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Whitetail Sixth Sense

I don’t really believe in it in my brain, but in my heart maybe… they sure do some tricky stuff. Last year I had a doe crossing a river bust me at 100ish+ yards while downstream / downwind behind a tree and brush motionless in ASAT, it was so ridiculous. Last week I arrived to the farm on Sunday, target buck shows on cam as he had for days, disappears for two days, shows back up on cam just as I was packing the truck Tuesday night, he’s been doing maddening stuff like that for three years. And I know multiple otherwise sane people that swear by HECS.
 
Let me just add that there are forces out there that most of us have no idea about. A friend's cousin is an animal communicator,he gave us a book she wrote. We read some of it and were not convinced,quite the opposite. We met her at a wedding and talked to her a bit and mentioned our horse that was having some issues. She asked what the horses name was and what color she was and said she would see if she could contact it. A little while later she talked to us about what she learned from the horse and came up with super specific stuff that our friend or anyone else had no idea about. We certainly didn't give her any hints. That was bizarre.
So if this lady can talk to animals from miles away I think it is fair to assume that the probability of animals having a sixth sense is pretty high. I think some are better at it than others.
We later did a phone appointment with the communicator and were able to further cement our belief in her abilities as she again came out with crazy specific stuff the animals said.Our one horse was at a stable and every morning she would kick another horse in her paddock around the same time. Our horse told the communicator it was because the other horse would not shut up when ours wanted to take a nap.
The craziest thing our horse told her was that Bobby really liked her ass. Bobby was the name of a stallion at that barn that our horse had to walk past to get to the arena,and he went nuts every time she walked past.
It is fine if you guys think this is all bs,that is what i thought when I read her book.
But I do think that there is lots going on in this world that we or science has not the first idea about.
 
The key words in all these stories are "for no apparent reason". There was a reason but it just wasn't apparent to you at the time. Maybe a bear or a pack of coyotes came through that area 20 minutes before you got there. You don't know. There was a thread on here not too long ago about the Hex suits and the few that thought it might work got ridiculed pretty good so I don't think there are too many people that really believe in them. Is that company even still in business? I, in my 45 years of bowhunting, have never had a deer spook in the least from looking at it's eyes and have never experienced any deer locking up and reversing direction for no "apparent" reason either. FWIW I don't believe in fortune tellers either and if you think you can actually communicate with animals you should be committed imo.
 
This is a fascinating conversation.

Only thing I’ll add is that it is very, very hard for humans to truly comprehend a deer’s sense of smell. Not because we don’t know it’s better. But because we lack the requisite experience to measure it against. Saying a deer’s sense of smell is 1000x better than ours is not the appropriate language. The dimensions they’re smelling in, and the impact that sense has inside their little brains, and the consequences downstream of that, are so foreign to us, as to make it a miracle.

It may or may not explain a lot of deer’s unexplainable behavior.

But seeing the stories being told here is really something. Keep ‘em coming!
 
I think there is something there. Test it yourself. Next time you're in a restaurant, pick out another customer, seated anywhere and stare at them. Within minutes, sometime seconds, they're eyes will instantly lock onto you, not like they were just looking around and happened to see you looking at them but their eyes will instantly lock on to you. You all have had that happen to you especially when it's an attractive woman.:flushed: Weird and hard to explain but there's something to it.
I've found that it you can take your mind off of an approaching deer and concentrate on prepping for the shot and not stare a hole through the deer, it seems to help.
 
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I did have one experience similar to this but it was with a yote not a deer. It was about 25 or so years ago. I was sitting on a powerline row on a really cold morning (about 15 degrees) in late November. The wind was very light and was in my face. On the left side of the powerline there was about 100 yards of open hardwoods leading down into a draw where the cover turned thick. I heard what I thought was a deer coming up out of the bottom up through the hardwoods but couldn't see very good in that particular spot as there were a few small hemlocks right on the edge of the row in that area. I spotted a couple of flashes of movement and could tell it was a yote not a deer. It kept getting closer so I got all ready to blast him when he comes out about 40 yards away but all of a sudden there's no more crunch, crunch, crunch of footsteps in the 6" of frozen leaves. Sob must have seen me move or something so I sat there for 2 or 3 minutes with no sound or movement at all coming from that spot. About that time I decide to just stand up real slow for a better view. Nothing. So I proceed to sneak toward the edge of the woods thinking I'll see him when he takes off to run but nothing. I finally get to the edge of the row and can see a good hundred yards down through these hardwoods but still nothing. What the heck. Then I noticed a log that was about 30 yards inside the woods. Haha! That little bast*rd must be hiding behind that log watching me. I walked very slowly toward the log with my rifle at ready but no dice. Nothing. Where in the heck did that sob go? To this day I have not figured this one out. Maybe he climbed a tree or buried himself in those frozen oak leaves but other than those 2 options I'm gonna wonder about that one till the day I die.
 
