The answer I am going to give you may leave you scratching your head as to what to do, but that is just the way it is.

First off, let me explain my situation. I’m the patriarch of a deer camp that sits on 200 acres in SW Bracken County. Our Opening Days sound like WWIII. There are at least 45 deer per square mile and 1 hunter per 20 acres. There is a lot of ATV traffic in the woods, especially just in the hour before The Opener. That gives me a lot of data points for making this answer. Our place is mostly on a ridge that is halfway between two roads approximately 2 miles apart. A lot of the neighbors use ATVs to access their stands and retrieve deer.

The first situation I will give you is what I hear on The Opener. I like to head out earlier than most, because my Opening Day stand is situated the farthest from the cabin. I am usually up the tree and settled in long before others are moving. Along about 20 minutes before legal hunting begins, you start hearing truck doors slamming and the ATVs cranking up. There is then several minutes of Putt-Putting before things settle back down. What the guys on the ATVs cannot hear is the crashing of deer through the woods ahead of the ATVs. It is quite spectacular. There are deer running every which way. It all settles down for a few minutes and then the shooting starts. From this perspective, I would say that ATVs definitely perturb the deer. However, there is more to this.

When you think about it, the deer really do not have anywhere to run. Well, they do. They run to where the ATV traffic is the least, and that is my place. Part of our success is that we have probably half the hunters that the rest of the neighbors have. We basically use the neighbors, the Orange Army, as beaters. On the other hand, in the big scheme of things, there are so many deer and so many hunters that a deer pushed out of one spot goes to another, and there is usually a hunter there as well.

Up until about 5 years ago, we did not have any ATV traffic on our property. Then our oldest hunter, SuperCore. developed heart trouble and had quad-bypass surgery. He acquired an ATV and now putt-putts out to his blind. You would think that from what I’ve written his luck would take a nosedive. It has not. He has about as good a record of shooting big bucks as anyone, and his success rate did not go down after acquiring the ATV.

However. . .!

I have no experience with an ATV, but I regularly bowhunted out of a climbing stand for two decades, and I used to park my truck within 80 yards of the stand site. I took all my largest bucks doing this. As long as I went in early and came out late, it was not a problem.

SuperCore is pushing 80, and he has a tendency to want to leave the blind early so he can be back at camp before dark. I have a tower blind about 500 yards away and there is a steep ravine between us. He cranks up his ATV and all of a sudden that ravine comes alive with bounding deer. I have also watched deer right at the margin of the treeline, just getting ready to pop out. SuperCore starts the engine, and they scurry back into the woods. So from this, you might conclude the ATV is chasing them away.

My overall surmise is that ATVs perturb the deer. However, their memories seem to be rather short and their stubborness and curiousity work to your favor. If they want to be somewhere to feed, you can dissuade them for a bit, but eventually, their stomachs will overrule their fear, and they will go back to what they were doing.

In the mornings, an ATV ride is going to put them off a bit. If you go in early, they will be back an hour after sunrise to do their morning thing. If you wait until after legal hunting in the evening to come out, an ATV will not perturb the deer that much. However, be advised that if you run an ATV, the deer are aware of your presence for at least a half a mile all around you, and they are reacting.