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Hunting the Wind - Question

Old 06-12-2012, 06:16 AM
  #1  
Fork Horn
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Question Hunting the Wind - Question

I know many say to hunt with the wind in your face or make sure the wind is blowing towards your stand and not towards the woods where the deer are potentially located. However will deer still approach from the same direction if the wind is at their back (thus a favorable wind)?
Imagine you are hunting and the wind is blowing from the woods towards your stand (say you are on field edge or 50yds in the bush). I would guess a mature buck wouldn't just walk on his usual path with the wind at his back, but instead parallel the field until he was cross wind or even downwind if possible, thus your stand placement is useless even though the wind is favorable.
Is this typically the case or will a mature buck follow the same path even if the wind is not favorable for him?
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Old 06-12-2012, 02:52 PM
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Deer are inherently lazy. When deer are relaxed, unharassed, and going about their usual routine, they get comfortable. They follow known, safe, trails and travel the easiest route to where they are going. Being downwind of the easiest route to their chosen food source is the best bet you've got. That being said, they get cautious when stepping out in the open. Putting your stand on the very edge of the field, I don't think, would not be as effective as placing it back where the cover is thicker.
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Old 06-12-2012, 06:39 PM
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I'll follow that response up with the fact that they are more cautious looking where they are going than where they have come from, regardless of the wind, and many times they will have the wind at their back. The reason for that is that they can use their eyes for side and front vision while depending on their nose to detect danger coming from behind where they have already been. When a deer or elk lays down they normally lay with the wind coming over their back and watch downwind. In that way they are protected from danger coming from either direction.
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Old 06-13-2012, 08:04 PM
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1) Choose potential stand locations based on your intuition, the terrain, the cover, and the sign that you are seeing,

2) Analyse those locations in terms of the prevailing (most common) wind/breeze: a) you want your stand to be DOWN WIND from the kill zone--the wind should be in your face, b) you want your approach route to be DOWN WIND from your stand--the wind should be in your face going in, c) avoid walking through really good country getting to your stand, d) if possible, choose a stand location that dumps the smell coming off off you into a dead zone--a location not likely to hold deer.

3) No matter how hard you try to avoid it, deer may approach your stand from downwind / your blind side. Those deer are going to bust you most of the time, but there is nothing you can do about it. That's hunting--and it's usually a damn big deer that does it!

4) Concentrate on the terrain that is 90-degrees to your left, the terrain in front of you (up wind), and the terrain that is 90-degrees to your right. Move your EYES, before moving you head while you scan. LISTEN for movement. If you hear something coming from behind you don't freak out and jerk around. Don't move, if you're busted, you're busted, but sometimes you're not, so you have to play it cool.

5) Your scent will leave you (will go downwind) in a ice-cream sugar cone pattern and deer can wind you at 800+ yards. Not all the time, but I've watched deer wind me at 800+ yards.

6) Never hunt a stand when the wind is wrong for it.

7) Big deer almost never use paths or trails. It's rare, and when they do it's not for long. If you're hunting trails, you're most likely hunting does.

8) Topgun is right. Big bucks bed with their backs to the wind, looking DOWN WIND. Big bucks move regardless of the wind, they just make sure they are in cover when they do it.

9) NEVER disregard the wind. You still have a chance if a big deer hears you--just wait him out. You may have a chance if a big deer sees you--as long as he didn't see you very well--sometimes you can wait him out. You NEVER have a chance when a deer winds you--he's gone--and his flight distance will be a mile to three (3) miles in Canada.

10) ALWAYS KEEP THE WIND IN YOUR FACE (or close to it) and always be aware of where your 800-yard scent trail is going. Remember this: When you walk somewhere 90-degrees to the wind, you are leaving an 800-yard scent trail to your right or left that kills that area for several hours at least. You can do a lot of damage with a lot of reckless walking around.

Bronc

Last edited by Broncazonk; 06-13-2012 at 08:18 PM.
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Old 06-15-2012, 03:43 AM
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deer hunt the wind too and are very good at it. I don't think the wind is all it's cracked up to be. I think deer hunt the wind after they hear and or see danger. Don't let them hear or see danger and they won't hunt the wind for you.

I'm about as scent free (human scent) as I can be, I never get busted anymore, but I don't think that's the whole picture, I'm also very quiet and well blended. On the occasions where I do snap a twig I've had deer come looking for me and sniff hard to find me. What I think peeked their interest wasn't the smell of me, but the smell of freshly crushed earth. They would come right to the base of my tree and stand there for ever looking for what caused them to go looking.

I hunt the wind, but the wind doesn't bust me if I can't.

