A deer's 6th sense

[Doc]

Read a short article in Field and Stream about a deer's sixth sense...... stories about a deer approaching and then all of a sudden turning all spooky for no apparent reason and turning around and exiting. I got to thinking about a couple of times when I have had that happen to me. Wind absolutely perfect ..... totally concealed and yet something about the set-up kept the deer from taking one more forward step. Ears switching around, that intent stare forward, the switching of the tail, and then the turn around and high bounding retreat. 6th sense?? Are we sending some kind of mental signals of our malicious intent?

What did the author suggest? ..... avoid eye contact. The theory being that when we are so focused and intent on our prey, there is some telepathic signals. So his thought was to break that intensity.

I don't know. Was this guy onto something or was he just fishing for a bogus subject to sell another article to the magazine? What do you all think?

[phade]

That extra sense has been a topic in many camps.

Another forum I go to had a long talk on it. I don't believe they have an additional "sense" of any sort. Deer and just deer, they are built and wired to survive like any other animal. Ultimately, they're wired for flight.

Beating them is sometimes not easy. When this happens, we as humans and the ones with the greatest weapon of all, need to rationalize why we were beat.

Many times, you will never know what caused that deer to figure things out. Alot of times, scent goes places we don't think it does. It might have been a movement, or a lighter shade of coloring against a dark background (vice versa) that triggers an alarm. Heck, maybe a yote went through your set 20 yards on the bad wind side of you 10 minutes before you got in? There is such a thing as being a victim of circumstance...people just don't like to acknowledge it.

Edited October 3, 2012 by phade

[NYbuck50]

Had it happen Monday night!!! I had a headwind of 8-10mph coming from where the deer came out.. half hour before dark, a buck and 3 doe come out and start heading my way.. The wind had died to an almost stop.. The buck got to 23 yards behind some trees and needed to take another 2 steps top be in the open for a shot. He stood there for 2-3 minutes and then calmly turned and walked right back down to where he came from.. He never snorted, never looked at me, didnt even run, he just knew something was off and turned around. Only thing i can think is that when the wind died, he caught a bit of my thermals coming down the hill with the evening cooling, and that was enough for him...

I guess they dont get to be old without learning a few things. Deer, with the exception of the rut, will always air on the side of caution.

[GreeneHunter]

Often time I have gotten into my tree stand (30 ft. up) way before sunrise and the deer come through about 7-7:30 and thet suddenly stop , they all come to a halt and just start looking for whatever ... I dont smoke til after I've gotten one and I don't give them any reason to start looking but they do for some reason .... always had me curious as to why !

[phade]

Had it happen Monday night!!! I had a headwind of 8-10mph coming from where the deer came out.. half hour before dark, a buck and 3 doe come out and start heading my way.. The wind had died to an almost stop.. The buck got to 23 yards behind some trees and needed to take another 2 steps top be in the open for a shot. He stood there for 2-3 minutes and then calmly turned and walked right back down to where he came from.. He never snorted, never looked at me, didnt even run, he just knew something was off and turned around. Only thing i can think is that when the wind died, he caught a bit of my thermals coming down the hill with the evening cooling, and that was enough for him...

I guess they dont get to be old without learning a few things. Deer, with the exception of the rut, will always air on the side of caution.

Now this is a hunter who understands. You learn more from your defeats than victories.

[ants]

Read a short article in Field and Stream about a deer's sixth sense...... stories about a deer approaching and then all of a sudden turning all spooky for no apparent reason and turning around and exiting. I got to thinking about a couple of times when I have had that happen to me. Wind absolutely perfect ..... totally concealed and yet something about the set-up kept the deer from taking one more forward step. Ears switching around, that intent stare forward, the switching of the tail, and then the turn around and high bounding retreat. 6th sense?? Are we sending some kind of mental signals of our malicious intent?

What did the author suggest? ..... avoid eye contact. The theory being that when we are so focused and intent on our prey, there is some telepathic signals. So his thought was to break that intensity.

I don't know. Was this guy onto something or was he just fishing for a bogus subject to sell another article to the magazine? What do you all think?

I have often thought that. I have been in the same situation, I don't know how many times. Good wind, good concealment I''m not moving then all the sudden the deer walks or runs the opposite way. Makes you wonder if we give off some kind of vibe or something.... Who knows??