I think its the same thing kind of like people have. Like if you ever walked into a burglarized house that wasnt ransacked and everything is in order yet you know someone was there. Or maybe im completely wrong but i would imagine prey animals have a very high threshhold for this feeling of GTFO. Their senses are epic also, though i think its easy to fool the eyes with camo and being still and fool the ears but i think the biggest gimmick we have is smell camo, it doesnt matter what you do or mitigate you are not fooling a deers nose, no matter what we do to mask smell its all for naught. We cant conceptualize how well they smell it just gives us warm and fuzzies that we smell like earth or pine or whatever scent you use to ourselves but i truly believe the only way a deer doesnt smell you is if the wind literally isnt bringing your scent to their nose. But the 6th sense thing is also in them. Its very obvious if you hunt for any amount of time. Just my .02
 
I had the biggest deer I have ever seen on the hoof get spooky for no apparent reason. Who knows why he did it, but he didn't go home with me. I was hunting a narrow strip of woods, a SMZ alongside a big creek. The SMZ T'd into a block of mature pines. On either side of the SMZ, which was about 20 yards wide, was new growth cutover. It was very thick.

This spot was 3/4 of a mile in. It was early in my hunting career, before I switched to bow only, and I had a 30-06. I spent the morning in a lock on I had put out about 50 yards from the T. The wind was blowing steady down the SMZ to me. At 10 AM I was planning to come down, but something just told me to sit all day. Back then, all day sits were not common for me. I had no food or water. I set until 4:45 with no action and then I noticed movement from the pines. My first thought was that a donkey was walking through the woods. The deer's body was huge. At that point I had not seen the rack. The way he was walking would have him hit the cutover. If he went north, I would not see him again. If he went south, he was going to be in my lap. He walked out of sight, and I stood up in the stand and pushed off the safety and aimed the rifle at a little opening about 30 yards to my right front.

About 20 seconds later I saw his head pop out into the little opening. This thing was huge. He was tall and wide, and he had very dark chocolate horns. I was dumbfounded. I had never seen a deer anywhere near this large. I had the scope right on him. I could see his head and most of his neck. I just needed a little shoulder. Nope. He froze there and stared straight ahead. Then he backed up and walked back the way he came. When he went behind cover, I shifted slightly to cover the SMZ. His head popped out from behind a couple of big trees and once again he had his head and neck out and was staring straight ahead. I thought he might cross the SMZ. No, he slipped backwards and walked straight back up that transition of woods and pine thicket. Whatever it was, he got uneasy, and he heeded his instincts. It saved him that day. As far as I know he died of old age.

I think maybe he got a wisp of scent. Who knows. I had been there all day. The wind seemed right but that is a lot of time to be stinking a place up. I do think this. Mature deer listen to that little voice that says this isn't right. I've heard that in survival situations, most people die of embarrassment, meaning they won't do some particular thing that will save them because they are worried they will look silly in front of other people. I think animals, especially mature animals don't have this.
 
Do you ever get a feeling like you’re being watched? Sometimes you are and other time not. It’s only logical that deer would do the same. They are so in tune with their senses compared to us as well.

