Everything seemed to be falling into place. After nearly four hours of watching a shooter buck who was bedded with a doe just outside of bow range I was about to have my shot. They stood up, slowly browsed into range, and as I waited for him to turn broadside I felt a cool breeze across the back of my neck. Thirty seconds later, the buck quickly made his exit, unscathed.
The hunt mentioned above is a textbook example of whitetail deer senses at work. Deer don’t rely on luck to avoid potential threats. They rely on their sense of smell, sight, and hearing. Deer hunters wanting to take their game to the next level should have a basic understanding of these senses.
Deer Sense of Smell
If there’s one sense that truly gives deer the upper hand, it’s their sense of smell. A whitetail’s nose or olfactory system is their most trusted line of defense. The olfactory system of the white tailed deer is jaw-droppingly effective at picking up scent (volatile organic compounds) due to the roughly 300 million olfactory receptors. For comparison, we only have about 5 million scent receptors in our noses.
This increased sense of smell allows deer to detect faint odors while also having the ability to sort out complex smells. To put this into perspective image you walk into a house where someone is cooking, a pot of chili for instance. Your nose would recognize the smell of the chili as a whole. A whitetail’s nose on the other hand would smell the all the ingredients individually.
Smell and Whitetail Communication
Deer don’t just use their nose to detect potential threats but also for communication purposes. Deer communicate via scent signals through the use of scrapes and licking branches. Scent signals from a deer’s mouth and forehead gland are deposited on licking branches (the branches overhead a scrape) while urine and scent from the deer’s tarsal gland are deposited on the ground portion of the scrape.
What Hunters Should Know About Avoiding a Deer’s Nose
Contrary to what most hunters believe, you can not completely eliminate human odor. Personally, I would not waste my money on scent eliminating sprays, carbon suits, or other products advertised to eliminate human scent molecules.
Instead of placing your faith in scent control products to stay scent free, play the wind direction and be mindful of how you access your stand site/hunting area, to avoid a deer’s sense of smell. Try to stay downwind of where you anticipate deer will be and are coming from so that your scent is being carried in the opposite direction.
Vision Capabilities of Whitetail Deer
Next on the list is deer vision. Deer have a much larger range of peripheral vision than we do spanning roughly 300° to 310°. This is due to a deer’s eyes being located on the sides of their head and their pupils having an oval shape that allows for increased light intake along the horizontal plane.
This increased range in peripheral vision does come at the cost of decreased depth perception. To compensate for the decreased depth perception, deer will often bob their head and stare from different angles to get a better look at something.
The colors deer can see also differs from our own. Deer have dichromatic vision, meaning they can only see tow of the three primary colors, blue and yellow. This is why we are able to where blaze orange during firearm seasons. While this color stands out to us, it appears dull and gray to whitetails.
While deer have fewer cone cells in their eyes than humans (for color/detail), they do have more rod cells than humans. The increased number of rod cells in their eyes paired with a reflective layer behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum allows them to have better low light and night vision. In practical terms, a deer’s night vision is many times better than ours – one source estimates deer see up to 18× better in low light than humans.
What Hunters Should Know About Avoiding a Whitetails Eyes
Avoiding the eyes of a mature buck comes down to two things. Movement and background cover. Because deer have dichromatic vision and decreased depth perception, they rely more on picking up movement to detect danger.
When deer hunting from a tree stand, make sure you have good background cover. This will reduce the risk of you being silhouetted and make it harder for deer to pick up on any subtle movements you might make while in the stand. This is just as important while still hunting from the ground.
When you do have to move in the stand, keep movements slow and smooth. If there are deer within view, wait for them to look the opposite direction or put their head down to feed before making your move.
Whitetail Hearing
A whitetail’s hearing range is very similar to our own in many respects. Both humans and deer hear frequencies roughly from 20 Hz up to about 20 kHz, with our best sensitivity in the mid-range. But what does this mean for hunters? In plain terms, a snapping stick while walking in or clanking metal on your tree stand will sound as loud to a deer as it does to you. The key advantage deer have is the ability to detect higher frequencies beyond human hearing. Whitetails can pick up ultrasonic sounds above 20 kHz that we cannot.
What Deer Hunters Should Know About Whitetail Hearing
Even though deer hearing is very similar to our own, they use their hearing much more effectively than we do. Their large, cupped ears rotate like satellite dishes, independently swiveling to scan for sounds in all directions. If you watch an alert deer, its ears will twitch and turn to triangulate the source of a noise, allowing them to very quickly pinpoint the direction of a sound.
While in the woods, minimize the amount of unnatural sounds you make. Instead of walking straight to your stand, take a few steps then stop for a couple seconds. The cadence of humans walking through the woods is unnatural and deer pick up on these sounds. Taking a few steps, stopping, then continuing to your stand will as a whole decrease the chances you spook deer entering and exiting your hunting location.
Final Thoughts
A mature buck gets to maturity by trusting its senses, not by chance. By understanding how deer smell, see, and hear, as well as how they affect deer behavior, you can start to use this to your advantage during your time in the woods. Play the wind instead of trying to mask human scent with scent control products. Make sure you have sufficient back cover and make slow movements. Slow down. Keep the noise you make in the stand to a minimum and don’t sound like a human walking in and out of the woods.