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Deer hunters: Good luck, we’ll need it

By Ben Moyer for The 4 min read
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It seems likely that no other large, wild, native mammal the world over lives in such abundance, adapting to such diverse conditions, across so broad a range as the white-tailed deer. Whitetails live everywhere from deep wilderness to urban parks and suburbs, from Canadian tree-line to steamy tropical scrub. No wild thing could achieve that success without an arsenal of built-in advantages. Beginning tomorrow, we 800,000 or so Pennsylvania hunters get the privilege of pitting ourselves against the whitetails’s best defenses.

Just like humans, deer analyze surroundings by processing information through their eyes, ears and nose. Unlike us, deer rely on smell as their primary sense for detecting danger, and communicating social clues to one another. A white-tailed deer perceives air-borne scent 60 times more acutely than the nasally-challenged human on its trail.

Have you ever closely examined a deer skull? Note those two tightly packed “rolls” of paper-thin bone that lie parallel just inside the nose. In a living deer, all that concentrated surface area is lined with receptor cells. We hunters adopt lots of ploys, even washing our clothes in scent-killing detergent, to neutralize that nose. But the oldest, and probably the best, tactic is to pay attention to the wind, moving, when possible, into its current or stationing yourself downwind of where you expect a deer to appear.

In vision, hunter and quarry are more evenly matched. A deer’s eyesight is not much, if any, more acute than a human’s. It’s just different.

Deer eyes are packed with more “rod” cells than are ours, enabling deer to see well in dim light. From the human perspective, deer sacrifice broad color vision and detail for acute sight at night, dawn and dusk, when they are most active.

But whitetail vision, despite what we may consider deficiencies, is still an amazing advantage. Even the placement of the eyes aids in detecting danger. A deer can survey a 310-degree arc without giving away its location to a predator or hunter by swiveling its head.

Researchers have determined that humans also hear nearly as well as deer. The difference is, in the woods, deer are so attuned to the normal sounds around them that alien noises stand out and send deer in the opposite direction, white tails flailing a warning to any deer that didn’t sense your approach. Deer know we are near not because we make loud noise, necessarily, but because we make the kinds of sounds that aren’t supposed to be there.

Deer are also better built than we to utilize the hearing ability they have. Their long neck, broad ears and ability to swivel those ears independently of one another, at almost any angle, allow deer to analyze sounds with fine precision. When a deer first hears your footsteps in dry leaves it can remain generally motionless but follow your progress by subtly adjusting the orientation of its “satellite-dish” ears. If you’re moving along at a steady, purposeful, human gait, the way nothing else in the woods moves, you’re made. When conditions–like wet leaves or soft snow–don’t permit moving quietly, you’re better off to make your steps in an erratic, unpredictable sequence, mimicking the sounds a squirrel might make as it forages, or that a turkey might send out as it scratches for food. When you must make noise, avoid sounding like a human being.

If you’re watching deer that haven’t detected you, you can sometimes use their ear movements to your own advantage. If you see a lone deer that frequently cups one or both ears back to the rear, that’s a tip that another deer is following. It might be a legal buck, or even that wide-racked buck you’ve imagined yourself tagging.

If a deer looks in your direction, don’t be too concerned if its ears continue to swivel and search. The deer probably doesn’t know what you are and it’s searching for more information. But if the ears are cupped straight toward you, that encounter’s nearly over, on the whitetail’s terms. He’s about to bolt.

We don’t think about it often because we have our own ideas about camouflage, but evolution equipped deer with ideal concealment. That darker stripe of hair down the back absorbs light striking the animal from above, and that white hair on the underside brightens shadow cast by the body. The result is an indistinct outline surrounding a neutral gray form. Unless a deer is standing in silhouette on snow, it’s almost always hard to see. Meanwhile, that whitetail is sniffing out your odor, scrutinizing every sound, and watching any move you make. Good luck.

Most importantly; hunt legally, responsibly, safely.

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