Then there’s the things that are very real that the deer can see, smell, and hear. Scent is a funny thing and how animals react to it can be even funnier. I’ve got a young Kemmer cur dog. I got her for tracking deer but after a slow season last year I decided to start her on squirrel last winter. I hung a caged one in a tree in the backyard to get her fired up and let her know that treeing squirrel was a good thing. Six months later and the pecan orchard next door has squirrel in it. When she smells them she goes back to that tree. Even if the wind is completely wrong for it to be coming from there she still checks that tree. She associates the smell of squirrel in the backyard to that tree and it was a positive experience she would like to repeat. I think a deer can smell something out of place and even though it’s upwind of you it can associate a smell with a bad experience that happened in your area. I think you can bust deer setting up in the morning and as it’s walking through later in the morning it can have of those v8 moments and say “you big dummy you wet just here two hours ago watching an evil predator climb a tree.” Then the deer gets all nervous and backs out the way it came for no apparent reason.
Deer have an amazing sense of smell and are highly in tune with their natural environment. They want to eat sleep and breed while exposing themselves to danger as little as possible. If they had the intelligence we give them credit for they wouldn’t be dead all up and down the highway.
 
I've read that deer smell at the molecular level. Not only can they detect odor they can differentiate it at a level our tiny noses couldn't even come close to. Lets say all human scent profiles are made up of 5 distinct molecular bases, a la our stink, we for the most part can't even smell that unless ones hygiene is non-traditional, even then it's just stinky, but deer can break down the scent into the five distinct bases, and a dog like a deer can determine the molecular density of an odor to determine direction of travel and with that the time in animal sense that is was left, that's what gives them direction, < density to > density. IMO that puts deer and humans in complete separate worlds. From here we can talk about sixth sense. Humans have a sixth sense. We've all felt it at one time or another, but we've been conditioned to disregard it, plus our senses are like a dull knife compared to the obsidian like sharpness of a deers'. Maybe it's our over sized brain that unconsciously strives to "understand", predetermining our thought pathways, always needing proof, that blocks us from being more in tune to the subtlest inputs from the physical world, thus adding to our physiological sensory impairment. Einstein says "energy can't be created or destroyed it can only be changed from one form to another". Lets say I strike a match and hold it a half an inch from my finger, I will perceive the energy that is stored in the match because of the transformation of its form from a match (read physical combinations made up of carbon and other elements) to heat and light. I can perceive it with my limited senses because I'm close to it and the chemical reaction(change of form) is intense, but when the stored energy is consumed and the match goes out the energy it created when it was burning still exists, only I can't perceive it any more, it doesn't make it gone, only gone to me. I like to think that when considering nature I can't with 100% accuracy use the terms always and never. Given the staggering number of combinations at the atomic level provided by the universe, and with my scientifically oriented thought process I must allow for the possibility that a combination exists that would allow another organism to perceive things at levels which I cannot. Evidence exists that supports this statement as true. One example is the canary in the coal-mine. It's an organism that exists that perceives things at a level that I cannot. Salmon return from the ocean to a specific estuary using the earths magnetic field as a compass then when in chemical proximity they can sense the specific make up of the stream they imprinted on as a fry. MIC DROP! BAM!!! Miracle, Magic, or Physical Perception the differentiation of these things is unimportant....unimportant I'm not sure but definitely above my pay-grade.
 
Their 6th sense is all that extra smell, and the ability to use wind currents to their advantage. They see the world through a dimension we don't. We can't comprehend how good their sense of smell is. On the flipside we can't comprehend how bad their vision is. The fact that you can stand still in a neon pumpkin suit in the wide open10 feet from an animal and never spook it is equally mind blowing imo and I've done that many times.
 
The_Fit_Ness_Monster said:
I think its the same thing kind of like people have. Like if you ever walked into a burglarized house that wasnt ransacked and everything is in order yet you know someone was there. Or maybe im completely wrong but i would imagine prey animals have a very high threshhold for this feeling of GTFO. Their senses are epic also, though i think its easy to fool the eyes with camo and being still and fool the ears but i think the biggest gimmick we have is smell camo, it doesnt matter what you do or mitigate you are not fooling a deers nose, no matter what we do to mask smell its all for naught. We cant conceptualize how well they smell it just gives us warm and fuzzies that we smell like earth or pine or whatever scent you use to ourselves but i truly believe the only way a deer doesnt smell you is if the wind literally isnt bringing your scent to their nose. But the 6th sense thing is also in them. Its very obvious if you hunt for any amount of time. Just my .02
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I feel like you're right on with this line of thought except I think we can reduce our scent density by keeping clean. It's not about tricking them with cover smells, it's about changing how they are perceiving when the scent was left. Using your scenario of the burglarized house. In the course of robbing your house the perps are in an excited state they are oozing adrenaline and all the human chemical scents that go along with that state. If we enter that house immediately afterwards we sense that "something" but we don't trust that sense until we have physical proof. We are desensitized to it. If you are on vacation and return 2 weeks after the fact and enter the house. It is my belief that that "something" would be harder to perceive, and it would go unnoticed. The deer TRUSTS the GTFO sense and doesn't question it. INSTINCTS.
 
