How PRESSURE AFFECTS DEER Movement
You’ve heard the same story time and time again: A dedicated deer hunter spends the summer months meticulously setting up and monitoring game cameras to see what deer are likely to be using the property during the upcoming season. With some luck, a shooter buck turns up and all efforts become focused on learning his particular movement patterns. By early fall the stands are hung and he is still consistently showing up right where he needs to be. It’s now the night before opening morning and the hunter drifts to sleep, feeling as though tomorrow’s hunt will go exactly as planned.
As you know if you’ve ever been this hunter, opening morning often does not go as planned, nor do many of the subsequent hunts throughout the season. Often, the deer that you’ve worked so hard to pattern completely change their behavior or seem to disappear altogether once you begin hunting them. Other times, you might successfully harvest the deer you’re after, but it usually doesn’t happen quite the way you had planned, and your success can often be attributed just as much to luck as skill.
What is it about white-tailed deer that makes them so hard to predict? For one thing, deer are perceptive creatures that seem to become more wary of
