Scent Managment

[Lew]

I know a guy who is an avid hunter, he grow up on dairy farm. He has taken some of the nicest bucks I have seen! His secret, he kept his hunting cloths in the barn.

[Reel Doc]

I agree with the farm scent but only if you hunt the farmland. Take the cow smell into deep woods & the deer will get one whiff & be gone. With any animals that rely on their nose you do not want them saying "What is that smell?"

Greg

[ Post made via Android ]

[Reel Doc]

I agree with the farm scent but only if you hunt the farmland. Take the cow smell into deep woods & the deer will get one whiff & be gone. With any animals that rely on their nose you do not want them saying "What is that smell?"

Greg

[ Post made via Android ]

[carpedium]

Its funny to read all those posts, and all that work and one fart ruins it all... The activated carbon is a joke, the science isn't there, carbon loads, and once its loaded it gives off as much as it absorbs. That's the facts folks and nothing will change that, the amount of AC in the fabric is very little and will load very quickly, once loaded it has to be "removed" and that's not an easy task to do right. I would bet the AC in those fabrics will load in 30 minutes or less 50% of the time.

Fact is you will not fool a smart buck if he crosses your sent in any form, you have to hunt the wind, or hope he makes a mistake. One of the best deer hunters in the world taught me that you will never shoot a careful buck, only those making a mistake.

Im all for doing whats reasonable, keep everything clean including yourself but then you have to be concerned with the wind it will always give you away, unless the deer are used to smelling people, and in some cases they are.

I am refering to deer in the deep woods where I hunt, they are never fooled by anyone with any type of sent control.

There are three bucks and probably a dozen does and youngsters that come into my back yard. The does are every day, morning and night, and the bucks are about 3x/week avg. The does will actually be 25 yards away from me when I am outside grilling or tooling around with something. When we have campfires out back its not uncommon for one of the does to walk up within 15 feet and feed with the fire blazing.... its unreal.

Anyway - I have no interest in taking the does, because its not sport when I can take a shot at one while flipping burgers. The older buck on the other hand is a separate story. I was thinking that being so close to the house and to human smells that the deer would be even more cautious, and therefor I would need to cover my scent even better. Do you think that the deer is "used to" the smell and it would be less of an issue? I know playing the wind is key, and I have that going for me since the prevailing wind is from the West, and that will blow my scent into my yard and past my house, not into the scrub brush/meadow/wooded area where they have to come from to get to my yard.

I'm debating going out there and cutting some shooting lanes, etc. Who knows, maybe that will freak them out and they will never be back!

[Gator]

When you talk about the Science behind activated carbon clothing...do you know of any studies, other than industry-sponsored, that examine their effectiveness? I'd like to see an unbiased report. I know that there's lots of people who swear by AC clothes and others who don't buy into AC at all. My experience is that they work. I know all about the loading issues and the fact that you'd need a boiler room to reactivate them, but I wonder if the movement of scent through the clothes makes a difference?

By that I mean that smelling something requires a critical concentration of odorant to trigger receptor activation. You don't generally project smell equally in all directions, so when a deer gets a whiff, it's probably from an airstream that concentrates your odor. If the odor is from a particular place where it's already concentrated, like your groin or armpits, so much the worse. If the AC clothes act like a dispersion system, taking in scent from particular places then releasing other stuff slowly, or a filter...not binding, but slowing it down...then it could conceivably work.

I'm just trying to figure out why I see more deer wearing the stuff. Experience has taught me that it works, so I'd bet dollars to donuts that there's a reason. Maybe somebody else has a better idea? Let's hear it.

[bluewater]

I always wash my hunting clothing in a scent free sport wash then bag it up and put it in my garage (I dont park my vehicles in there so no auto smells), every morning before a hunt I wash my body with a scent free shampoo and soap then when I get to the woods I spray down with scent killer I also put some kind of deer pee on the bottom of my boots and always play the wind in your favor.

[thejigger]

I practice alot of the scent management techniques mentioned in the above posts, but have a theory about scent blocker clothing. After several trips to North Dakota pheasant hunting, I can tell how close my Brittany is to a bird by how fast he is moving. As the scent gets stronger, the slower he works, eventually almost belly crawling to a point. I believe that the scent blocker clothing, never truly blocking 100% of your odor, makes it harder for a deer to tell how close it is to you, thus giving you more of a chance for a closer shot. Playing the wind is by far the most important thing in deer hunting. There are several deer trails we hunt that we have stands on both the North and South side, the wind deciding which one we will hunt. Good luck and safe hunting.