Some of these scent control stories seems like they would take the fun right out of hunting. Play the wind, use milkweed, learn about thermals. You’re gonna get winded. EVERYONE gets winded. Whether they’re willing to blame themselves or not is a different story. It’s a part of hunting.
The extent and severity of being winded is a matter of degree.
Close in, full nose in light wind and high humidity is going to elicit more extreme busts than a deer located on the fringes of our scent cone, at longer distances during dry, breezy conditions.
Odor busts are not an all or nothing affair. To what degree are we busted? Is it a full blown deer panic or something much less? No doubt in my mind that we get busted far more often than we realize.
The deer that briefly stops but shows no visible alarm, probably picked up a few molecules of our odor. They may take a second to analyze a faint human odor and continue on unalarmed, and offer a shot...either at that deer or at a following deer which actually may be the buck we want. Not all odor busts result in full blown deer panic. Reducing our odor tilts the odds slightly in our favor...and I need all the odds I can get.
I pay attention religiously to the wind. I'm a milkweed addict, which has proven to me, time and time again, that wind currents are much more complex than a lot of guys realize.
I've never experience hunting flat land. I've been hunting hills for 48 seasons now. Wind eddys and thermal behavior are not cut and dried.... High pressure sucking toward low pressure; Sometimes its swirling wind on low-pressure leeward slopes during moderate velocities that don't cause the same swirling pattern during mild velocities; Stable wind all day onhigh-pressure windward slopes but then start to shift as the sun gets lower, and a slight change of the direction the prevailing wind hits ridges and slopes is yet another complication; Falling, evening thermals on an East slope meeting air still in the sun on the South slope of that same hill makes air movement do tricky things along those thermal breaks...its a lot more complicated than just paying attention to the prevailing wind that's created by weather systems or hunting "the thermals". Sure, once the sun has completely set, thermals will settle and get consistent throughout the area, but while the sun is still shining on some areas which are adjacent to shaded areas, there is a break along those seams of differing temps and airflows. And those seams, and how they effect overall air behavior, change as the sun sets. Wind has micro patterns and those patterns change in relation to each other and change as temps change. Its very dynamic.
In a lot of hilly areas, wind behavior, at times, is so much more complicated that we can possibly predict 100%. And sure as crap, the wind will screw you just at the moment you have a 200" buck approaching. It happened to me years ago when I practiced sloppy odor reduction.
I don't view odor tactics and wind study as taking the fun out of the hunt. For me, its all part of the hunt. I enjoy the chess match.
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