Strange things while hunting.

[Eric Krewson]

Anybody see strange things happen while hunting?

I saw this and it still has me wondering;

I saw some deer communication on a hunt that still has me baffled as to its complexity.

I pulled my wife's and my treestand to food plot at the end of a huge hollow on a deer cart. I got her set up overlooking the plot, left the deer cart in an old field road behind the plot and climbed a tree overlooking a honeysuckle patch about 50 yards from the plot.

Later I herd deer coming down the hollow toward the plot, there were seven of them if I remember correctly. The deer stopped on the back side of the honeysuckle patch, they sent a sacrificial fawn ahead to check for danger.

The fawn walked down a well worn deer trail and stepped out into the field road near my deer cart. The fawn instantly spied the cart and stood there looking at the it, flicking it's ears and bobbing its head. It turned and walked back to the main group of deer.

When the fawn got back to the group they formed a circle around it, it proceeded to go through the same head bobbing ear flicking motions it made when it spied the cart.

A big alpha doe left the group and walked down the same trail the fawn had walked back to the field road. She stuck her head out of the honeysuckle thicket, looked at the deer cart then turned and went back to the group.

When the doe got back to the group they formed another circle with their heads facing each other. The big doe went through the same head bobbing, ear flicking routine as the fawn had. In a moment, with a loud WOOF, she led the rest of the deer back up the hollow at breakneck speed.

These deer were communicating on a level I had previously thought to be impossible, pretty strange.......

[Tracker0721]

That's so cool! I love seeing animals behave when they think no ones watching. I've seen some strange stuff, like a fully set up camp camo'd in back in a deep dark part of the woods on a wildlife refuge with no camping permitted. Looked like the people had left seconds before so I knew I was being watched and took off. Also have found random bags tossed in the middle of the woods. Joys of living by Canada and key Mary Jane grow sites. As for animals I saw a hawk chasing squirrels through the trees and it'd hop up all the branches spiraling around the tree till the squirrel moved to another tree. Then it'd fly off and come back and do it again. Also watched ground squirrels eat their dead friends as if they hadn't eaten in years. Nothing scarier then looking at a squirrel drenched in blood eating a lung of another.

[Chief RID]

Very fortunate Eric. I have never seen anything that comes close to that.

[osage outlaw]

I've had close encounters with owls, hawks, and a flying squirrel that tried to land on my headlamp.  Once I saw a possum come up the hill and go over the other side out of site.  A while later he walked back the way he came.  He had a stack of leaves wrapped up in his tail.  They were all the same shape and neatly stacked.  I watched him make several trips back and forth like that.  He must have had a specific type of leaf that he preferred for his den.

Another time I was hunting during the early bow season and wasn't seeing anything but a lot of squirrels.  Suddenly one squirrel let out a screeching sound like I've never heard before.  It was high pitch and almost sounded like a scream.  All the other squirrels in the valley started making the same sound for a few seconds and then everything went silent until it got dark.  It was very eerie. 

Probably the strangest thing was when I heard an elk bugle on multiple days during deer season.  We don't have elk in Indiana.  I thought maybe it was somebody messing around with a call but the call sounded like it was coming from different directions throughout the evenings.  My neighbor and 2 of my relatives hunting nearby heard it also.  Maybe an elk escaped from a game farm.

[BowEd]

Learning from wildlife there noises and actions and reasons for them takes concentration and patience.Someone with me that wants to talk too much I get away from.Being a single guy most of my life I'm very well at home in the woods by myself  daylight or night mostly training dogs having coon hunted 250 nights a year for 25 to 30 years.Many different states.Hunting along rivers I like the most.Lots of action and your noises there.Could mention lots of stories.Deer stand hunting is no different.I use squirrels to tell me something is coming.Watch other deer to tell me more are coming.Blue jays,crows,and chicadees have their warning calls too.I use them for my own benefit.
Not trying to sound like a know it all here and don't know it all at all but it's something I've been comfortable with all of my life.COOL that you guys are talking about it.To me it's really not strange or alarming.We are the strangers really.It's an ever ongoing learning process for us humans.

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

If you really want a head trip about animal communications look up the episode of the show Radio Lab where they talked with researchers looking into prairie dogs. Their language, and it absolutely is a language, is spookily advanced. They found they have a large vocabulary just in their warning calls, they don't just say "hey, a human is coming", they say "there's a tall human wearing red coming from the west".

[PEARL DRUMS]

That would be cool to witness, I totally believe deer "talk" more than we think. I've never had anything crazy happen to me, a few screech owl attacks is about it.

