How smart are deer? Do they have a long term memory? Short term memory? How smart are they really?

Not very smart really. One track minds and short attention spans.

Wow, like so many people I know.

They are not smart. Often times one will not leave after you shoot it's companion. Mostly that happens with fawns, but sometimes adult deer will stand there looking trying to figure why their buddy is taking a nap now. Bucks looking for does are often incredibly unwary. Do something that they don't expect, say like go from walking to sitting, and they might well come closer to see what the heck is going on. If people would learn to watch carefully in the woods it would surprise them how many deer you walk past out bird hunting. Drive Interstate 94 from Hudson down to Tomah and you'll see that they don't recognize the danger of traffic either.

Smart enough to skunk me last season... Ah well...

Good one,Lol.

Back in Elmer Kieth's day they were capable of reading the paper, able to do math, tell time, and make evasive plans worthy of a west point graduate. They doubled back, carefully stepping exactly in their old tracks,and took crafty right angled jumps over windfalls and even cliffs once they knew he was on their trail. NO match for Elmer tho.
Ever read 'Elmer Keith's Big Game Hunting'? It's worth owning if you can find one.

Smart enough to walk up behind me out of a thicket, but dumb enough to go crashing back into said thicket and come out the other side, still trying to get to where they were headed in the first place. And dumb enough to look at me like they can't figure out why I'm not where I was before, right before I shoot them dead.

The ones around me are smart enough to stay in peoples backyards and live off their gardens.

They're street smart if they live long enough to learn from others or lucky enough to survive lone encounters.

After spending about a decade of shooting hundreds of crop damage deer and closely observing them nearly year-around I've come to accept the following about deer.

They're fairly good with what normally works but have a bit of delay in situations out of the ordinary. If they are accustomed to people they know/learn the difference between the appearance and gait of a casual hiker and a hunter. They live in a hierarchical society and if the leader doesn't flee or sense danger the rest stay put until the situation becomes obviously dangerous or tedious. Most don't know about cars, trucks, horns honking, tractors, guns or gun shots but the older/educated ones know known and unknown -> the educated ones flee or freeze from unknowns. They don't know about their mortality. They don't know about being shot, they know to react to pain or perceived dangerous situations and they flee the area of danger if they can identify it. They have a home (range) and are reluctant to leave it.

They "know" hunting season is upon them because hunters begin scouting the wooded areas not frequented for about nine months, areas that hikers and others don't enter. The early and/or frequent scouters change the habits of the deer just prior to deer season.

They are much like people in that they react when and as it's required.

Those are all very good answers.

One thing that most people do not realize is that deer lives in a certain range all of their lives - at least until their mother kicks them out of the herd - if they are a buck.
They mostly live a life of solitude - not needing any human intervention - feeding and stuff that at times actually brings up the mortality rate and not the opposite.

The very first day of rifle season in Pennsylvania they get real smart real quick.
Because deer lives in the woods, they can experience numerous thunderstorms in a lifetime and they are not generally scared when they hear a loud crash or boom out in the woods.
It isn't until people start running around and acting stupid after the rifle shot that they get real educated real quick.

On the opposite side, when the weather conditions gets really nasty - such as it was here last week, temps below zero at night, deer hesitates to run when danger is in the area and many times they will stand in one pose and hope that you do not notice them or that you will not bother them because their stores of fat is being depleted and they need to conserve as much energy as possible for the long winter ahead of them and any stress that is placed upon them could cause them to burn up their winter reserves and they can quite literally starve to death with a whole mouth and belly full of corn and oats and hay.

The PGC in Pennsylvania claims that as many as 14 Elk were lost last year because of humans feeding them the wrong food in the winter.

Good observations Dave. Deer are highly suspicious of anything out of the ordanary but soon become acustomed to it.

Example, and I have seen this year after year. During the summer and fall I can drive my pasture and deer will pay very little attention to me unless I stop. If they are close when I stop, say fifty yards or so, they will move off but not in a hurry. If they are out aways they will just stand and look.

About two days after the season opens they will flee at the sight of a pickup no matter where they are in relation to it. NO WE DO NOT SHOOT OUT OF VEHICLES AT DEER.

When the season closes for about a week or two this behavior continues. Then they revert to not paying vehicles any attention at all. By the end of February I am able to drive by deer slowly at thirty yards and they will just stand an watch me.

BCR

I have noticed Mallard ducks doing the same thing. About a week after the season closes here, the road ditches will be full and you can drive right by them. miles

These were't too smart!!



But this one is and still is !!!