[joe12]

I believe this to be true. I have noticed that many times when I am just strolling my property in the offseason I can walk within 20-30 yards of deer without them taking off. I usually pretend that I don't see them and try to avoid eye contact. Very often they just stand there and stare and just let you walk by. Its almost as if they can sense that you are not in "hunting mode" and are out to cause them no harm at that time. On the other hand, many times when I am hunting from my treestand they have appeared frazzled for no reason, and I know that they did not wind me. Very interesting topic.

[Doc]

Ok .... How about this? I will guarantee that within a week of the closing of gun season, there will be at least three or more deer casually grazing in my front yard in broad daylight. I will also guarantee that I will see night-time deer tracks within a couple yards of our front door. Human scent everywhere. We don't dress in scent-lok clothing or spray down with scent-killer. So I'm sure that our presence is no secret to them. Also, the TV or stereo blasting away is not intended to disguise our presence.

Just the few weeks prior, those same deer would take off like a ruptured duck at 150 yards. One sniff of human scent would cause instant panic. Somehow, they are able to determine when it is safe to come out and when it is not. Now I'm pretty sure they don't have a copy of the hunting syllabus, and probably don't have a calendar, so there must be other signals that are given off in some form that tells them exactly what our intentions are. Is that part of a 6th sense?

[mxsmitz201]

Maybe its becoming part of their genetics that this time of year means anything that feels suspect probably is lol i know thats a bit far fetched but you never know

[crappyice]

I'm not a bigger believer in the universe having all sorts of energies(what's it called feng sway or something), but the example given by joe12 is very true. Think about how different our bodies read when THAT deer finally comes in. We must be sending out a vibe. I, as a person who still has not killed a deer with my bow, have a real hard time controlling my jitters. That must be getting noticed. Whereas my hunting partner remains very calm now that he has killed a few deer at close range.

[Guns&ReligionCop]

Ok .... How about this? I will guarantee that within a week of the closing of gun season, there will be at least three or more deer casually grazing in my front yard in broad daylight. I will also guarantee that I will see night-time deer tracks within a couple yards of our front door. Human scent everywhere. We don't dress in scent-lok clothing or spray down with scent-killer. So I'm sure that our presence is no secret to them. Also, the TV or stereo blasting away is not intended to disguise our presence.

Just the few weeks prior, those same deer would take off like a ruptured duck at 150 yards. One sniff of human scent would cause instant panic. Somehow, they are able to determine when it is safe to come out and when it is not. Now I'm pretty sure they don't have a copy of the hunting syllabus, and probably don't have a calendar, so there must be other signals that are given off in some form that tells them exactly what our intentions are. Is that part of a 6th sense?

Its like squirrel, The squirrel come right up and my porch and stare at me but if I followed into the woods it would be a ghost

[phade]

People think too much. Stop rationalizing.

[wdswtr]

You ever fall asleep in a deerstand and something suddenly out of some unconscious reasoning tells you to open your eyes? And when you do a deer is standing there staring at you and bolts as soon as you make eye contact? It sure the hell has happened to me before and more than once. My 6th sense is telling me right now to quit falling asleep in my stand lol.

Edited October 4, 2012 by wdswtr

[erussell]

Hog wash! Nothing but a load of crap. If a deer stops and go's another direction it could be any number of things. Maybe a yote or a bear walked through there earlier maybe the wind is in your face but 50 yrds back it could easily be blowing right back at the deer. Maybe there's another hunter 500 yrds up wind reeking of aqua velva. Or maybe the deer just though, hey I smell Acorns over there lets go check it out. Maybe he caught movement of something that made him nervous. Some deer are just more skittish than others especially bucks and older doe. Nothing but sensationalism and speculation.

[Doc]

Hog wash! Nothing but a load of crap. If a deer stops and go's another direction it could be any number of things. Maybe a yote or a bear walked through there earlier maybe the wind is in your face but 50 yrds back it could easily be blowing right back at the deer. Maybe there's another hunter 500 yrds up wind reeking of aqua velva. Or maybe the deer just though, hey I smell Acorns over there lets go check it out. Maybe he caught movement of something that made him nervous. Some deer are just more skittish than others especially bucks and older doe. Nothing but sensationalism and speculation.