[Pat B]

I was sitting in a stand on the edge of just planted pines and a mature white oak grove. Some of the large oaks had died from over spray a few years before after the original pines were harvested and the area sprayed to kill off ant hardwood seedlings. This year had a very heavy acorn crop and every animal around was taking advantage of the massive mast crop.
  That day there were lots and lots of redheaded woodpeckers. More than I'd ever seen at one time. These guys were flying into the big white oaks, grab an acorn and head to one of the dead white oaks and plant the acorn is the rotted trunk. Also, this area attracted plenty of squirrels but every time a squirrel went into a live white oak a few of the woodpeckers would attack it, chasing it from the tree. This lasted all afternoon and needles to say I don't know if any deer came by or not because of all the other activity.

[JoJoDapyro]

A recent interview with Steve Renella he talked about hunting with the indigenous tribes in south America. Said how strange he found it that they could pick out one small noise in the jungle of a hurricane of sound. Crows also know a lot more than they put on. Squirrels normally just ruin my hunting day.

[H Rhodes]

This kind of stuff is one of the many reasons that hunting will never get old for me.  I think that most animals commnicate with each other in more ways than we know.  Deer sure have some strange sounds that they make.  A couple of years ago I had a little basket rack young eight point eating acorns under my stand.  He wrinkled his nose and then sneezed - it sounded just like a quiet human sneeze.  He then sort of shook his head and blinked his eyes and went back to eating acorns.  I thought to myself, "yeah buddy this pollen is bad this year". 
    One of the stranger moments that I ever had while hunting happened when I was sitting on the edge of a power line hunkered down near some wild plum trees.  A shrike, which is a grey looking little predator of a bird, came and stuck a grey fence lizard on a thorn on a honey locust sapling growing about ten steps from me.  He was gone for a while and I thought it was weird that he picked that spot.  I had seen them stick them on barbed wire before, but not on a tree.  Damned if an hour or two later he didn't come back and impale another one on that same tree about a foot away from the first one.  He perched there for a bit and looked at me as if to say "well what have you killed?"  I get a kick out of watching the show. 

[Chief RID]

You guys better have a prescription for that stuff! 

[BowEd]

Watched a great horned owl nail a hen pheasant once and many red tails catching rabbits and mice.Owls at night will swoop on past a person checking you out that's for sure.Sparrow hawks are fun to watch doing their thing.Watching those little falcons I call them streak through the woods after squirrels is fun to watch to while in the stand.A litter of coon in the tree above me climbing down past me to the ground was neat.A little darn chicadee once sat on my broadhead for quite sometime before I finally spooked him off.He cussed me out good from the tree next door.
As far as sounds in the woods especially at night hearing bobcats,coon,and beavers fighting carry pretty well through the valley when it's dead still out.Someone out there who does'nt realize what it is can have the hair on their neck raise.People around here have seen many a mountain lion and one was shot 4 miles from my place while dragging a deer through underneath a fence during a snowstorm.Personally I can't say I've seen one.My hounds never did actually get onto one either.Plenty of bobcats seen though.Love to get a good shot at one in the stand someday.
I remember the first time turkeys were chased from there roost while retrieving dogs.Seemed like the sky was falling with twigs falling underneath there.I thought those are some mighty big crows up there at first.
Mothers and fawns staying in touch with each other.Bucks grunting here and there.It's all good.Gets your blood going.Any kind of animal noises are cool to me.Go primitive it's the only way.

[kinslayer1965]

Fell asleep while turkey hunting with my father once and a black snake slithered right up my pants leg. My father thought I was making some kind of attempt at communication but he was unable to understand what all my gyrations meant. He said the screaming seemed to be pure gibberish as well.

To this day I am not sure who was more scared...me or that black snake.

CR

[H Rhodes]

I sat down with my back against a big root wad and leaned against the trunk of a fallen tree.  The other side of the root wad had a hole in the ground that was something's home.  I had sat there about fifteen minutes when something 'woofed' from under ground.  I decided to go sit somewhere else!  I guess that doesn't qualify as strange - I would woof at someone on my doorstep too.

[jayman448]

nothing like that but while fishing i witnessed the same bald eagle attack a crows nest, a hawks nest, and chase an owl across the lake. my uncle once while netting a fish had his fish attacked from below by a loon, only to have the loon attacked from above by an eagle. now both eagles were in the same bay of the same lake from the same nest only a few years apart.... i seem to think MR eagle has grown a taste for bird meat XD