do any differently? By the way, tell the nuns I'm sorry. It was a Skyline thing-- they'll understand.

It's always going to be upwind somewhere. One deer's upwind is another's downwind, and if deer get an urge to go eat, they are probably not going to get really, really cagey about how they get there. Your mileage may vary, but that is how I am beginning to see it.

So, if I'm so against reading the wind, what am I for? Structure. More and more, I see the basic topography dictating more about deer movement than anything. When you couple fairly gross topological features with cover and food, there is a package that will dictate the vast majority of deer movement.

With some planning and quite a bit of perseverance, I have found structures on my farm where deer habitually move. It may be a point here, a hint of a shelf there. It may be a saddle, or just the closest approach of two creek systems for miles around. These seem to produce predictable deer movement more than anything. That is, if I post myself in sight of one of these structures, I will see deer. Add the predictability of their penchant for showing up at dawn and dusk, and the odds go up even more.

Add wind? That's what I want to know. How can I add wind when I can never see a predictable pattern to it. I can post on a given structure. Watch the sun go up or down. The deer will show or not. Nowadays, I seldom go a whole sitting without seeing at least one deer. After nearly 3 decades, I can't say if that is because I have become a great deer hunter, or that there are just a lot more deer running around than there were when Regan was president. I suspect it is a combination of both.

Give me the benefit of the doubt here, and assume the deer show up. If they do show, they're not going to come from a predictable direction. Their noses aren't to the wind or against it. I have had deer regularly show up from 3 directions to converge on the same spot. Do I get busted? Yes, not as much as before I took the mothballs out of my pockets, but I still do on occasion. Now that I am washing my stuff in baking soda and making a point to bathe myself on hunting trips, I see a lot more deer. I get busted, but it is usually from a combination of sight and sound and smell. Beyond a certain level, I know I cannot control my odor after I leave the house, therefore I concentrate on the other two and try to move as little as possible.

This has all been written from the perspective of a stand hunter. What about other methods? It all applies, but it applies in different ways. On the ground, it is all still true, only more so. If you're in a ground blind, or still hunting, the chances of getting winded are higher. I have only to look at my own experience with this, and I am sure you will agree; for every deer that comes to you on a upwind quarter there are at least one or two that come from a downwind quarter. Did they somehow sense you and circle around to double check? Are they that canny? I doubt it. Most deer stumble through life the same way we do. They were just lucky they stumbled in just the right way. We're not talking about cervid master-minds here. These are dumb deer, probably no smarter than your average viewer of American Idol or WWE.

For going on 10 years now, I've been bringing guests out to the farm and taking them on walking tours. Some are hunters. Some are not. Usually whatever we're up to, it takes us past one or more of my treestands. Most times I tell people that there are treestands around, and they are tasked with trying to spy them. The result? Most people cannot see a treestand outside of close bow range. Most have to have them pointed out. Some need me to go up and touch it. Often times we bump into deer. The deer have a nearly similar track record. Sure, some will bolt away at 200 yards snorting madly, but for each one of those stories, I've got one to match it like the deer that I walked up on holding a flashlight last fall. (That was me holding the flashlight. Wow! J-Lo gonna be a judge this year-- ain't that the shizz?) . . . or the buck that followed me down the road a few years ago. I don't know what that deer had on his mind! It must have been Hulk Hogan putting that smackdown on Andre the Giant. I know it rocked my world and left me stunned for weeks.

Stalking? Look, I'm a walking landform (Think John Wayne gone to seed) Do you really want to take the word of a guy who has Size 14 shoes on how to stay quiet and go unobserved in the woods? If so, I have an inside tip for you: J-Lo  is secretly in love with Steven Tyler, but doesn't know how to tell him. Look for the subtle signs this year. I'm sure you'll see them. Take it from a guy who's gone through five presidencies hanging out in trees-- the wind is not the most important thing out there.

One last story: One night, I was coming out from hunting. I was parked in the apron of the farmhouse (Nick and Nina's place) . Nick and Nina were long gone, and my buddy had rented it out to another family. It was a cold, frosty, November night and Jupiter was high in the sky. I pulled out my binoculars and started looking at Jupiter , and was treated to one of the best views of the planet I'd ever seen. I was able to see the 4 Galilean moons very clearly. It moved me deeply. About this time the guy who lived there came out to say hello.

"Whatcha doing?" he asked. I put down my binoculars, still reeling in the sublime moment. There were the 4 moons that showed Galileo that there was a world more wonderful and wider than the Universe described by Aristotle and held as gospel by the Church. It meant we were not the center of the Universe. It was one of the greatest realizations a man had ever had, and there I was seeing it fresh again, as it had been the first time.

"I've been watching Jupiter." I said. "This is great. You want to have a look?"

"Sure." I passed him the glasses and pointed out Jupiter.

"See the moons?" I asked. There was a long pause, followed by an even longer one. Finally the fellow put down the binos and handed them back to me.

"All them pretty lights," he said. "Them's stars, ain't they?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Thought so." he said. Without another word, he went back inside to watch TV.

I submit to you all that most deer do not surpass the tenant's level of intelligence. Given the chance to travel upwind, downwind, or whatever, most will chose with the deftness of the Turtle and ostensible wisdom of the Opossum to take the path that offers the shortest, flattest path to a good meal or a good bed. The rest? I dunno. Judge Judy's coming on soon. I gotta go.