When most hunters think "whitetail," they think of tree stands in relatively close cover. The words "mule deer," on the other hand, speak of glassing high alpine meadows and stalking bucks below the rimrock. These are the classic forms of hunting both types of deer in classic habitat: Woodlots with plenty of edge cover for whitetails; high country for mule deer. This train of thought leads us to accepting certain "givens" about our two primary species of deer.

Whitetails are crafty, cover-loving homebodies that occupy and know intimately a relatively small home range. Mule deer are open-country wanderers--migrating long distances between summer and winter ranges--and are generally less wary than whitetails.

Mule deer are definitely not the same as whitetails, but the modern mule deer is just as wary, in his way, as the whitetail. With some hunting pressure applied, he can be just as nocturnal, almost as invisible, and it's highly unlikely that today's mature buck will stop to look back when spooked--as he might have in your grandfather's day.

When you get right down to it, the differences between the various races of deer are relatively few and are outnumbered by the similarities. And since we hunt deer by figuring out their movement patterns and habits, I believe it is the habitat in which you find the deer as opposed to what kind of deer it is that dictates the best tactics to use.

This Arkansas whitetail was killed from a tree stand. No surprise here--the habitat in a lot of whitetail country makes aerial perches almost a necessity.

There are 38 subspecies of whitetail deer between the Amazon Basin and Canada's tree line. I haven't hunted every subspecies, but I have hunted them across North America, and I've found that whitetails are whitetails. They rub, scrape, grunt, snort and fight in much the same way. But as the country changes, they don't always act exactly the same, and the old saw about "whitetails living and dying within one square mile" has about as much validity as mule deer bucks always looking back. Yes, in lush, thick country--probably with agriculture nearby--deer don't have to move far to find food, water and bedding cover, so their home ranges tend to be fairly small. This suggests that a sound tactic is to pick a good spot and wait for the deer to come to you, but is it the habitat or the deer that make this strategy a good one? Tree stand hunting is by far the most prevalent technique for hunting whitetails. In the East, for example, where millions of hunters pursue whitetails, the average acreage available for the average hunter is relatively small. It doesn't make a great deal of sense to still-hunt or glass a 40-acre patch--probably not even a few hundred acres.

Maybe you'll see some deer, but you'll spook more than you'll see, and the deer you spook will simply run past your neighbor's tree stand. Even if you have unlimited acreage to hunt, a great deal of it is probably too thick to glass effectively and too dense and noisy to creep through on a still-hunt.

When the country becomes more arid, and the food and water sources are scarcer, the whitetail's home range expands in accordance with the conditions. In Texas' famed brush country, it's not unusual for whitetails to range between waterholes 10 miles apart. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, where deer densities exceedingly low, a given buck may wander the same number of miles in search of hot does. And in the Great Plains it isn't unusual for individual whitetails to wander along miles of cottonwood bottoms--and just as many miles out onto the open prairie.

This doesn't necessarily mean tactics should change. Texas' brush country is so thick that stand hunting remains the only sensible tactic. Canada is a tossup. You can roam and glass if you have lots of country to hunt, but does are more localized than bucks, and if you have does maybe you should sit them out because you never know what kind of buck might come calling. In the Great Plains, you can effectively hunt whitetails by glassing and stalking, and in this open country you can take liberties with centerfire rifles that you cannot take with archery tackle and muzzleloaders. So if you are limiting your effective range by using these latter tools, you are giving the deer's senses a greater advantage--especially if you're moving around. You're probably better off taking a stand in order to eliminate both movement and noise.

Serious whitetail hunters understand the incredible sensitivity of a whitetail's nose, accepting it as the whitetail's first line of defense. They go to great lengths to hunt with the wind, and they mask or conceal their own scent just in case. This is sensible for deer hunting anywhere. But there's nothing wrong with a whitetail's eyes, and based on my experiences hunting whitetails in a lot of different country, I believe that open-country whitetails come to rely more on their eyes than on their sense of smell.

