The woodland chess game: How to overcome a whitetail's keen sense of smell

A whitetail’s sense of smell is all but beyond our comprehension.

Dogs, too.

My bird dog would lock up on point while retrieving a downed bird.

Somehow that dog was able to smell a woodcock through all that heady grouse scent swirling around his muzzle. His nose was buried in hot feathers!

How could that dog smell a hidden bird with another bird in its mouth?

And how are bomb-detecting dogs able to identify human scent on a tiny exploded bomb fragment?

Older, experienced deer, are quite able to tell when a tree stand is being used. And they often will shy away, especially in the daytime.

A couple of inches of snow on the woodland leaves showed that a deer had walked straight to the base of the tree holding my tree stand. Deer prints on top of boot tracks at the base of the old White Pine tree.

And it was obvious that the whitetail had stood for a little while, shifting its feet back and forth. Every cleft hoof print seen there next to the tree was actually a snapshot of a fleeting emotion of that wary animal.

Our scent hangs like fog, not dissipating for days to a whitetail’s nose.

Some younger whitetails have also learned to be wary of a spot in the woods, supersaturated with a hunter's odor.

Scent acts a lot like a colored smoke cloud.

The smoke metaphor helps us imagine what it must be like to have a whitetail’s sense of smell.

So let’s say that scent could be colored like a rainbow, the oldest scent to the freshest scent mirrors the colors of the spectrum.

Therefore on one side, old scent, could be represented by blue smoke, maybe up to one-week old. Any older and it would turn to gray and dissipate, being almost undetectable.

Newer scent would be yellow smoke, maybe say, only three days old, and orange smoke would be just two days old. And red smoke was fresh scent, laid down within 24 hours, on the other side of the visible spectrum from blue.

Now take a tree stand that has a hunter in it each day for a week. Throw down a smoke bomb of each color, red, orange, yellow and blue around the base of the tree to represent those days of old scent. That gives us a visual representation of what a whitetail smells.

Now if you were an older whitetail, and wandered even close to a tree with various colors of smoke whirling around by wind currents and thermals, it would be enough to make you at least stop and stamp your foot.

Most hunters believe that the only way to successfully hunt whitetails is from a stand, whether it is a tree stand or a ground blind.

Hunting from a stand seems easy, logical and simple. And it must be the best way because most hunting experts on TV hunt that way.

But time was when we could wander from ridge to ridge, before portable tree stands and videos, playing the wind, still-hunting.

Many of us know that hunting is most productive the first time or two in a stand. We often save choice stands until the rut peaks.

When we hunt multiple days from the same stand, we often see a drop-off in activity.

And forget about it on the fourth, fifth, 10th, and 15th consecutive days.

Visualize the smoke metaphor. Our scent builds up and lasts for days in the vicinity of a stand. If we use it, day after day, whitetail will pattern us better than we pattern them.

And it follows then when we take the same stand day after day, we see fewer and fewer deer.

The more tree stands and ground blinds in different locations a hunter has, the better the chances for seeing deer because we allow our scent to dissipate, not to mention playing the wind in the deer hunter’s chess game.

And deer hunters who make different stand site moves have better odds of fooling the whitetail’s nose and getting a checkmate.

Oak Duke writes a weekly column for the Hornell (NY) Evening Tribune.

This article originally appeared on The Evening Tribune: woodland chess game: How to overcome whitetail's keen sense of smell