Regardless of whether you’re scouting or actually bowhunting, every possible precaution must be taken before entering a mature buck’s domain not to leave human scent. Precautions such as using scentless soap on yourself and your clothes, and wearing knee-high rubber boots. In addition, I highly recommend wearing Scent-Lok’s charcoal lined, odor-reducing suits. These suits are breathable, allowing moisture to pass through while filtering out scent molecules.
Still, even if you’re wearing a Scent-Lok suit, knee high Lacrosse rubber boots and washed clean of bacteria, all is for nothing if you don’t have the wind direction in your favor. Your approach and your stand should be downwind or at least crosswind from where you expect deer to approach.
Scent control is a very major piece of the puzzle. A whitetail deer is a scent-detecting machine. It’s estimated a whitetail can smell 10,000 times better than a human. This is because a whitetail has several hundred million scent receptor sites in its nose, compared to a meager five million in the human nose.
The amazing thing is even after you’ve taken every pain staking precaution, there is still a good chance and old nanny doe will blow your cover anyway. However, if you don’t take every possible precaution, you won’t stand a chance. Most deer will wind you from so far away, you won’t even know you’ve been caught! Granted, we all have “stinky” friends that have tagged a good buck or two during their lifetime. Yet, think how much more successful they could have been….