Some of the country's best whitetail hunting is now found out on the Great Plains, river-bottom country where the deer are quite visible and quite vulnerable if you know how to hunt them. Newcomers to the prairie want to hunt them along the cottonwood bottoms, the only obvious whitetail country nestled in the sagebrush hills. That's probably the place to hunt them during early bow seasons, and perhaps later, too, after the snow flies. Give these same whitetails just a small taste of hunting pressure, though, and they leave the bottoms and head for the prairies. Out there you hunt them like, well, like burrowing pronghorns or like mule deer.

Several years ago, we were driving down a dirt road in eastern Colorado when my old outfitter friend Tom Tietz jammed on the brakes. I have no idea how he saw it, but there was a nice whitetail buck bedded several hundred yards away on a sagebrush ridge, out in the middle of nowhere. Even from that distance, the buck saw us stop, and he bailed out over the top of the ridge--never considering waiting for confirmation from his nose. Tietz took his hunter in a big circle, and they killed that buck two or three canyons away. Not many miles from there, we didn't get so lucky.

We had hunted a cottonwood-lined canyon system without success, then decided we should check the ridges above. We climbed up to a good vantage point and looked carefully over the top. On the next ridge, about 600 yards away, there was a good whitetail buck bedded in a little cut, shaded by big boulders. We ducked out of sight immediately and thought we were in good shape. There was a strong crosswind, so there was no way the deer could wind us. We made an elaborate approach with the wind in our faces, but when we got to that shady spot the buck was gone. One quick look at 600 yards was apparently enough for him. Was it the country or the game? In close cover, whitetails learn to rely on their noses. In open country, they learn to place more trust on eyesight.

Given that sometimes you have to hunt whitetails like mule deer, do you ever have to hunt mule deer like whitetails? Sure. Many mule deer herds have radical shifts between summer and winter range--mini-migrations--which is rare with whitetail herds. And because they often live in big country where food, water and cover are widely separated, even if they don't "migrate" they often move around quite a lot. Much of this movement is dictated by habitat.

I love hunting the breaks, badlands, coulees and river bottoms of the western Great Plains, where the country starts to slope upwards toward the foothills of the Rockies. Many spots within this region have both whitetails and mulies; some hunting licenses mandate which species you may kill, some are just for "deer." During rifle season, we hunt both whitetails and mule deer the same way: spotting and stalking. But in archery and muzzleloader seasons, we hunt both species from stands, mostly placed in natural funnels along the river bottoms. Scouting tells us that a given place is better for whitetails or mule deer, but we really have no idea what might show up.

The areas where mule deer and whitetail range overlap are not the only areas where mule deer can be effectively hunted from stands just like whitetails. Much of the southern Rockies are covered with thick oakbrush, which is great deer habitat but extremely difficult to hunt. The cover is extremely noisy, and there's limited visibility.

MULIE STANDS
Most mule deer hunters try to work the edges and clearings and stay out of the oakbrush, but some use stands carefully placed along established game trails. This is more common for bow and blackpowder hunters than it is during rifle seasons, but it works and is one of the best ways to get the drop on big mulies that are too smart to leave cover during daylight hours. In more arid areas, some western deer hunters take stands over waterholes (not a bad tactic for almost any game), but, in general, using whitetail tactics isn't real common with Rocky Mountain, desert or California mule deer. These deer live in country that's open enough to allow visibility, and hunting areas are generally big enough that you can go after the deer you see. Also, western deer densities are generally much lower than with eastern whitetails, so you usually need to cover a lot more ground to find deer.

When you get all the way out to the West Coast and the mule deer shift to the smaller blacktail subspecies, things change considerably. While the blacktail has always been considered a mule deer subspecies, recent DNA research suggests it may actually be the original North American deer from which both mule deer and whitetails developed. This could explain why the blacktail's behavior is, in many ways, more similar to whitetails. Or is it due to habitat? Typical blacktail country is "tighter" than most mule deer country--more rainfall, more vegetation, more cover.

The Coues deer is a whitetail, plain and simple, but the desert mountains it calls home justify plans of attack that, say, an eastern whitetail hunter would find quite unfamiliar.

