What are you going to do when the deer crosses the path you walked in onand your not religiously trying to cover your scent? Each step and slight touch of a weed, branch, etc. could get you busted. Always scent control, if not, good luck...hope the wind is right and you can fly on in.

TO maximize your chance of success you must practice scent control. There will always be the chance of getting lucky and you hear stories of them guys saying yeah I did this and the deer never detected anything. But those are few and far between. At least when your hunting wild deer that live away from human activity. I am pretty strict on scent control and always play the wind the very best I can. If the wind is not right and I have zero chance of a deer coming from another way. I would rather hunt the ground with the wind in my favor as a last resort.

The question was:

Sooo... if deercan't see what's not there,will they also not smell what's downwind?


I hope I didn't confuse anyone including myself with that question because reading it back to myself just now it started to sound like a double negativedue to thewording. What I was asking really was kind of a rhetorical question because obvioiuslyno living creature cansmell what's downwind.

Mike, you bring an interesting element into the equation which actually can change the answer to yes, it is possible for deer to smell you though you are downwind. Imagine a situation in the afternoon when the thermals are falling and you happen to be in part of the stream of a swirl pattern. Though you never actually feel the wind change directions, the thermals may be taking your scent down to the ground then injecting it intothe swirl stream which takes it upwind where the deer can smell you. It might not be a strong potent smell to the deer but they will know that something is in the area. Hope that wasn't too hard to follow.

I'm not totally anal about scent control but I do practice it. I do the Atsko/plastic bag deal. I do have woods only footwear. I try to walk slowly to my stand so I don't look like I just ran a marathon by the time I get there. I don't however, spray all my equipment and stand down each time I go to the woods. That would probably cost me another hundred bucks a month on top of my monthly $400.00 hunting fuel bill.

I do understand that minimizing scent lessens the chances of getting busted because yes, deer can pop out from anywhere, not just upwind. I think that in perfect scenarios where you have your back up against say like a river and the wind is blowing in your face then there's probably very little chance you'll get winded. In the middle of the woods though, anything can happen including the lucky net I fell on jumping into the woods stinky after a long days work.

Call me CRAZY, but I'm a fanatic about SCENT control, and I pay a little attention to the wind, but I've killed many deer that were downwind, including my biggest buck, and a herd matriarch that "had it coming." I don't honestly remember being busted by anything by my own stupidity of moving, or dumbluck that I got busted moving by an animal I didn't know was there. I use X-scent or an alike Silver Ion base layers, and spray off with a little scent killer and use just a little BUCK URINE for my cover, rather than doe urine or coon urine or whatever. It's yielded good results for me the past few seasons thus far.

wind never seems to be blowing from a consistant direction here....generally light and variable when Im out....so yes, I try to take all reasonable measures to control scent...........but I dont use scent lok clothing or anything like that

Don't give it another thought, just play the wind. Then again, if that deer was where you were and didn't wind you, do you really even need to play the wind? Seems your nothing scary to deer. Your golden!

Scent control helps with variable winds but it is not a cure all.Never hunt a good deer downwind.

Justin,
Try some base layers with the antimicrobial Silver Ion impregnated thread, big words, but they are also very effective words, X-scent is the name on most of my stuff, but I have a couple off-branded ones that are similar, and they are excellent in conjunction with an already good scent control plan, and they also help wick away your sweat, keeping you cooler than you might be otherwise. What I use are like underarmour, except with a scent control aspect added in.