Let’s imagine you are still-hunting like the average deer hunter still-hunts these days: sneaking through the woods, often changing direction, often halting to listen for sounds made by a deer and scanning ahead from side to side, your main objective being to spot a deer within shooting range. You rarely remain at one location more than a few minutes. Because most deer you hear or see are noisily bounding away, making them very difficult targets, you carry a firearm that enables you to quickly fire several times. All of this makes it very easy for whitetails that have survived your aggressive style of hunting during two or more previous hunting seasons to quickly identify and avoid you. Within a day or two, most if not all mature whitetails that lived in your hunting area will have abandoned their home or breeding ranges, unlikely to return for several days or until the hunting season is over. Still-hunting as practiced today is the least efficient of methods to hunt whitetails and one of the two most destructive to additional hunting in the area until the beginning of the following hunting season.

Next blog: Properly done, scouting during a hunting season is step-one of the most rewarding of ways to hunt whitetails today.