Overnight winds had swept the oaks below, blowing fresh snow into drifts higher than a whitetail’s brisket. I knew the snow’s depth because a doe crossing the woods below me was plowing a furrow in the fluffy blanket as she approached. The doe paused occasionally in her midmorning stroll to browse...

If your knees don’t knock and your pulse doesn’t pound as a buck slips into range, maybe it’s time you quit deer hunting. As Aldo Leopold wrote: “The love of hunting is almost a physiological characteristic. I should not like to own the boy whose hair does not lift his hat when he sees his first...

No biologist, veterinarian, or medical professional believes the popular bowhunting claim that deer have dead space high in their chest. That void, it’s said, lets a broadhead pass through with little harm to the deer if it just happens to exhale as the arrow hits, supposedly opening the space...

If the hunting gods ever created a belief system more indifferent to scientific scorn than the moon’s supposed impact on big-game animals, they’re keeping it to themselves. Researcher after researcher since the 1970s has failed to document any changes in deer activity during new moons, quarter-moons...

Hunters tend to overestimate a whitetail deer’s hearing abilities, maybe because we constantly–and mistakenly–marvel at their red-alert reactions to sounds we barely hear. Those comparisons can be deceiving. For one thing, most adult hunters have abused their hearing for with decades of chain saws...

No hunter who’s seen deer halt in their tracks when crossing downwind has questioned the superiority of a whitetail deer’s sense of smell. Not only do most hunters rank the deer’s nose over its own keen ears and doubting eyes, we also rank it a world beyond our own scent-detecting abilities. Maybe...

Recent research into whitetail vision confirms what you’d expect from a crepuscular prey species: They see their best during the dim light of dawn and dusk. Bradley Cohen, the lead researcher in a 2014 University of Georgia (UGA) study, calls whitetails an “anti-predation machine.” For starters...