One of the cardinal rules of deer stand hunting is that a stand will best produce the first time you hunt it.
That makes sense, since human scent is often left on the entrance trail, perhaps while you are on the stand. Even human breath leaves a scent trail.
On the other hand, once you pattern a big buck’s behavior and have a stand in the perfect location, how do you not go back?
The answer, of course, is one of the great mysteries of deer hunting. Clint McCoy casts the light of scientific research on this subject in this informative post from QDMA.
It’s simple: Deer respond negatively to hunting pressure. Their avoidance of heavily hunted areas is undeniable, as my graduate-level research at Auburn University documented. But exactly how long does it take for a specific stand site to “recover” from a hunter’s presence?
We now have an idea. In my study using GPS collars, I tracked the movements and home ranges of 37 bucks at Brosnan Forest, a 6,400-acre study site in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. My study focused on buck movements in relation to breeding strategies and hunting pressure, and what you are reading is a short excerpt from a feature article on my findings about hunting pressure for the October/November 2014 issue of QDMA’s Quality Whitetails magazine (If you’d like to start reading Quality Whitetails, become a QDMA member today). The GPS collars were distributed evenly across age classes, with roughly equal numbers of bucks in each of four age groups: yearlings, 2½-year-olds, 3½-year-olds, and bucks 4½ or older. Each buck wore a collar that collected a GPS location every 30 minutes from August 24 to November 22, which includes the unusually early rut at this location (80 percent of breeding in this population occurs between September 20 and October 30). My study included over 116,000 GPS locations!
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