Through the years, well-known hunter Bill Winke has pursued whitetails in a wide range of places, and this experience has taught him that some bucks are easier to hunt than others.
Winke says the most difficult whitetails to bowhunt are those that don’t encounter people except during hunting season. These whitetails haven’t built up any tolerance for people, so the slightest human odor in the woods — or a confirmed sighting of a person — puts them on high alert.
In contrast, whitetails that regularly encounter people are less suspicious of every little thing people do. Because they live within a few hundred yards of homes, these deer regularly smell human odor. They also see kids playing in backyards and often hear dogs barking. These deer have learned to tolerate their encounters with people, and in the video below, Winke explains why this often works in a hunter’s favor.
It’s worth noting that not all avid whitetail hunters agree with Winke, and they say so in the comments section of his 8-minute YouTube video. Some argue that whitetails living near residential areas can sometimes be even tougher than wilderness whitetails — that deer can positively tell the difference between normal human activity and those of a hunter infringing in a whitetail’s world.
I doubt Winke would disagree with these comments, because certainly every hunting scenario is unique. My 50 years of experience pursuing whitetails in everything from the big woods to backyards in the Upper Midwest has taught me that no whitetails are easy, but some are easier than others.
Example: I’ve bowhunted in suburban wooded parks where whitetails spent almost all their time feeding in people’s backyards (corn piles, gardens, under bird feeders, etc.). These bucks were extremely difficult to kill because of city/state rules about needing to be a certain distance (say 500 feet) from an occupied residence (i.e. a house). So there was no room between where the bucks bedded (thick cover within sight of the backyards) and their food. The best time to kill these bucks would have been when they were rutting, traveling from wooded park to wooded park searching for a doe in heat, but dates of these special park bowhunts (only 2-3 days, usually) didn’t align with the rut.
If I had to choose which deer/habitat is easiest — still not easy! — I'd say areas where deer regularly encounter people but there’s a bit of room for deer to live away from backyards, and they have dependable food sources (ag fields) away from houses. These habitats are generally a patchwork of woods and ag fields, with farms and some non-farm houses every half-mile or mile along a grid network of roads (some paved, some gravel). These whitetails are somewhat desensitized to people. But that said, you still must be super careful hunting them!