That was my first reaction when I started reading this article. But then I started thinking about other experiences that I have had. For example, there have been times when I could "feel" someone staring at me, and turned around to find out they were. Or as someone mentioned, there have been times when I have turned around while on stand to find a deer there. No indications of something being there, not a direction that I had any intention of watching (downwind), but something told me to turn around an look. So there are a few situations that indicate that we might have some version of that 6th sense. So it does make you wonder if animals may have a bit more developed ability which sometimes gives them a break.

On the other hand, I am aware that wind in particular can do some things that we are not always aware of. I'm also pretty convinced that everytime our wind blows to a trail (even if it's only once), it does leave behind our scent molecules. So perhaps we forgot that about 15 minutes ago the wind did have a brief back-draft. Also, there might be something about your stand that looks un-natural, or perhaps when you were brushing out a shooting lane, you removed something that the deer was used to seeing there. Or perhaps when you were preparing your stand and leaving scent everywhere, the deer recalled those disturbances in that particular area and decided at the last minute not to go near your shooting area.

So it's very difficult to be able to say anything too definitive about a sixth sense, but sometimes there does appear to be no explaining how a deer gets it all figured out. Like my examples about the deer activity on my lawn, there is no way that I can explain how they know precisely what scent to pay attention to and what scent to ignore. Why would they go into an area where that scent is the strongest? And I have no clue how they figure out so precisely just when the gun season is over. There definitely is something tricky going on in their little critter minds that I don't understand. Does it all relate to some 6th sense? ..... I don't know.

[WNYBuckHunter]

Deer and just deer, they are built and wired to survive like any other animal. Ultimately, they're wired for flight.

I agree 100%, they are always slightly on edge, not just when they get within a certain distance of a hunter. I think of them as a loaded spring that can go "boing!" at any given moment for any reason they may perceive as danger.

[Doc]

Here is the Field and Stream article that I was reading:

http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/whitetail-365/2012/09/poll-results-almost-70-percent-say-deer-do-have-sixth-sense

And, just like any other part of hunting, someone has figured out a way of using this thought to take some of our money .... lol. How about buying a suit that blocks electro magnetic fields. Check out the references to a company that sells these things at the end of the article.....ha-ha.

[Early]

Ha..Ha....I shall line my hunting hat with tin foil !!

Seriously, I think the keen senses of deer, sight/smell/hearing, when used together, are so superior to ours that we just might think some sixth sense is working. We must remember: we are merely hunting; that deer is trying to stay alive....His senses must protect him, or he dies!

[Doc]

Ha..Ha....I shall line my hunting hat with tin foil !!

Seriously, I think the keen senses of deer, sight/smell/hearing, when used together, are so superior to ours that we just might think some sixth sense is working. We must remember: we are merely hunting; that deer is trying to stay alive....His senses must protect him, or he dies!

I agree, there are many things that could tip off a deer to our presence and many of them may not be all that obvious. But I still have to wonder how they know when they can ignore all of these signals. What tells them when human scent, blaring TVs and radios and other indicators of our obvious presence can be completely ignored. How did they figure out that hunting season ended and it's now safe to walk around grazing on Doc's front lawn, next to his house, in broad daylight? How do they realize that the human scent oozing around that front step and that front door really doesn't mean anything when just a few days before, and throughout the entire hunting seasons even a slight hint of a distant bit of human scent would send them running in the opposite direction. I know that they have very primitive reasoning abilities. And even their memories are quite limited. So it makes me think that there are some strange instinctive abilities to analyze situations that we don't even have the beginnings of understanding. Is that all part of a 6th sense? ..... who knows? If that isn't the answer, then we have a whole lot more to learn about deer and their defences.

[Elmo]

I had read a different article on a related subject which was a scientific explanation on whether dogs can see ghost to try to explain why dogs some times react, get scared, or bark at things that just aren't there. What they did was produce a noise pitch that we humans can't hear but to dogs it was like scratching your nails on a chalkboard. Dog were hearing to noise almost a mile away. Makes the dog go react in all different ways but us humans are completely oblivious to it.

While I do agree that sometimes you just get a feeling someone is watching you I think most times the deer are just hearing something or smelling something that we can't detect.

[tughillhunter]

i would agree. ive seen it myself. its wierd, and i often think that danger season has been adapted to them. just my 2 cents though. im wierd.