The mature bucks form or congregate in bachelor herds about the middle to end of February and often stay and travel together until late August or early September. Sometimes old does will hang with the bachelor herd -> these old gals have a nose about a foot long it seems and a very wary.

The non-mature buck deer form matriarchal family type groups/herds with an "elected" leader, this leader is most often the one that will flee first at danger -> the others will key off her and leave once she indicates to do so. If a stealthy hunter were to shoot the lead doe (a DRT shot) and remain "hidden" to the rest of the deer the remaining deer will often not flee allowing for successive kills.

Family groups have a hierarchy, an old doe for a boss then the younger does and finally the 1 and 2 year old deer. There may be several family groups sharing or overlapping in a common range, these separate family groups also have a hierarchy and seem to avoid intermingling. Hunting a single field or feeding area may allow a hunter to hunt several different family groups at different times of the day -> one spooked group does not mean all deer in the region are spooked.


Boggy Creek Ranger
In the farm country it seems the deer do know all to well about pickups and farm equipment. These vehicles normally travel about the fields in patterns or along known routes. Once hunting season starts it seems the pickups stop traveling these circuitous routes and make a beeline straight to the deer -> the deer don't care for this direct attention in my observation. When I've needed to "sneak" up on deer in a truck I slowly follow the normal routes along the edge of the fields going slow and even then they seem to know a strange pickup and/or a persons intentions. I have had farmers leave equipment in the field (if the fields are expansive and without cover) and used this equipment as a shield, the deer don't seem to mind a stationary wagon, spreader, pickup or such. (It might take a few days for the smartest of deer to get close to the parked equipment but eventually they'll come to ignore it.)

The best thing to do is to hit them with a old car or pick up truck and then throw them in the bed while they are stunned and tie their feet together so they can't kick you.
Then drive to a secluded place where you can slit their throats or dispatch them quickly with a .22 rifle and then take them home and eat them as quickly as possible.

Deer are pretty stupid and if you tie them to a tree, they will pull - walk backwards on the rope.
You would think that it would strangle them - but it doesn't seem to phase them.

Interesting.

Do you eat them hair-on or hair-off when you're in a hurry?

This was an interesting read. WAS..thanks Daniel Boone

well one thing i learned from this thread and that's that deer are more Intelligent than Daniel Douche beer.

Big old bucks are a lot like big old men. They sleep all day and wander around all night. Neither have very much intelligence.

Well, I didn't learn much about deer intelligence on this thread but did gain quite of bit of insight into the intelligence of some of our stalwart posters. The latter was much more entertaining than the former by a long shot!

About ten years ago I saw a SPIKE that was being chased by dogs pull a perfect double back move. He trotted by me about 30 yds away heading south; he stopped about 50 yds away and then doubled back to the north for about 20 yds, took a big leap to his right (east) and circled around south of me about 50 yds farther to the east and just stood there looking back north where the dogs were approaching. Just before the dogs came into view, he trotted off to the east.
When the dogs came by and hit the spot where he stopped south of me, it was like they had hit a brick wall; it took them about 1/2 an hour to figure it out. Now how the heck did he learn to do THAT??!! It was pretty neat watching it first hand.
__________
NRA Patron

I got this buck... Coupla years now, (I think he's the same one)!
Anyway, I'm convinced he knows Tensor Calculus!

One time when I was managing a large ranch here in the Boot Heel of New Mexico, we had a VIP hunter that merited some special consideration. So, I ended up driving the guest, one of our board members and one of our cowboys around in a Suburban. We were hunting Coues whitetails. The plan was to let the cowboy (one of the best guides that we had) and the hunter out on one side of a peak that always held a lot of bucks. Then the other fellow and I would drive around to the other side and spend our time glassing for deer while the guest and his guide hunted over to meet us.

As we were driving up a canyon toward the drop off point, I got a glimpse of a buck just as he lay down in some tall mountain muhly. He was at the base of a small live oak that would provide him with shade for the rest of the morning. I only got a quick glimpse of antlers and could not tell how good he was. We stopped and I pointed out where the buck had laid down. He was on a northeast facing side hill just below the canyon rim.

Fortunately, there was a side canyon emptying into the canyon that we were in, about 200 yards up. Our board member took the guest and walked down to the mouth of the canyon where they could work their way on on the other side of the ridge and pop up over the ridge top above the buck. The cowboy and I remained with the vehicle where we could see the buck if he got up.

Maybe thirty minutes passed, and the buck (just an average 8-point) suddenly stood up and looked toward the ridge where our hunters were silently working their way up. He listened for a minute and then dropped down the hill where he would be out of sight. Turning, he calmly walked across the contour below the approaching hunters and vanished over the ridge, crossing the trail of the hunters who had just gone up.

