What has been experience hunting on vehicles? Have you been able to sight deer from the vehicles better or by approaching them walking? And do you know which the finest places to spot the deer are? You can maximize your chances of success in hunting and minimize wounding the deer and not being able to trail and spot them again.



Automobile hunters can cut their driving time and increase their chances of sighting a deer if they are able to recognize the places the deer are most likely to use at the time the hunter approaches them. Places where deer trails cross roads are probably the least productive to the road hunter, because, although he might sight a deer, he will seldom have the time to stop and leave his car before the deer is out of sight in the surrounding woods.

Feeding areas are the finest spots to find deer; and if the road hunter concentrates on several of these places and visits them daily at feeding time, he is almost sure to sight a deer sooner or later. For the best results, these feeding places should be in open areas so that the deer may be seen from a moving car and should be far enough from the road so that the act of stopping the car will not be too alarming to them. It is not necessary to confine this type of hunting to the back roads, as many hunters do, for the deer will often visit a choice clover patch near a well-traveled road in preference to some less palatable food in a more secluded spot.

Road hunters are responsible for a tremendous waste of deer which are wounded but not recovered. Hunters using other methods wound deer, but the man who is on the ground and in the woods will usually know when he has wounded one and will usually make a sincere effort to find and kill the animal. On the other hand, the road hunter often shoots at a deer which is near the woods and if the deer does not drop in its tracks, he will often assume that he has missed his shot, traveling on in search of another target. This would not be so bad if these men would take the time and effort to walk to the spot where the deer was standing and make sure that they had actually missed their shot. Too many of them merely drive off without investigating. There must be some psychological reason for this reluctance to leave the road, and the car, in order to check the effect of their marksmanship. This practice certainly shows that these men lack confidence in either their shooting ability or in their gun.

I remember two incidents that showed me the importance of checking the results of my shooting. I was not hunting from a road, but the experiences taught me that it is very easy to walk away from a dead deer.I had not hunted long enough to have much confidence in my marksmanship when I shot at a deer which was standing by a clump of bushes near the edge of a field. When I shot, a deer jumped into the woods and I fired a second shot, thinking I had missed the first one. The deer continued on into the woods and I started to leave the place, thinking that I had done some very poor shooting. I began to wonder why I had missed so easy a shot and I finally went back with the intention of looking for the marks of my bullets on the trees in back of the place where the deer had been standing. I found a dead deer in the tall grass. This deer had been killed instantly and had abruptly dropped to the ground simultaneously with the appearance of the second deer which I had mistaken for the first.

Often a hunter is unable to see clearly at the time of the shot because of the effect of the gases from the explosion in the air around the gun's muzzle. This combination of powder gas and air turbulence will distort, if not totally obscure, the vision at the time of the shot so that a man cannot be exactly sure of the results without checking the scene. This is probably what happened to my vision on this occasion.

There are many instances of the deer being wounded and not being found anymore by the hunters. These are mainly because the hunters are not able to trail them anymore and find them. These could be caused by different reason. So always try to hunt deer not your vehicles but by walking through the woods which can give you better advantages.