see Food.

like most animals, Smell is their primary sense. the vast majority of your effort is going to go into compensating for your inherent human stink.

The consensus of YTers purporting to be excellent hunters seems to be:

• Buy every single scent control product you can find, and use it liberally.
• hike slow to reduce sweating and heavy breathing
• touch as little as possible, to avoid scent-marking
• blinds and stand setups offer negligible scent control
• none of that shit above matters if you're upwind of a deer. take up amateur meteorology, because wind is everything.

like most animals, hearing is their secondary sense. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of consensus about precisely how well deer hear, but it seems to be at least as good as human's. (shoutout to huntinghit.com, saying "deer use their excellent hearing to detect danger and food sources". grumble grumble "oh but chatGPT knows everything" grumble grumble)

• make sure all your gear is tight and secure before packing in
• don't forget to silence your phone :)
• shut up
• watch where you step
• hike slow to minimize heavy breathing

apparently there's growing popularity of drones with IR cameras? (just how much money do you fuckers have?!) very cool for tracking after the shot, but be aware that a loud-ass drone will spook deer.

They're red-green colorblind. hence blaze orange is the favorite color for safety gear, surveyor's tape, etc. They can see blue, and/or shiny, very well. You can, too - when you hike out, observe how you can see your car's windshield from super far away.

They're far-sighted. To brush in your blind, you don't have to have amazing camouflage. but it has to be invisible from 100 yards.

they are normally "Crepuscular", meaning most active right around sunrise and sunset.

A deer likes to find Bedding near Food without too much Pressure.

TODO

it's where a buck scrapes the velvet off his antlers, and scrapes the bark off a tree

TODO

it's where a deer can rub the ground, and rub his scent on a hanging branch.

You can make these yourself with paracord and a saw.

Deer aren't bothered by "miserable" weather as much as humans. what we consider a moderate rain, they consider mild. They don't mind snow like we do.

Deer are much more bothered by obscuring weather - a persistent rain with accompanying wind makes it hard to smell/hear/see, so they'll wait that out. So for your purposes, what you're hoping for is a hurricane overnight - that'll be when deer have been huddling, waiting, getting hungry. then once you're in position, the eye of the storm passes over. Then, success or fail, bonus points if the other side of the storm can cover your exit.

They also get shaken out of complacency by weather changes. You know how in winter, 50 degrees is a heat wave, but in summer, 50 degrees is a cold snap? a sudden temperature drop will inspire a deer to be active when the sun can help warm it up.

TODO