Blinds and scent control

[Finlander]

You are what you eat!

[BLACKJACK]

All this talk about meatballs makes me want to goto the Cooking forum!!!

[Bear55]

There really isn't a great way to measure scent control because all animals react to it differently. Young deer and does sometimes could care less about your scent, or they smell it and don't react at all. A lot of times these younger deer have never had a bad reaction to human scent so they have little reason to fear it.

The problem I see is people attempting to go scent free and contributing the deer reaction or lack there of to the scent products, when a lot of time the deer would have reacted the same way without scent control. I have had dozens of deer downwind of me and pay little to no attention to me. Or they put their nose up and smell me but sit there and feed anyway. It can really be an eye opener.

Now when you start talking about older deer you start to see a more consistent reaction, every mature buck and a lot of older does that have crossed my trail or got downwind of me pretty much freaked out or turned tail and snuck away asap. Most of these encounters happened when I was a scent control freak too, so I finally gave up.

I have talked to a few people who take extreme scent control measures, going as far as not eating meat and other strong odor foods during the hunting season so they don't smell like a predator, they also take chlorophyll tablets to reduce their scent and do all the showering/boots/carbon/clean clothes stuff. These guys were hard core and even they admitted if a buck got downwind of them they were busted. Now why spend all that money and time and go through all the scent stuff when it just doesn't work? I guess if you are going to do it you might as well go all out and take exreme precautions go for it, if you just going to half a$$ it I wouldn't waste my time.

[Jason_Gundersen]

I do my best to control my scent (shower, wash clothes, hang outside) but not to the point where I spend $200 for a jacket when I can get the same thing for $100 without the carbon... I can defintaly tell the difference as I can say, without lying, I get winded maybe once or twice a year but that can also be attributed to my refusal to hunt a stand with a bad wind regardless of how much I want to sit there... Its an arguement that can never be won but the most important thing, blind or treestand, is play the wind and pray for rising thermals

And my favorite cover scent to use is taking a handful of pine needles and breaking them in half and rubbing them on my clothes... Its a strong scent and at the least it makes me "think" I'm making a difference lol

[Finlander]

If I can find some standing water from a pothole, creek, or even a lake, I'll go in there with my mud boots and walk around a little bit to get some natural scent on there rather than scent spray which is mostly soda water anways.

[deerminator]

I do something similar, althought not exactly that. I have my wife buy some cheap panty hose, stuff it full of dirt, leaves and grass from my hunting area and viola, natural cover scent, that I throw in my hunting clothes "dresser" in my hunting cave (closet under the stairs). The dresser is just one of those plastic sterilite bins with drawers. I try not to keep anything smelly in the closet like gun oil and keep an open box of baking soda in there to absorb odors. And the door stays shut. Scent control at its minimum. And a lot easier and cheaper than all the stuff I used to do with no better results.