It is good to know that deer will often use a different trail when they are followed or driven than the tracks from where they usually don't travels. A hunter should know such places where groups of deer pass. Most of the time hunters know feeding places which are the most favorable for the hunters one to deer. Even by using even some fruits or nuts could help to get the deer on the way.
I know of one feeding area, which is used by ten or twelve different family groups of deer. This is an area of fields bounded on three sides by extensive woods and is the nearest area of this type of food for the deer, which utilize these woods as their range. All deer located in the area north of these fields (usually four groups) use a trail that crosses a brook, in order to get to the fields from the wooded section of their range. On their return to the woods, they separate and some of the groups use a trail which crosses the brook about three hundred yards east of the first-mentioned crossing, while the others use a trail located nearly a half-mile to the west of the same crossing.
The first trail would be an ideal place to watch in the late afternoon, yet would be totally unproductive in the early morning when the deer were returning by different routes. All three of these crossings are equally obvious to an experienced hunter, but unless the man knew of the habits of these deer, he could spend considerable time in watching any one of these places at the wrong time of day. Deer will often use a different trail when they are followed or driven than the one, which they utilize while traveling unmolested. I have known of deer using all three of the above-mentioned trails in both directions, when men or dogs frightened them.
Feeding areas are probably the most productive places for a hunter to wait for deer. Patches of beech and oak trees, apple orchards, and clover patches or similar green vegetation are usually the more productive of these feeding areas, but any place where deer are known to feed may be watched with some chance of success. As a rule, individual groups of deer do not visit the same feeding area on successive nights, but move around their range with fair regularity, so that they return to a feeding area on every second, third or fourth night. If there are several of these groups in the area, each feeding place might be visited by different deer on each successive night. Some of these feeding areas are visited by deer quite early in the afternoon, while others are not visited until after dark. This difference is caused to a great extent by the distance between the feeding area and the bedding area and by the nature of the cover adjacent to the feeding area. The amount of moonlight also affects the feeding time of the deer.
I know of an orchard which the deer visit almost every night during the fall and early winter. It is in sight of my former home where I had the opportunity to watch this spot from a distance. I have never seen a deer in that orchard in the daytime. I also know of a single apple tree which stands less than a half-mile from that orchard and I have seen and shot deer under this tree before sundown. The single tree is near the woods, which means safety, while it is necessary for deer to cross about two hundred yards of open country in order to reach the orchard. Naturally they wait for darkness before crossing this open area.
The shooting of deer from an automobile is forbidden in most states, but the practice of driving along the roads until a deer is sighted, stopping the car, stepping to the side of the road and shooting at it is a common practice in many places. Deer are not particularly afraid of automobiles and these road hunters can usually drive quite near the animals without alarming them. In some sections where hunting is heavy, the act of stopping a car will cause the deer to retreat to safety in the woods, so it is often better to chance a long shot than to risk alarming the deer by a too close approach.
You can try out on some of the tricks here according to your conditions while hunting. But remember always that shooting of deer from an automobile is forbidden in most states. Try to be on the safer sides of the law and avoids as such trouble as possible to have good hunting game and enjoying them.
Another stump that I encountered is the exact image of a deer's head. Something about its position or location prevented me from shooting when I first sighted it, and I approached for better identification. Curled pieces of bark formed the ears, two black knots were the eyes, a piece of weathered bark was located in just the right position to form the nose and a combination of light and shadow caused the outline of the head to stand out from the rest of the stump.
This play of light and shadow can delude a man who possesses the best of eyesight and it even does it on the brightest of days. One evening I thought I saw a deer and, as I was about to shoot, the thought came to me that the deer was standing in rather an odd spot. There was something wrong with the setting?nothing definite, just not natural. I moved to my right about ten feet in order to view the subject from a slightly different angle and the deer's head became separated from the neck, as it turned into a cluster of dead leaves hanging from the end of a slender limb of a maple. The neck separated from the body and turned into a fence post, and the body transformed into a juniper bush. When I returned to my original position, these objects lined up and formed a perfect silhouette of a deer. The next day, in bright sunlight, when details could be seen, there was nothing there that had any resemblance to a deer.
The only time that I ever shot at an inanimate object in mistake for a deer, it turned out an optical illusion caused by the lighting at that particular time of day. I had sighted a doe which was feeding in an abandoned field partly covered with clumps of alder. She was about two hundred yards from me and, as that was a long shot for my gun I decided to attempt a stalk. While checking the position of the bushes I would need to utilize in approaching the deer, I saw what I though to be a large buck standing, partly hidden, near a clump of bushes, not over fifty feet from the doe. This buck seemed to be standing with his head in the air, and, judging from his apparent alert position, was watching me.
Stalking an alerted deer was out of the question, so I made the necessary allowance for the distance and fired at the buck. He never moved, but the doe ran into the woods at the sound of the shot. I took my time and fired a second shot and the deer still stood there. Knowing that there was something wrong, I started to walk directly towards my buck and before I had covered half of the distance between us, he simply disappeared.
Just another case of the light and shade, and along with them the convincing presence of a real live deer had caused the mistake, when the very presence of a feeding deer should have been proof that there were no alerted deer in the vicinity. I had momentarily forgotten the fact that when one deer of a herd is alarmed or alerted, the information is quickly communicated to the others and they all will assume a position of alertness.
In some circumstances, we can mis-identify the target, which resembled due to the fog. But it is always better to double check before shooting to avoid shooting the wrong target to save the ammunition.
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