In the fall, increasingly shorter days trigger most of the white-tailed deer behaviors that hunters rely upon. During the mating season, hormones run amuck. Females advertise their willingness to breed. Males catch a whiff, react violently to competing males and forget their naturally fidgety, guarded nature. Hunters learn that the rut creates opportunities at a time of year when deer are too preoccupied to be cautious.
Before the rut, however, it's a different hunt. Pennsylvania's early antlered and antlerless archery season is in many ways more difficult, scheduled at a time when deer senses are sharp, foliage is dense, food is abundant and most of the conditions are in the deer's favor. Consistently successful early-season archers know their hunting grounds well through routine scouting, and can flip the situational advantage their way.
Most hunting occurs around dawn and dusk, which are generally comfortable in September. Late summer afternoons, however, can be hot, muggy, sticky and sweaty. That doesn't sound so good, but the advantage goes to hunters. While they're relaxing in conditioned air and plopping ice cubes into cool drinks in the afternoon, the deer are outside wearing hollow-haired coats, trying to cool it in the shade and requiring water. When it's hot, deer sneak out for a drink several times a day. With knowledge of where the water is, smart September archers position the stand or blind between water and sleeping areas.
Late-summer foliage creates a condition in which there's more for the deer to eat and less that the hunter can see. Special summer feeding areas can be hard to find when tasty leaves and sprouts are everywhere.
But some oaks produce acorns earlier than others. Some feral apple and pear trees have already started dropping fruit, and persimmons and other sweet nutritional berries are ripe. Corn and other agricultural crops are ready to be ravaged. Those summer smorgasbords could be visited mostly at night, an advantage clearly in the deer's corner. If there isn't a camera on those sites, check for prints and the direction the hooves are pointed. Set up accordingly and hope to catch an early or late diner.
When leaves are dense it can be hard to see more than an arm's length away. It's important for bow hunters to clear shooting lanes where the deer are most likely to cross, and to cut the openings wide enough to give themselves a shot. Keep shots short when the forest is flush, and remember that red blood tracks well on green leaves.
The suppression of scent, color and movement are taken very seriously by many fall rifle hunters. At the height of the rut, a deer's senses can be so hormonally addled it might run right up to a cigar smoking, coffee sipping, brightly dressed guy with a gun. If image diffusion products are so cherished by hunters before the rut when a deer's senses are sharp, how can an early-season archer avoid getting busted by a deer's acute senses?
The best scent suppression tool on the market is a 4-foot ladder extension to boost the height of a tree stand. Play the wind, knowing that its predominant direction and speed in summer will likely change in winter. In September, leave the doe-in-estrus scent at home. The does are not ready to mate, and while the bucks may not know that, it's equally possible that catching an untimely whiff could trip a sharp-minded buck's internal alarms.
Foliage hides deer from hunters, but it hides hunters from deer. And the movement of wind-blown leaves can cover up a multitude of movements. An autumn-brown camouflage suit that works well in the fall may look suspiciously out of place among bright summer greens and could, in fact, attract unwanted attention. As always, match the camo with the habitat. A mask or face paint is vital at close archery distances, and an instinctive primal fear of "predator eyes" will spook a deer even if it doesn't recognize a hunter's form.
Deer perceive little detail but are keenly aware of the slightest movement. Like all mammals active at night, their eyes have more light-dark registering rod cells. In a 2013 study at the University of Georgia, researchers found that deer comprehend a different range of colors than humans, starting lower on the color spectrum with the shorter blue wavelengths common at dawn and dusk. The study clearly showed that deer cone cells absorb light from the lower blue spectrum, which humans cannot see, and pass those signals to the brain, which interprets the object in some form of blue. It's unclear whether deer see low-spectrum black colors as a ghostly blue glow _ think of an ultra-violet Pink Floyd poster in the dark. And every deer in the forest see those blue jeans coming a mile away.
Sound is always an issue when hunting deer, but again, it works both ways. Above the soft, silent floor of a summer forest, thousands of leaves separate the hunter and the hunted, diffusing every sound passing between them. But white-tailed deer hear much better than humans, and their large, top-mounted, multi-directional ears don't miss a thing.
Deer smell more, see more and hear more than humans. Before the rut, when bow hunting is most difficult, expect experienced bucks and mature does to be sharp and aware of everything.
