I was 27 years ago and it was an extremely cold and long December week hunting whitetail in New England. We had been hunting hard all week, from before sun up to sunset every day never leaving the woods for a minute. I had seen nothing.
I gave up my stand to a buddy of father on opening day as this gentleman really did not know the area. He was using a Mossberg 590 Tactical Shotgun with just a bead sight. I cringed when I saw that, but kept my mouth shut. He had five deer walk right by him opening morning and hit one of them. Naturally the shot was not well placed and we ended up tracking that buck for hours before the blood trail finally ran out.
That’s all the action we had all week. Here it was Saturday morning, the wind appears dead still, it’s 3 degrees out and I’m absolutely freezing. As you know, it always colder when you are not seeing anything to shoot at. Finally, I catch some motion out of the corner of my eye. Slowly turning my head I see a fork horn working his way through the think mountain laurel. Now I’m thinking this is it! Five plus days of trying to figure out where the deer went is going to pay off.
He works his way down the trail, real casual. I’ve got my Ithaca Model 37 12 gauge Deer Slayer ready to put this guy down. Just a little further and I’ll have a clean shot a 30 yards. Then he stops and throws his head in the air so fast I thought he would break his neck. I could actually see his nostrils flare as he sampled the air. I am sure he never saw me. He took off in exactly the right direction to take him away from me. And that was it. Track soup that season.
Until then, I never really believed a whitetails main defense was its sense of smell. Sure, I could buy that it was better than humans, but come on, how good could it be? That hunt taught me a lesson. And I began to wonder how good the sense of smell, sight, and hearing is for whitetail deer.
After doing some research, I was really surprised to find out that a whitetails sense of smell is something like 20-50 times better than humans (I think my wife’s sense of smell is about that of a whitetail!). That and the fact that they can sense the direction of the breeze, no matter how faint, so they can determine where the offending order is coming from and get out of dodge is just amazing.
Now I take care to make sure I minimize my scent. There’s any number of products available these days to knock down your actual scent ‘foot print’. Using cover smells like skunk might work, but I always worry how authentic those smells are and if I’m actually waving a flag to the deer like ‘here I am’ using those scents. This is especially true when archery and shotgun hunting as the ranges tend to be a lot closer than when rifle hunting.
Now I’m a believer, and over the years I’ve learned to set up multiple stands on either side the trail I’m watching and choose the stand to take advantage of the wind, rather than having it take advantage of me!