Sunday, July 20, 2008
Whitetail Deer Travel Trends
I noticed a trend in deer travel on my land long before it was high-fenced. The deer traveled in two distinct directions, regardless of wind direction.
The animals moved from west to east in the evening, and from east to west in the morning. Back in those days, no one hunted the front woods on November 15, the opening of our firearm deer season.
Hunters set in stands on the east side of the second woods to the west on opening day, and it wasn’t unusual to see 100 to 200 deer move through the front woods and across the big field. Some days they traveled with the wind on the tail, into a crosswind from the north or south, or even into the west wind.
Wind direction seemed to made little difference. The deer headed east in the evening and west in the morning. All the stuff about deer always traveling into the wind didn’t count for much back in those days.
If the easterly evening travel was on a west wind, the deer wouldn’t have any advantage. The opposite was also true in the morning.
And, guess what? The fence has been up for many years, and quite a bit of the deer travel inside the enclosure is still east in the evening and west in the morning. The one thing I’ve learned is wind directions aren’t always as important as some outdoor writers believe.
Deer do follow trends on my land, and will follow a somewhat regimented morning and evening travel route, but if a deer is shot and other deer see human activity, those travel plans are subject to change on little or no notice.
Often, especially with a bow, when a deer is shot, it runs off 50 to 100 yards before falling. Other nearby deer may look to see why it is running away, and then go back to feeding or they run as well.
All of that changes if a doe detects danger by spotting movement, hearing any type of noise or if the hunter tries to climb down too soon after shooting. It makes far more sense to stay seated, and wait for all of the deer to move off before going after the fallen deer.
This is especially true during the cooler weather of the rut. A deer shot in early October, when the weather can still be very warm, places a heavy demand on the hunter to field dress the deer as soon as possible to start the cooling process.
Travel patterns also change as crops are harvested. We try to keep deer numbers at a relatively stable number but if too many animals are taken from one location, we’ll see a minor or major shift in how the deer travel.
These trends are based somewhat on food supply. We don’t have oak trees and acorns on my land, but in areas where mast crops are heavy, it’s much easier to see travel patterns develop as the acorns crop diminishes. A stand of oaks are eaten quite regularly as the animals advance from the first ripe acorns to the last ripe ones. There is almost a visible line in the woods where deer move to feed on late-dropping nuts.
Deer change their travel plans as they start entering standing cornfields in cold weather. A popular stand years ago was a hay-bale set in the middle of a cornfield. The hunters always entered and left along the same path, and the deer didn’t pay much attention. As the end of shooting time approached, the deer would be filtering past the blind in steady fashion. Sometimes they would even stop to snatch a few mouthfuls of second-cutting alfalfa, and several hunters shot bucks while the animal ate their blind.
Once December arrives, and deer are moving through cold weather and often snow, the trend is for deer to lay up during the day fairly close to the food source. October bucks may travel a mile or so to reach a food site, but travel is reduced once cold and snow sets in.
Watching these travel patterns change according to the food supply, hunting pressure, human foot traffic or weather conditions, is one part of the bow hunt that many hunters seem to tune out. They may wonder why deer moved here last week, and are moving somewhere else the following week, but that is about as far as it goes.
Check it out, and you’ll often find some reason for such movement changes. Learn those reasons, and plan for them, and you’ll climb one rung higher up the deer-hunting success ladder.—The Whitetail Wizard