Thursday, April 20, 2006
Some Tricks To Try When Deer Won’t Leave
It’s a problem that every bow hunter has encountered while hunting over bait. The deer show up just before dark, start munching happily on carrots, corn or sugar beets, and won’t leave even though it’s dark.
So what’s a bow hunter to do? Start climbing down is a stupid act because the deer are still there, and it would scare them badly enough so they may never return.
The first thing to do when legal shooting time ends is to take the arrow off the string, and put it back in the quiver. Sit motionless, make no human-like noise or movements and wait.
One of my buddies who hunts a large farm, and often has one or two guests hunting with him, uses a four-wheeler. He drops the other hunters off at their tree stand so the machine will spook any nearby deer. He waits nearby, with the engine idling, until they are in their stand.
Before anyone goes out hunting they discuss what will happen if one or more people get pinned down by late-moving deer. Their rule is the first person out goes and gets the four-wheeler, and slowly moves in to pick up each hunter.
They don’t roar in fast with headlights blazing, but just keep moving slowly toward the stand. The deer often will let the four-wheeler get to within 100 yards before they move out.
The basic principle of this philosophy is it is better for the four-wheeler to gradually move deer off rather than have a hunter attempt to climb down from the tree. Hunters in trees will betray their presence if they try to climb down and sneak past the deer. The four-wheeler does a much better job, and the deer will return the next night.
One guy rigged up a rather ingenious way to move deer away. Long before deer season opened, he rigged this set-up at two or three different hunting locations. He would go into his hunting area in May or June with a big aluminum ladder, an empty pop can, a pocket filled with small pebbles, two screw eyes, and some greenish-brown Fire Line.
He would find a tree at least 25 yards from his stand, extend the ladder, and climb up 15-20 feet off the ground and put a half-dozen pebbles in a pop can sprayed with brown paint. He drilled a hole through opposite sides of the can, run a length of coat hanger wire through both holes, bent the ends of the wire up, and screwed a screw-eye into the tree.
He then ran the Fire Line through the screw-eye, and tied it to the coat hanger wire, and allowed it to dangle about six inches below the screw-eye. The line was run across to his stand, through another screw-eye, and tied to a small wood stick.
If the deer came just before dark, and pinned him down, he would put away his arrow at the end of shooting time, and sit and wait. On occasion, everyone in his hunting part would be pinned down, so he would give a soft yank on the fishing line.
The pebble-filled can, 25 yards away, would rise and fall and the pebbles would rattle around. The deer would often turn to look at the noise, and go back to feeding. He’d give it another yank, make more noise, and after two or three times, the deer would walk or run off. That noise would spook the deer enough to allow him to get down, walk out to the four-wheeler and pick up his friends. The deer would never be frightened enough to avoid that stand. They always came back.
Another hunter, when pinned down, will snort loudly like a deer, and often the animals would move away. I’ve never tried this but wonder how a deer-like noise sounds when it comes from up in a tree.
Another man carried several marble-sized pebbles in his pocket. He gets pinned down, and flips a pebble on the other side of the deer. Two or three pebbles rolling around in the dry leaves usually get the deer moving away from the stand.
Each hunter must figure out how to move deer without being seen or spotted by the deer when he gets pinned down. I’ve found the best way is to either wait them out and allow the deer to move off by themselves or have someone (wherever possible), move in slowly with a car or four-wheeler with the lights on.
That way, something other than the hunter scares the deer away and it doesn’t ruin the hunting spot for the future.—The Whitetail Wizard