Field notes on deer and scent

What a treestand does to your scent.

Your scent leaves the stand at stand height and comes back down to a deer's nose farther out. How far depends on the air far more than on the feet: about bow range on a sunny afternoon, a few hundred yards on a still night. Under a closed canopy, or in the evening's draining air, it may not help at all.

By Gavan. 26 October 2026, a 6-minute read.

Where it comes back down

Scent spreads up and down as it travels. From a stand it reaches the ground once it has spread as far down as you are high, and it's strongest at the ground a little past that. How fast it spreads depends on the air. Sun-warmed air churns and brings it down quickly. Overcast or breezy air mixes it more slowly. On a clear, still night it hardly spreads at all and travels a long way first (Briggs 1973; Turner 1994).

"First" is where it starts reaching the ground, "most" where it's strongest there. Those are our sums on the standard open-country spread curves, so treat them as a guide. The curves were fitted from 100 m out, so the close numbers are stretched, and a real plume wanders, so scent touches down in pulses before and after these points.

• Height buys a gap close to the tree. Past the gap you're a ground hunter: 110 yards out on a sunny day, scent from 13 ft is 95% of what a ground sit puts there (our sums). Climbing 20 feet up doesn't vent your scent into orbit. It spreads on the way and comes back down; the tree only buys it a head start, about bow range on a sunny afternoon, before it reaches his nose.
• On a still night it lands late, but strong. It has hardly spread on the way, so where it does come down it can be several times stronger than daytime scent at the same distance.

What the tests say

We found no study of stand height and deer detection. Outdoor Life hung a stand at 10, 15, 20 and 25 ft in a 10 mph breeze. From 25 ft the powder "was blowing away and not down to the ground," and the writer judged that a deer 15 or 20 yards downwind would have been overshot, while "deer that were maybe 100 yards away would certainly smell me" (Robinson, Outdoor Life). The sums agree: from 25 ft on a sunny, breezy afternoon, scent first reaches the ground at about 33 to 48 yards.

Bowhunting.com calls height for scent "Hogwash!", because from 18 or 30 ft the scent lands well past archery range anyway (Martino, Bowhunting.com). That's right in overcast air and at night. On a sunny afternoon, scent from 18 ft is back at the ground by about 23 yards.

Under the trees

Under a closed canopy 50 to 80 ft tall, a stand at 13 to 20 ft isn't above anything. By day your scent rises into the crowns, where the air turns over in about a minute (34 seconds with the leaves off) (Bannister 2023), and the eddies at the canopy top mix it back down (Finnigan 2000; Raupach 1996). Our own model agrees: when we gave the scent the canopy's own layers of wind, a 20 ft stand in 90 ft hardwood got a shorter cone, not a longer one. The scent moves faster at mid-canopy but is mixed down and settles sooner.

At night the air under a forest canopy drains as its own cool layer along the slope of the floor (Staebler and Fitzjarrald 2005), and a stand inside that layer goes with it. A stand buys the most where there's no canopy over it and the draining layer is shallow: a field edge, a cutover, the edge of a marsh.

On a field edge

What the app draws

Groundwind's scent cone runs from the ground, from 4 m (13 ft) or from 6 m (20 ft), and counts only what reaches a deer's nose, about a metre off the ground. It moves your scent at the wind of each layer it passes through, so it sits inside the canopy's air under the trees and can ride over a field edge at dusk. The card says where it first reaches noses and how far it goes. It's a model and hasn't been checked against powder watched from a stand yet, so puff yours from the stand and log it.