Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Deer stand / cigar question

Anyone here smoke cigars whilst in a tree stand? 12 to 14 feet in the air?

My experience is that a deer will smell you no matter what if he gets down wind. I only have hunted whitetail.

Not in a treestand, but on the ground, all the time.

Doesn't seem necessary. But that's just me.

Those things will stunt your growth

+1. Don’t smoke anymore, but I did for years.

I have had deer that seemed attracted to both pipe and cigar smoke, but at other times it spooked them. It seems almost random for putting them on the alert but not necessarily spooking them. I don't smoke when there are down drafts or a temperature inversion like around a stock tank, this has definitely spooked deer.

I don't smoke, but I don't think that animals are bothered by the smell of tobacco smoke, but I think that they do notice the hand movements that are associated with smoking.

I use to smoke and hunt. Got busted by deer a few times because of it. But I have seen some upclose that my smoke went right past them and didn't bother them. They were young dumb ones.

My dad was a chain smoker, deer didn't seem to mind, we killed many with him having a cigarette lit up, shotgun and bow distances.

Funny, he'd always tell me "I'm checking the wind" when he lit one up. Salem lights!

I used to hear that smoking cherry cavendish tobacco in a pipe would attract deer. I used to smoke myself sick trying to attract deer that way. Of course, this was when I was still hunting in wool clothes that reeked of mothballs and carried a Jon-E handwarmer. I was up for trying anything and everything.

No. I never found any surefire way to attract deer with those methods.

It's pretty elementary.

When hunting, you are in the living room of everything wild in the outdoors.

Any scent that's not usually there will draw the attention of every animal that smells it.

Some of you talk like you have not spent much time in the outdoors....

If they can smell your smoke they can smell you, too.

I’d think that would bust them more than a cigar would.



P

I enjoy a fine cigar every afternoon. i start as soon as I get into the stand and am done by prime time. Never seemed to be an issue for me.

If a deer had to run every time the smell of smoke was in the air it would almost be in perpetual motion.

Tobacco use in any form is a nasty offensive habit.

i used to smoke cigars while deer hunting. it was one way to check which way the wind currents were going, so i told myself. i've had to drop a lit one to shoot a deer a few times. if they are downwind of you they are going to smell you no matter what you are doing. the biggest problem with it is the hand movements as said above.

Yesterday I was hunting and I could see the tree stand I had been using the last two days.

A group of does and fawns were walking by the stand ......one snorted a few times in alarm.

Finally the does were at the base of the tree, smelling the steps up to the stand. I hadn't smoked, I used to...

Checking the wind...it's great 4 that. But my point is they smell everything....and don't miss much.

In farm country the smell of smoke and human activity related scents of one kind or another is common. Never noticed whitetail deer act especially spooked by it alone.

As to smoking cigars, cigarettes, pipes, while hunting deer, deer are curious animals and sometimes attracted by new scents but in my experience what alerted and spooked them quicker than the smell was the physical movements associated with smoking.

As always, YMMV...

I have never smoked and would discourage others from doing so - especially when hunting deer and mature bucks in particular.

John