Too much of a good thing: Over-hunting our deer stands can doom hunts before they start

After deer season ends, it's a good time to reflect back and think about what we could have done differently.

What should we have done to make a better, more successful whitetail season?

Hunt more?

Hunt less?

What?

One recurring paradigm that continues to come back like a bad, reoccurring dream is when I over-hunt my stands.

I do it every year and just can't seem to help myself.

I hunt the same stand too much.

While walking down a trail from my truck to my stand during archery season, I noticed deer tracks in my boot tracks from the day before.

That in itself is not unusual.

Deer often "follow the path of least resistance" and will walk in hunter's footprints in the snow, vehicle tracks, snowmobile trails, etc.

But this one struck me as odd and I took special note.

Nearing the tree-stand, I could see deer tracks at the base of the tree.

Hmmm?

Upon analysis, I could see that the deer had not only followed my boot prints to the tree, but stood at the base of the tree for a while, shifting back and forth, right under my stand.

There was no evidence of feeding, rubbing or scraping; just tracks, as if it stood at the tree, smelling the ladder.

I had exited the stand on the previous evening and gone back to the truck on a different, more direct route.

The deer tracks in my exit prints showed the deer had taken my trail, all the way back to nearly where I park.

Okay, no big deal.

So, a deer was curious and walked back.

Reading deer tracks in the snow tells us a great deal about deer movement that we can't get from any other source. When it snows, the whitetail book opens up and allows us to read more about their mysterious ways.

Fast forward a couple seasons.

I was in my tree stand at the end of shooting light on a quiet evening. I was just about to climb down, when I heard the familiar "crunch, crunch, crunch ..." in the leaves.

Wait. Don't alert the deer, right?

In the fading light, a nice buck walked directly to the base of the big hemlock tree, directly below. I could hear him sniff the tree, exactly where I had climbed up the trunk.

It was one of those calm, still evenings. I held my breath.

The buck stood there a moment, turned and walked up my trail carefully, smelling the ground for about 20 yards. And in the fading light, stood there looking up my trail, up the ridge, to where my truck was parked.

Evidently satisfied I had left, the buck turned and ambled after the rest of the deer, now feeding out in a nearby field.

The significance of these two incidents drove the point home that deer indeed pattern our movements and that if we over-hunt a stand, we run the risk of teaching the deer about our behavior.

The oft-quoted phrase, "first time in" has much greater significance when viewed in this light of deer patterning. It emphasizes the importance of us being judicious and careful in using our stands, as tough as that may be.

A typical scenario is that we hunt a stand, see some deer, maybe even a good buck the first time we take a stand. So the next day, we want another chance, and our anticipation is great. So of course the next day we get in the stand, and maybe we don't see the whitetails as we had the previous day. So we take the stand a third, and maybe a fourth day. And we figure, "the deer have moved off."

But it is possible that we over-hunted the stand.

Whitetails have an amazing ability to detect our scent, and evidently log it into their memory banks.

And an older deer could detect not only our present scent, but our scent left on previous trips to and from the stand.

Think of older human scent from trips to and from the stand, as in layers of scent.

A whitetail can smell our scent from four days ago, three days, two days, and yesterday, all laminated like plywood, on top of each other.

Older deer can sort it out.

So it is best if deer hunters have a number of stands in different areas if possible, and rotate the use of those stands. Maybe as a rule of thumb never hunting in one on more than on three straight hunts, at the most.

I've gotten so that I don't hunt out of the same stand more than twice on consecutive days.

Another benefit of forcing ourselves to hunt different stands is that we can keep track of what is going on in other adjacent areas.

Too many times hunters "go back to the well." And our shot opportunities and encounters with deer tend to drop off in direct proportion to the times we take the same stand, especially when we are hunting older, wiser, and spookier whitetails.

There is one caveat to the "three times and out" rule.

If a hunter lives on the property, near the stand, or if the hunter is in the woods near the stand throughout the year, cutting wood, walking the dog, etc., whitetails seem to get use to particular human scents.

Whitetails, especially those near residences or communities, deal with human scents every day. And they learn what is safe and what is dangerous.

That's why a landowner who grooms his woods, mows, fusses with his food plots, and has a cabin nearby has greater luck than average.

Whitetails get fooled by their noses when they mistake the familiar scent of a hunter engaged in benign human activity such as cutting firewood or trimming brush. Instead, the woodcutter has swapped his chainsaw in for a gun or bow. And instead of being at the base of the tree, is up in the branches.

But with that exception noted, whitetails find most of our scent in their woods as alien and out of place as a vegan at a meat counter.

One of the most difficult things to do, for those of us who can hardly wait for the season to start, is stay out of the woods and out of our stands.

More: Lessons learned from half a century of scrape hunting, now aided by trail cameras

It is so tempting to climb up in the stand a few days before the season opens.

Tune it, fuss with trimming out branches here and there for better shooting.

But when we do, we run the very real risk of diminishing our chances come showtime by over-hunting our stands and laying down too much human scent there.

After all, those whitetails we are hunting don't know that the season is not open yet.

— Oak Duke writes a weekly column.

This article originally appeared on The Evening Tribune: Why less time in the tree stand may be secret to seeing more deer