Sharing this research from MSU Deer Lab. This unorthodox factual data fascinates me.
Thanks for sharing, Andy. I love what MSU is doing.
It's not necessarily that you know where the deer is coming from or where they will be going. It is more about positioning yourself on a terrain feature, knowing how the wind and thermals interact....and knowing how how deer typically utilize the terrain. And then sitting there knowing the odds are in your favor IF the deer happens to come through there. Obviously, you have to be lucky the deer comes through there and most times, you are not or can't capitalize on the moment.One of the reasons when I hear hunters say "Hunt the wind, I have to have this or that wind to hunt this spot, etc", I always ask, if you know that why don't you kill every deer you want since you know better than the deer where they are traveling, whether it be to an area or leaving an area.
Exactly. Sadly, I'm not smart enough to figure out why deer do the things they do, but many years of observation have taught me - in ridge-and-hollow terrain - deer prefer to use certain terrain features to move across the landscape. I simply "hunt the odds." I try to get stands up on as many "preferred" terrain features as possible, and then rotate through as many of those different locations as possible over the course of a season. On any given day, I use wind direction and "gut feeling" to choose which stand I will hunt. And by wind direction, I mean I eliminate stand sites for that hunt that would produce the lowest odds of success from that stand. For example, if a stand is located to cover a low spot in a long narrow north-south oriented ridge, I don't want a wind blowing north or south along the ridge-top. That wind direction wouldn't guarantee I wouldn't see a deer from that stand, but it would certainly lower the odds.It's not necessarily that you know where the deer is coming from or where they will be going. It is more about positioning yourself on a terrain feature, knowing how the wind and thermals interact....and knowing how how deer typically utilize the terrain. And then sitting there knowing the odds are in your favor IF the deer happens to come through there. Obviously, you have to be lucky the deer comes through there and most times, you are not or can't capitalize on the moment.
I forget who it was on this site, but years ago they emailed me a picture of the first 170+ buck in velvet that I had ever seen in our county. He had several velvet pictures of that buck in summer, but as soon as velvet shed, the buck vanished (the classic time-frame for summer-to-fall range shifts). later that year, a juvenile hunter killed that buck, if I remember, 5 miles as the crow flies from where that buck had been spending the summer.Our Grandson used to talk to the members of a hunting club that leased land next to a farm he hunted when he lived up in Kentucky. They had a 200 class nontypical that they had a bunch of photos during the summer and fall. During the pre-rut they got video of that buck getting whipped by a bigger bodied buck with a smaller rack. the bigger buck was killed by a high school kid about 15 miles away.