Far Afield
First tracking snow
With Oak Duke

Funny how a patch of pawed up snow, in the middle of the woods, can get your heart pumping.

The first snow of the season stuck to the high ridgetops with a couple inches. But down in the valleys, what was able to stick quickly melted.

A whitetail buck had set off a small bomb in the buckthorn thicket on the edge of the field.

Not only had the snow been pawed back and the rich, black humus of the forest floor exposed, about the size of a dining room table; but brown, torn and mudencrusted leaves were kicked back as far as six feet away, on top of the wet, heavy snow.

And the day before - no sign of deer.

No sign there at all, just an unbroken white expanse of snow throughout the hardwood stand.

The whereabouts of that "perennial scrape" (yearafter year buck scrape in exactly the same spot) is a closely held secret.

This scrape site is ritually freshened and exposed by a rutting buck in that rubscared thicket, each and every year without fail.

Deer tracks, going every which way in the day-old snow, were all around.

A tracking snow gives us a great advantage because the stories of all the comings and goings are written in the snow to read. Course you need to know the language in order to read the story.

A track in damp soil is much more difficult to age than a track in the snow, not to mention even see. The consistency of snow constantly changes; hour-by-hour, dayby day.

There are many words for different types of snow.

Hunters who know the time when deer tracks were made interpolate entire whitetail movement patterns by walking and scouting and setting up their strategies accordingly.

Many hunters are tempted to take a stand when it snows, but much more can be gained by instead, using that time to scout, before the information is deleted by warmer temperatures.

Here in the Southern Zone of New York state, the early part of most deer seasons have little snow until the final week or so in December. And some have no snow at all. An early snow is a blessing for archers, if they use it.

By reading deer sign, deer hunters fine-tune their tactics, that is stand-placement - and where they are going to setup for the next hunt.

Deer tracks, rubs, scrapes, movement zones and even behavior patterns are all clues to the whitetail puzzle that can be the missing piece.

And there are never more "pieces" than when a fresh snow falls.

Many successful hunters change their hunting strategies throughout the season, but a "tracking snow, gives us an edge.

Another advantage of having snow is our ability to see deer. Whitetails have an amazing ability to blend into the cover. But when the first snow covers the ground, deer movement can be seen at impossible distances in the late fall woodlands.

The deer "take" almost always goes up dramatically when there is snow cover for the hunters to use as background.

And hunters are thriceblessed with snow cover because it is literally "a tracking snow." Deer can be trailed after the shot much easier than in wet leaves, a cut corn field, or through a brown goldenrod field.

Tracks and deer sign are so evident, so exciting in the snow.

Oak Duke, publisher of the Wellsville Daily Reporter and the Sunday Spectator, writes regularly on the outdoors.