Last year I killed a nice buck bedded 15 yards away looking right at me and I didn't see it till after climbing into my stand and adjusting everything just to get ready to shoot including taking off my coat. Either that deer was deaf, dumb and blind or I know what I'm doing. Kind of was a let down in a way, it really was too easy. Deer never got up. I put 4 arrows through it quick. The first 2 kept it down, the next one finished it. I didn't need the forth. It couldn't go 150 yards away or it would've been on land I can't cross.
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Old 06-16-2012, 03:32 AM
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My best stand was one where deer seldom, regardless of conditions, traveled in back of my stand. My stand was in 30 yd from a field and a trail was in from the stand. When the wind was right and blowing from the trail to my stand, I never got busted. In other stands, yes, deer would find a way to get downwind from me - especially for stands that deer were aware of. Portable ground blinds upwind from a trail are nice in that deer are not aware of them and not casing them out.
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Old 06-18-2012, 02:04 PM
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When it gets closer to the Rut a Buck will usually chase a Doe any where and not be as cautious so You can get away with more closer to the Rut...still its best to stay as scent-free as possible and hunt smart!If the Does are using an area to go to and from bedding or to food the Bucks will be looking for them,its just a matter of time and good stand placement before You'll get a shot at a nice Buck.
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Old 06-19-2012, 08:56 AM
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Some thoughts on wind.

Setting up stands for the prevailing wind depends on where you hunt.

For example, here in Michigan, the prevailing wind is from the west, but if you look at 30 years of data from Lansing Michigan as shown in the the following figure, an unexpected conclusion can be reached. You can get one of these for your area at LINK

This image is called a Wind Rose. Each petal coming off it tells you the direction the wind was coming from, and the length tells you the percentage of time it came from that direction. This one happens to be from November. If you break this up into 4 quadrants, and look at the percentage of the time the wind came from each quadrant, you end up with westerly 35%, Northerly 15%, Easterly 12%, and Southerly, 32% (calm about 5%). The wind rose looks a little lopsided but that is just because the longer arms get wider, if you actually measure, you get these numbers.



So what is the definition of prevailing winds? It is the general direction that the wind comes from more often than any other. In Michigan, in November, the winds are "prevailing" about 35% of the time from Oct through Dec. But they are blowing from some other direction 65% of the time. If you set up your property mainly for prevailing winds, you will be wrong most of the time.

Not only that, but it is well known that deer move more in cold weather (northerly winds) and when low pressure is approaching (easterly winds where I live -- weather almost always come from the west, but winds can come from any direction depending on the pressure created by the weather). About 27% of the time the winds are coming from the north or east. Rather than setting up for prevailing winds, it is probably more wise to be sure you are set up for all winds, but most especially for those winds, like north winds, that are likely to bring conditions that will increase deer movement.

Another thing about winds is that most hunters listen to the weather and think that the wind in their hunting area is going to be blowing in the direction that the weatherman says it is blowing above the trees. Never mind that wind is greatly affected by what is on the ground. For example, the downwind end of a thick woods will almost invariably have a reverse wind . You can test this yourself by just walking along the downwind side and you will feel the wind drawing back into the woods. The reason is that as the wind rushes across the top of the trees it swirls into a kind of low pressure zone created by the blocking trees, much like how a draft works on a race car. You end up with something like this.



Each hunting spot will have its own characterisitcs of shaping the wind. I have one spot where, in October, if there is a brisk west wind to my north, there will be a brisk east wind to my south. Here is a wind map I have drawn from observations of autumn leaves. There is about a 30 foot elevation drop from A to B, plus I am in the lee of the woods, combined, the hill behind me and the lee of the woods create a reversal of direction.



One more example of the futility of playing the winds (in many locations) is that the wind is a fickle thing. Let a cloud go over and the wind may reverse for a while. As the sun rises, there is often a wind that may be reverse to what the main wind for the day is expected to be. These things all conspire towards making "playing the wind" alone a pretty futile plan for many of us. Here is a chart of just one day of hunting, during which I felt wind coming from every direction, but the nearby weather station in Hillsdale was not quite as bad (they took hourly reading) but illustrates my point.

On this day, Nov 13 2010, we hit the stand an hour before daylight and stayed until after dark. Notice at 5 a.m. the temperature was in the high 30s to low 40s, wind was from the east. By midday the wind was from the SE, and by evening it was from the SW. The temperature rose 24 degrees during the day, which of course changes the thermals, and The humidity fell from 87% to 37% during the day. Humidity greatly impacts the diffusion of scent molecules and how they are sensed.



I am not saying in any of this that it is not super important to consider what the wind is doing that day, but am saying that it is critically important to realize it is not always going to be blowing the way you think and it might be doing mysterious things based on the structure of the hunting area and other affects like cloud cover, humidity, etc. through the day.

These and many other observations lead me to the conclusion that the wind is a pretty fickle thing to depend on. Our main defense against this is scent control, followed by scent control, followed by scent control, in that order
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Old 06-19-2012, 01:46 PM
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Very informative information here.
Thanks!
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Old 06-19-2012, 03:56 PM
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If I am at a decent place, I do good on days when the wind is moving all over the place. I am usually hunting steep mountains with lots of gullys. Best time to walk up a deer is on a bad windy day. Most of the time the deer really sit tight. They are afraid to move because they can not hear or see well because everything is moving. A deer's sense of smell is highly overrated. There are very few days when they can use it to their full potential.

Last edited by Gunplummer; 06-19-2012 at 04:00 PM.
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