I found this draft from back in 2009. Somebody had asked the question, and I’d hesitated to answer. The post lay in draft status until I found it again over the summer as I was housecleaning. I have been asked this many times, by readers and by my own sons as they were starting out. It is an innocent enough question. I remember asking it when I first started.

How DO you know a deer is coming?

Of course, nowadays most beginning deer hunters know the answer before they set foot in the woods.  The answer is simple:  the background music shifts to serious power chords. Right?    I didn’t have the benefit of watching hunting shows. All we had was American Sportsman on Sunday afternoons.

It’s been over 40 years since I first tried deer hunting out of a treestand.

 
I’m going to limit this to my experiences in the stand. When I’m in a ground blind overlooking one of my pastures, it’s there really is no good cue. I’ve had deer show up within a couple of minutes of sitting down. Up in a stand, there are usually some warnings.

My treestand venues are all situated around oak/hickory groves. There are leaves on the ground starting in September and they are there until spring. Unless it is pouring rain, I’d say a majority of the deer announce themselves with a slosh through the leaves. I can usually pick that up 100-200 yards out. The hard thing to do is distinguish the deer from the squirrels. For that, my best gauge is that squirrels tend to move less so the bearing stays fairly constant. Deer are usually moving in a straight line, so the bearing is changing constantly.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that whitetails tend to move in waves. The only reason I say is this is that the shooting seems to come in fits and spurts. I’m hunting in some of the densest whitetail action on the planet– Zone 1 in Kentucky. Our Rifle Openers sound like WWIII. We can average 3 shot-strings a minute for the first 5 hours of the season. However, that is just an average. What really happens is there will be a sudden fusillade of perhaps 20 shots, and maybe somewhere in the middle of it, I’ll see a deer. Whatever is going on, it seems to have an effect on deer across a wide area. At sundown, it is really poignant. The shooting will start within a few minutes of sundown. The deer come out of their staging areas to feed in the fields and reveal themselves.

Of course, having said all that, I can’t count the times, I’ve suddenly had a deer show up under my stand as if they’ve materialized out of thin air. There really is no answer for that besides my inattention. By this time in my hunting career, I’ve learned to slough it off. There really is no way to stay that tuned–in in the woods all the time. Staying on top of every sound and every movement just makes you jerk around too much. Somewhere along 40-some years I struck a balance.

If I had to give one serious piece of advice to someone asking this question, I would advise practice. Spending time in the woods when there is no tag and no weapon at hand is the best tonic. I would say this is doubly so for time spent in the woods at sunrise and sunset. It tunes the mind. Another good exercise is squirrel hunting. My sons have learned to enjoy squirrels as much or more than deer.

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