Until we can successfully transplant a human head onto a buck’s body, nothing we say about whitetail behavior amounts to more than an educated guess. Dr. Karl V. Miller, a deer expert whom I talk with regularly, and I have arrived at an agreement that allows him to preserve his integrity as a scientist and allows me to preserve my sanity. It is understood that his response to any question about what a deer will or won’t generally do begins with the following: “It all depends on the situation…” In short, we’ll never know it all. But our knowledge of the whitetail continues to advance. The latest studies, presented here, reveal new insights that debunk much of what we used to hold as deer gospel. This science will also improve the way we hunt.

VISION

The Old: Once a deer sees you, even from a good distance, the game is over.

The New: We already knew quite a bit about how deer view the world: Deer vision, like our own, is a function of rods and cones; deer can see extremely well in low light; and deer have only two types of cones (blue and green-yellow), whereas humans have three (blue, green, and red). Their color vision is of lower quality generally and narrower in overall ability to differentiate certain hues.

Researchers believe that deer see blaze orange as a shade of gray. However, their blue cones enable them to see that color distinctly. So the hunter who wears blue jeans and a camo shirt rather than full-body blaze orange has got it backward. He is more visible to deer and less visible to fellow hunters, which makes it a safety issue as well.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting: A deer’s ability to distinguish detail is horrendous. Using a hand-raised doe named Nellie and “targets” of black-and-white bars of varying sizes, Dr. Karl V. Miller, professor of wildlife ecology and management at the University of Georgia, and his students measured Nellie’s visual acuity. A human with excellent visual acuity has 20/20 vision. Miller discovered that Nellie sees detail at about 20/100. In other words, if you are 20 feet from a deer and remain motionless, the deer can resolve the details of your appearance no better than a human observing you from 100 feet.

What This Means for Hunters: Two things: One, a deer couldn’t care less what camo pattern you’re wearing. If it breaks up your outline, it has done its job. Two, when a whitetail stares straight at you and snorts—that is, when you are certain you’ve been busted—do not throw in the towel. If it is your movement that has alerted the animal, it’s possible that the deer has not yet figured out what you are. If you freeze, you basically disappear again. Unless the alarmed deer smells you, it may relax after a minute, giving you a second chance. Which means the game isn’t over until the deer flees.

Bonus: Tree-Stand Consealment

Deer pupils are horizontally slit, which, along with features such as the distribution of rods and cones, gives them a completely different kind of vision from our own. First, deer can take in a tremendously wide field of view at a glance, with no eyeball movement needed. Second, their orbs are designed to pick up danger where it will do them the most good—at a distance. Third, the slit naturally orients their eyes to pick up movement at or just below the horizon, the place from which a predator is most likely to appear.

Miller maintains that deer eyes are much less adept at picking up movement above that horizon line. So although hunters can never get away with much movement around a deer, they can get away with more movement in a high tree stand than on the ground.

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Tags: deer, hunting, whitetail

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 | RSS 2.0 feed.