Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Serious Deer Talk Forum Hardwood smoke as cover scent?

Anybody us it? buddy of mine swears by it. says its something deer smell all the time so if they get a whiff they pay it no mind. uses hickory since it has strongest smell and hangs his clothes over it. seems to smell strong enough to mask most odors if your doing every thing else right

Good one!

I've always heard to keep the wind right. Other than that, just burn cypress limbs with about 25% of the water in them so it the steam being burned off will absorb better into the clothes. After that, Smoke for a day or two with hickory and it'll blend the smells. If you wanna go ahead and pull the trigger on one for sure, pour some doe in heat urine on your shirt.

No thanks.

or ya could just get yer cat to piss on the clothes, the deer won't be able to smell YOU.....

I know it works but it gives me a headache so I just climb higher up the tree

how does a deer smell it all the time?

I wouldn't say all the time, but how many times you drive by and see someone burning something in a year's time? Limbs, trash, leaves, fireplace, cleaning lots off... and so on.

Deer won't associate danger with the smell and the odor overpowers your own scent. Been using the smoke treatment for years and it works great. Only reason I buy scent-away is for my boots.

Maybe piss as a cover scent works in the suburbs of birmingham but down here we have more fireplaces than winos.

I smoke my hunting clothes from October-April and their is never a hunt or shed/scouting trip that I do not have deer come in from every direction. I don`t hunt the wind anymore, I just smoke up and hunt. I will put my faith in the use of wood smoke as the best cover scent method over any carbon suit on the market!! But then again I live in an area that 50-60% of the population still use wood for heat, including me. My wood stove burns 6-7 months out of the year and is the only heat source I have, so the deer are use to the smell of smoke. I wash my hunting clothes once a week, shower with regular scented soap and shampoo, and when I do get busted by a deer it is because of my movement not the way I smell. But to each his own method, I just do what works for me and am very successful at it.

Had a six point walk under my stand this afternoon and directly away from me, he came in down wind. Also the youth hunt I took my nephew on this weekend both our hunting clothes were covered in wood smoke, that buck came within 15 yards of our ground blind.

Some pics from the last few days behind the house on my way to my stand or out of my stand. First two pics are a 6 point and 7 point at 30-35 yards, 3rd pic 10 yards, 4th pic coyote at 25 yards, 5th pic button head at 3O yards, 6th pic cow horn spike at 45 yards, 7th pic two does at 35 yards.

I wear my clothes and stand in front of the fireplace so it will absorb the smoke smell. It works for me.

I have found that every kind of cover scent WILL spook deer at some time...I TRY to remain as scentless as possible.

Long reply, sorry....

Before work this morning I took a scent free soap shower, used the Arm and Hammer deo, then went to work. I came in early so I could get into a stand. I noticed my dad was burning a brush pile when I got home. We live next door to them. I ran in, changed into my hunting clothes, hopped on the 4 wheeler and pulled down wind of his brush pile. The smoke was rolling out of it and I sat there maybe a minute. I had never tried using smoke as a cover scent before, but with the wind swirling as it was this afternoon I figured it couldn't hurt.

I got to the stand on my food plot at 4:20. At 4:50 a couple of does and some yearlings came out in the plot about 80 yards away. They fed out into the middle of the plot and decided to camp out until way after dark. The wind had swirled all afternoon and I was surprised they didn't smell me. I didn't want to spook the deer, so when shooting time had passed I lowered my bow to the ground and sent a text to my wife asking her to drive over and run the deer out of the plot with my truck. As I saw her coming through the back pasture I looked to my right and saw 2 big bodied deer about 25 yards downwind of me in the plot. When my wife got to the food plot, I could see in the lights that there were 4 deer and all 4 were bucks. Nothing big, 2 spikes and 2 small forkhorns, or small 6's, but I had bucks downwind all the same. Until I see something different, I'm gonna smoke my clothes pretty often.

Yea , that's the kind of stuff my buddy was saying he had experienced. i usually change into my hunting clothes on site but i know it's impossible to be totally scent free. i'm going to try it. i figure if a deer is downwind i'm busted anyway.

I started smoking my clothes this year and I've noticed a big change in the way deer react around my stands. I don't get busted nearly as often and my confidence is higher, which I believe is a huge plus. I wish I could remember what it's called, but there's some sort of dvice similar to what bee hive owners use to run the bees off so they can get in and extract the honey. Some sort of "smoke gun" if you will that you can use to apply the smoke to all your hunting gear. There's a guy on youtube who took his son and smoked him up (lol I'm sure there's another meaning in that somewhere) and sent him about 100 yards away then turned a dog loose to track thr boy. The dog eventually found him but he had a hard time doing it. It really showed me that if there's a mix of human scent and smoke, the smoke really does make it hard to pinpoint human odor as well as other foreign odors.

I hunt a lot from the ground and always "smoke up" before hitting the woods. I keep a metal pan in my truck bed, start a little fire with Fritos corn chips (will burn for about 3 minutes and is a good cheap fire starter), put on some leaves and twigs to get a little blaze, stand around the smoke for a few minutes, then head stright to the woods.

I try to hunt the wind but when it is swirling then that just doesn't work. It is impossible to be scent free and impossible to completely mask your scent, but it is possible to cover up your scent with smoke just enough as not to completely spook deer downwind. Lost count of the times I've had deer downwind and close and had no idea I was there hunting on the ground. No other scent control but for the smoke.

It is not foolproof and not 100%, but it helps better than anything else I've ever tried. Been doing this since I was a kid and was taught by some old timers that it works. From my years of hunting I can see a difference in getting busted when I haven't used smoke.

straycat, I think every region in the world uses the statement, "if you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes and it will change." Around here we can surely say if you want to hunt a particular wind, just wait a few minutes and it will blow that direction. Even yesterday while hunting on the east side of a large high pressure system, after a front moved through the wind blew from the south, and west while I was in my stand. It was out of the north when I left to go hunting and blew from the north most of the time, but swirled many times. It's basically impossible this time of the year to plan a hunt to be downwind. It seems easier to do that once fall gives way to winter, but still not possible all the time.

It cant hurt. I would reckon that indians smelled of wood smoke most of the time. And most of them were far superior hunters to most of us. If woodsmoke hurt hunting they would get hungry quick.

I wish I could put simple things like this together, but unfortunately I don't.

After reading this, and trying it yesterday, I think back on the times in the past that I've gone hunting for a few days and camped while hunting. Coming in to camp, warm up by the fire, taking a ho bath, and wearing the same camo for 3 days. I've killed deer on those excursions. Can't say if I have or have not been "blown at" during those trips. My memory isn't that good. I can say that this year when my clothes have been washed in scent free soap, dried in a scent free dryer, hung out to air out overnight, put directly into a plastic bag, and I've only put them on after a good de-scenting shower, using scent free deo, spraying down in scent killer before and after getting dressed, I've been blown at on several hunts.

Maybe it boils down to this, maybe it doesn't, BUT I figure there is no way to eliminate human scent. It can be knocked back, but not eliminated. Maybe concentrating on eliminating all scent, leaves nothing but human scent for the deer to smell. Maybe pure human scent, regardless of it's concentration is enough to spook deer. I guess that might be the purpose for cover scent. Not to mask human scent but to dilute it. I've never tried a cover scent that I could say really worked. Maybe smoke is just that.

Some primative hunters would go into a sweat lodge to purify the body before the hunt. They would sweat out much of the impurities that cause sweat to stink, and would be less detectable to game. It wouldn't be unreasonable to wonder if they might "purify" thier clothing with fire(smoke).