It depends on where you hunt deer whether they will panic when they see or smell smoke. I used to believe that any smoke would spook deer. However, a good hunting buddy of mine called me at work one October day after he left the woods where he was deer hunting with his bow. He was sitting on a stool, next to a small trail that cut through some tall bushes to his back, while watching the intersection of two active deer trails some 10- yards in front of him. He decided to smoke a cigarette, as Nothing was moving, nor where there any alarm calls from the birds and squirrels in the woods. He took a draw on his cigarette, holding it in is left hand, and put his hand down on his left knee with the cigarette, smoke curling upward in the still air.
All of a sudden, something pushed his left shoulder, and he turned his head to see what( or who) it was. What he saw was a 5 pt. buck pushing through that gap in the bushes behind him, pushing one of the branches into his left shoulder. That buck- 1 1/2 years old, walked right4 past him, and within inches of that smoke curling up from his cigarette. When he got to the deer trails, he turned and managed to put a tree between him and my buddy, and kept that tree and others between himself and Don until he was out of sight.
Now, this occurred on a farm in Southern Champaign County, Illinois, near the border with Douglass County. This is Row-Crop farming country, and you can hear combines working the fields miles away. Burn piles are the norm, and farmers tend to burn their burnable garbage, and brush too, on a regular basis. Smoke is simply not that unusual an event to the deer living here. In fact, I have other friends who have burned brush they piled up, only to turn around and find deer standing around at the edge of the
woods watching the brush burn.
That is not the case, I suspect, in the Deep woods of the NE, nor in much of the country in the West, where smoke means fire, which is always associated with danger.
I, too, used to preach my " No smoking " rule to students in my Hunter safety classes, but have since changed that tune to reflect my own observations, and these stories from friends. Don was another Hunter Safety Instructor who taught with me, and we discussed that deer pushing past him for many weeks, as both of us believed, as you do, that smoke will drive deer away. That deer had to smell and see the smoke from Don's cigarette as soon as he pushed his head between those bushes. He could just as easily backed up, gone down about 50 feet to another gap, and been on his way where Don would have not had any kind of shot.
I still think that " no smoking " is a good General rule, but I am not sure all whitetail deer have been taught that lesson, now. :rotf: :grin: :grin: :v
