Was out this weekend and had a close encounter, just wondering if anyone else has experienced this. Heading to the edge of a picked cornfield which has shown lots of activity. Heading to stand very early to hopefully get there before the big guys, or at least early enough that if I do push them out they'll want to come back before sun-up. A big guy WAS in the field, I could see him by the moonlight. I was crawling to stand, hoping to not spook him too bad, and he turned, ran off about 30 yds and wheezed/whistled a couple of times, but didn't run off. I wheezed back at him a couple of times, and he actually started back towards me! He came closer than when I first saw him, at which time I began to soil myself! I was still on hands and knees, and was worried he was looking for a fight on his territory. Again, scared the crap out of me. First time with this type of thing, and wondering if anyone else has experienced this. Over the weekend heard LOTS of wheezing, and when I wheezed back they would respond and come in. Really neat to experience, but wondering how to handle that in the future.
Sounds like you were hearing the snort... never a good thing.. an alarm call (if you will)... when you hear it, the deer are pretty much gone and all you actually have is to snort back and them and hope... I've turned deer around or even held deer snorting back at them but eventually, they are going to walk away... Not to mistake this snort to the sniff/wheeze of an aggressive buck...
haha thats cool where im from the competition for does and territory isn't very competitive so if i snort/wheeze i end up seeing white tails heading in the wrong direction
I can't explain the aggressive behavior. I had 3 of them snorting/wheezing with me as the 4th. We were just going around in a chorus for about 10 minutes Saturday night. They were actually moving back towards me as this was happening. Didn't make sense. Fun to listen too, but they never did spook. Stayed fairly close by, within 100 yds. The buck from the above post only moved off about 100 yds and actually came back in to see what was goin gon in the field. He's the one on my avatar, 30 yds to my right where I have no shot at him. Again, cool to see, but he was definitely on high alert. I just always thought, as you guys said, the snort/wheeze was not good, but here it worked to provoke them in.