A few minutes later, the hunters topped the ridge and peered down at the spot where the buck had been laying. Then, disappointed, they came on back down the hill. They sarcastically told me that the only thing up there was a solitary doe and that she was what I had seen. When we told them what had happened, I don't think that they believed us, and probably still don't until this day!

I chased a big sand hill mule deer for a couple of years that would do exactly the above and the country he lived in was well suited to it in that he could be 50 yards away and out of sight. When he doubled back, he would always hide his tracks.

A rather complex question. Deer have much different and often better senses than we have for one. Their night vision, for instance, is much better than ours, but their depth perception is much worse. One of the major reasons why even older, experienced bucks get killed by autos on the highways.
I am fortunate in that I get to watch deer almost every day in my yard and in my neighborhood. Want to knowe why you almost never see those big, old bucks nearly as often as you do the neighborhood does ? They are alot more wary for one thing. I just got to see one of mine last night, long after legal shooting hours. And around midnight. This is in an area where they are not hunted as far as I know. If I didn't have a very attractive "deer supplemental nutrition" block out in my yard, I know I'd be lucky to see him more than twice a year. And then only briefly during the rut.
Two things that I've learned over the years is that they are masters of their habitat and that they are literally hunted all year. If they survive four or more years, then they have learned how to be really good at that. In spite of any mistakes they've made.
We need to also remember, I think, that the mortality rate for them is very high. Very few survive their first year. Bucks don't survive nearly as well as does do. Probably because at the end of their first year, they are driven from their mothers by the doe's suitor during the rut. So they must cope often on their own and have no company to help them keep watch for predators and other dangers.
I really can't say just how smart they are. They have different tools to deal with their challenges. I've seen somne do really dumb things, like the young doe that ran into the back of our car two nights ago as we were getting out of it. Then there are those really smart, old bucks that always disappear when the season opens. E

A couple of years back, my hunting partner watched a large mature buck push a smaller buck off a very high bluff and then watch him tumble to the bottom breaking one antler off. I saw the young buck a day later-- easy to identify and he was still acting airsick. Never got a shot at the older buck.

This year, I had three bucks together come and look into my ground blind at 10 yards. An eight and two sixes. They finally just walked away. I took pics. Maybe these just weren't very smart.

Another favorite mule deer trick is to let your little buddy step out first, likely getting shot before the bigger buck will make his appearance. I've witnessed this several times over the years and no doubt it has kept some big boys alive and extra season or two.

Besides seeing mulies do that, I've also seen bull elk, desert bighorn sheep and Pronghorn Antelope do that.
I agree. It's probably saved alot of older animals. E

The 8 and two 6s, I'd bet, were young. Very young. An old deer would rarely if ever do anything " inquisitive" That includes a doe.

What I do see from mature bucks that I don't from does and drives me batty, the bucks, IF they decide to show themselves, seemingly have no concern at all. Its if they've watched for hours and nothing happens so all is well. While the does... paranoia is their middle name.

We just tried to kill a doe with a crossbow a few weeks ago. I had 3 bucks out, all 4.5 to 6.5 years old, not quite OLD, but more or less mature. once they decided to come out, I had 2 less than 5 yards from the blind the whole time. Does... would rarely come close, but eat at angles you couldn't get a shot. Then about 3 times that morning I had a perfect shot and as I did final aiming they'd just all of a sudden quickly walk off... its like they KNEW..... They were NOT seeing movement either. heads were wrong direction at those times... I"m picky about shots... the bucks I could have shot a dozen times over.

I"ve seen the young buck come out before the old one. Of course my take if the "young" one is big enough to make you happy, no big deal. But I've seen folks make some dumb mistakes that way.

Bottom line to the big bucks I've seen. Never in season. Always carefree, no worries in the world but rarely seen. Not nearly on a schedule.

Less intelligence, more instinct.

Deer, like most ungulates, are "hard wired" for the basics (what is palatable, when do I breed, when do I put on fat for the winter, what are the parameters for bedding cover, security cover, escape cover, winter cover, etc.), but they also have an amazing capacity to learn how to maximize their chances for survival in the world in which they live. They learn their home ranges through exploration, they learn where resources exist outside of their home range through exploratory behavior that is outside the normal range of their daily activities. Instinct kicks in when they are subjected to events that are outside of their learned behavior. Most of the time, it can ensure their survival, but in some situations, it will contribute to their demise.

"Life is a game. If an animal survives today, it wins the opportunity to play the game again tomorrow."