A Great White can smell a drop of blood in about a million gallons of water too. There's no way us humans can relate to that either so I think we are comparing apples to oranges here as far as an animal's senses and our own. Mankind is arrogant. There's so much more out there we don't understand than there is that we do understand so who knows.
 
GeoFish said:
Gene Wensel has a chapter in two of his books discussing this and a instance of a big buck leaving the scene because of sensing danger.
My team member @BTaylor posted that he felt he had a deflector shield keeping deer out of range.
Any of you have a experience with the 6th sense?
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It's like walking into a room with a subtle and slightly burnt wire smell , old men know that smell most women don't. The men know it may mean death...
 
GeoFish said:
Gene Wensel has a chapter in two of his books discussing this and a instance of a big buck leaving the scene because of sensing danger.
My team member @BTaylor posted that he felt he had a deflector shield keeping deer out of range.
Any of you have a experience with the 6th sense?
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I read that book. I still have it. I still think about that chapter. I was young then when I read it but after 43 years of hunting experiences I think the 6th sense does exist. I can't list them all here but there have been many instances over the years where the animal just "knew" something was wrong even though every thing else was not in their favor. I may get ridiculed for it but I think it's possible that the theory behind the HECS suit is valid. We definitely give off some kind of EMF. That can be proven scientifically. I also I think it's possible that some animals especially mature animals may be tuned into it especially when close. A dog will recognize it's owner immediately but if you hypnotize the owner, that same dog will react completely different. I've seen the videos, the reaction is quite interesting. The dog "knows" something is wrong or negative. Brain waves? How many times have you seen a dog get up and start barking at the door when there was no way they could have smelled or heard anything outside?

I also think it's possible that people give off varying degrees of vibes/ negativity or positivity. They say some guys are lucky or unlucky. I used to know a couple guys that were part of a group that did a lot of deer drives with buckshot. They never killed a lot of deer but always got a few every year. I was never surprised when I heard that Paul #1 was one of the successful hunters. Paul#1 was a good hunter, a good shot and he paid attention so that had a lot to do with it. Plus he was "captain" so he was usually a flanker. The other "captain" was named Paul also. He also got to flank a lot which is usually the best spot because bucks like to slip out the side of a drive. Anyway, Paul #2 killed a buck his 1st year and then 40 years without getting another. He got to be a "captain" because he paid attention in the woods. He didn't move around a lot or make a lot of noise. I've seen it 1st hand. The guy was doing it right just like he had been taught. However everyone said he was just "unlucky". Deer in general would not go within range of him. It was as if the deer "knew" he was there. It was always the guy next to him that got the deer. Every year he kept coming back and lead the guys in the woods. Whether if he was driver or a stander, Every time someone else who got the deer. More often than not it was Paul #1! Whenever they said Paul got one, I would secretly hope it was Paul #2 but it never was. After 40 some years in the woods, you would think that the law of averages would eventually let a buck run by Paul #2 but that was never the case. I think the deer just had a 6th sense and "knew" where he was. I think He just gave off extra vibes because he wanted a buck so bad. I haven't seen those guys in 30 years so I don't know if he ever did get another buck. I hope he did.

Because of that chapter years ago, whenever I see an animal that I intend to shoot and I have time to think about it, I try not to think negative/ predatory thoughts. I think of anything else and try not to stare at them till they get in range. It seems to be working. I've been bowhunting 43 years and usually manage to kill several every year.
 
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I think y’all are getting paranoid. I’ve killed three bucks this year and I never worry about my brain waves. I worry about hunting at the right time and place. I was intent on killing all three from the moment I spotted them.
 
John 35 said:
I think y’all are getting paranoid. I’ve killed three bucks this year and I never worry about my brain waves. I worry about hunting at the right time and place. I was intent on killing all three from the moment I spotted them.
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Your like Paul #1 or all 3 of those deer weren't in tune w/ their 6th sense! LOL
 
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