Hunt 365 October 2018-Entrance and Exit Route Details
This month, I’m trying to address several questions regarding entrance and exit routes to stand locations. Many readers have asked that I go over in detail how to create setups that have great access to and from stand sites.
Entrance and Exit Routes
Since soliciting questions from the readers began, I’ve received several wanting me to go over how I decide or figure out how to get to and from my stand sites without bumping deer. I talk a lot about entrance and exit routes because I feel this part of the hunt is maybe the least understood and certainly it might be the least talked about.
Many hunters don’t realize that their chosen access route to their stand location on any given hunt might actually be destroying their chances of seeing deer before their hunt even starts. The reasons are because we don’t know or realize what we are doing because it is hard for us to comprehend how a deer can use it’s senses the way they do.
Let’s start by just talking about how important it is for a deer to use its senses to a level we can’t comprehend. Imagine for a moment, if you were in the wild living off the land but you were also co-habiting that land with predators who wanted to kill and eat you. (I know this sounds weird but go with it!) Every day you go about your life literally fearful that if you make a mistake you will become food for another animal…all day…all night…no vacations! That’s what a deer deals with every day. That’s why over millions of years deer have become so good at detecting predators with their eyes, ears, and noses. Those deer that couldn’t detect danger got eaten first. The deer with the best senses and the most nervous attributes likely lived the longest…so now we are left with the super-deer. Their senses have been honed to give them the highest chance of being able to make it surrounded by predators their whole lives. I know this sounds quirky, but its literally how a deer has to live its life every day. We can’t comprehend this because we go to bed each night not worrying about a coyote coming into our rooms and eating us…if we did I would suggest we might not sleep the same or even sleep at all.
This is important to understand. It’s important to let this concept sink in. Because every time you enter the deer’s home you are alerting it to your presence and the fact that it’s being hunted. If a deer knows it’s being hunted at any given moment, your chances of killing that deer are over. Our only chance, is if a deer is lulled into a false sense of security long enough to make a mistake. Thus, the older a deer gets, the harder it becomes to kill because it has learned how to survive. Enough with the rambling right? Ok, I’ll get on with it.
When you are walking to your stand you need to avoid alerting deer to your presence. This means you have to prevent deer from using their acute senses of hearing, seeing, and most importantly smelling. Preventing a deer from seeing you going in and out is harder than it might sound. If you are hunting rolling hills or bluff type terrain, deer will often bed high enough to see vast distances out in front of them. This isn’t an accident. When deer bed in hill country, they will often bed just off the edge of a ridge or high point facing downhill with the wind at their backs. Any predator, like us, coming from the downhill side will likely be seen by them. Even deer in flat country have a way of finding places to bed that allow them great views from their upwind side. To avoid being seen by deer, you have to consider this. Try using terrain features like ditches, low spots, thick cover, etc. to block the view of deer. A favorite of mine is using switch grass, corn, or even a planted screen to block my entrance and exit from a deer’s eyes. When leaving after your hunt…all the same rules apply only it might get harder. If you walked a field edge to sneak in for an evening hunt, that same field edge might not be the ticket on you way out. It is just as bad to bump deer walking out as it is walking in.
Now, add in avoiding detection by a deer’s ears and it gets a little harder. If they can’t see you they can sure as heck figure out the sound of a hunter and the pattern our foot steps make. Add in some clanking from our stands we are carrying in, or our rattling antlers banging accidently in our pack and they’ve got us figured out pretty easily. To avoid being detected by their ears, I like to have all my routes mowed and even raked to eliminate the swooshing of grass against my stride or the cracking of twigs under my feet. For stands located closer to bedding areas or inside the timber, I’ll sometimes wait for hunts when the wind is blowing so that the wind covers my entrance and exit. I have a couple stands I simply can’t get to unless there is a solid 10mph wind or higher covering any noise I might make. Oh, and make sure your stands, blinds, ladders, etc. don’t have creaks and cracks in them.
So, if you’ve managed to avoid detection from a deer eyes and ears, you have the hardest and least understood sense yet to try and beat. All hunters know we have to beat a deer’s sense of smell. But many hunters don’t understand how our scent gives us away while walking to and from our stand locations. I’ve seen different data concerning how far a deer can detect human odor. I’ve also witnessed firsthand deer smelling me and others from as far away as 200 yards or more. For this reason, I consider anything within 200 yards on my downwind side to be blown when I’m on stand OR when I’m walking to and from my hunting location. So, just do some quick math…if you are walking into your stand and have a half mile to go, you are allowing your scent to contaminate and alert deer in an area 880 yards long by 200 yards wide. That’s almost 40 acres of land you’ve contaminated with your scent and alerted any deer in that area that you have walked by. If you are doing this in a way that alerts the deer you are hunting for that sit, your hunt is quite possibly over before you’ve even gotten to your stand. Do this over and over again without regard to where your scent is blowing and it won’t take long into the season and you’ll burn out your hunting location.
This is where it gets difficult. Not only do you have to worry about not being seen, you have to worry about not being heard…and now you can’t let your scent blow anywhere there are deer. Well, in some cases you can have almost bullet proof setups that meet all three criteria. In other cases, it won’t be perfect. But ignoring any one of the three elements altogether is what hurts so many hunters. A perfect scenario then looks like this…You are able to walk into your stand quietly enough that deer won’t hear you, they can’t see you because you are using terrain features that hide your actions, and your paths into each stand are directly into the wind thus the only scent you are casting out is where you just walked. That’s the perfect scenario. The same would go for exiting your stand and many times this requires an exit route different than your original entrance route with the wind now at your back. This is why it is so critical to have multiple stand locations planned out in advance for each set of conditions like wind direction, wind speed, early season when the leaves are still on, etc.
One last thing. For me, getting to my stand sites has always been easier going undetected than getting back out at the end of the hunt. This is especially true on evening hunts when deer are up on their feet feeding at quitting time. In some cases, you can plan out your exit by setting up in transition areas instead of right at an evening food source (for example) so that the deer have gone past you by quitting time. This is why I like transition interior plots so much. In other cases, it seems like you just can’t make the setups perfect. In cases where you still have deer by you at quitting time, using a coyote call to spook the deer away, having someone drive close by to spook the deer, or any other method other than you bumping the deer seems to be better than letting them know your hunting location!
Next month I have some hunting tactic and in season related questions to go over.
Make sure to send in any questions or ideas for an article you would like written for the Whitetails 365 column to tapeppy@gmail.com. Thank you.
CAPTION to Piction
To illustrate correct and incorrect entrance and exit routes, take this 160-acre parcel. In this example, the hunter lives on the property and has three stands to choose from. Stand A works great for a southeast wind because while on stand the hunter’s scent blows over the neighboring pond…a pretty safe bet! An incorrect route would be to walk from home down a path, across the food source, and to try and sneak into stand A. The problem is you are alerting deer all along the way, especially by casting your scent 200 yards downwind into the primary bedding on the north end of the property. If there were any deer bedded in the timber you bumped those too. And, you’ve left scent all along your path. A much better route to stand A would be to clear out a quiet path along the west side of your property and enter stand A on a breezy day with that same southeast wind. All the way in your scent would be blowing over open ground on the neighbors. Better yet…if you could gain access from your neighbor, walk in through his property straight to your stand. In either case, you are better off accessing stand A from the west. Can you see the correct and incorrect entrances to stands B and C? What winds are best to hunt B and C from?