In this tighter cover of the Pacific Northwest, blacktails are genuine homebodies compared to mule deer. They occupy smaller home ranges, are more habitual in their use of trails and tend to spend more time in cover. They are considerably more responsive to calling and rattling than mule deer. Is that because, in thicker cover, they place more reliance on their hearing? Too bad we can't ask the deer. Along the edge of blacktail country, most hunters use typical mule deer hunting techniques: glassing and spot and stalk. Some use stands, including typical whitetail tree stand setups, but if the country is open enough for visibility, stand hunting isn't essential.

When you get into the rain forests of western Oregon and Washington, there is no longer much of a choice. The locals refer to the most common technique in those dense jungles as "trail sitting"--finding a well-used trail and camping on it until a deer comes along. Some hunters literally sit, while others use ground blinds and tree stands. It's really no different than sitting on a whitetail stand in Pennsylvania. There are, of course, two different blacktails: the Columbian blacktail of the Pacific Northwest and the Sitka blacktail found along the coast and on offshore islands from northern British Columbia up into the southern parts of Alaska.

Blacktail antlers are considerably smaller and stubbier than whitetails or mulies, but under ideal conditions their bodies can be quite a bit larger. Sitka blacktail on Kodiak Island, for instance, are burly and barrel-bodied. I don't know if Sitka blacktails differ greatly from Columbian blacktails in behavior, but the country in which they're found varies tremendously. Much of the coastline of northern B.C. and southeast Alaska, and many of the islands--the Queen Charlottes, Alaska's "ABC" islands--are incredibly thick.

With visibility severely limited, stand hunting is the sound tactic, but low deer densities make it really tough. Out on Kodiak Island, however, these same deer are extremely visible on the open, wind-swept slopes. There you can hunt purely by glassing and stalking. Northern deer populations like these are subject to severe ups and downs depending on the severity of the weather. When I hunted on Kodiak, I hit it just right: After several mild winters there were deer everywhere, and it was more like hunting pronghorns in unusually hilly country. Our biggest problem was too many deer to wade through to get close to the ones we wanted (what a problem to have), so fairly long shots were the norm. Is it the country or the deer? In the case of tactics, it was the country.

THE OTHER WHITETAIL
Among the 38 whitetail subspecies, we single out just one as being different enough to rate special consideration: the Coues whitetail of the Southwest. But is he really that much different from other whitetails? I don't think so.

The Coues deer is a whitetail. He rubs and scrapes, grunts and snorts, has a home territory (although, in his arid country, it can be quite large), and during the rut he chases does with abandon. Although I love to hunt him and am glad we don't lump him in with the rest, to me the biggest difference with Coues deer is the country he lives in. The desert mountains of southwestern New Mexico, southern Arizona and northwestern Mexico are really big country where deer densities are generally low. Since the Coues deer is a whitetail, he could be hunted by standing, calling or rattling. Shoot, I've even done a couple of drives that produced deer. Most of the time, though, Coues deer are spread too thin for using standard whitetail tactics.

Instead, Coues deer hunting has evolved as the ultimate glassing game: the biggest and best optics, the most spectacular vantage points, and the most patience and determination in keeping your eyes glued to the eyepieces. Coues deer country--with its slopes of brush and cactus--is usually conducive to this kind of approach, and because hunting pressure is relatively light, these deer are not nearly as nocturnal as their eastern whitetail counterparts. So glassing--a traditional mule deer technique--definitely works for these whitetails, while traditional whitetail tactics are usually of limited value. Usually. We have found an area in northern Sonora that produces some real whoppers, but it's a brushy, relatively flat area where glassing just doesn't work--too much cover, not enough relief for vantage points.

Perhaps we need to hunt these deer as if they were eastern whitetails, but it would be difficult and frustrating because the density is really low. There aren't many deer, but the cowboys and ranchers find huge sheds and kill the occasional monster. Truth is we haven't figured out how to hunt this area effectively--yet. But I'm sure the right answer lies in figuring out the country just as much as in figuring out the deer.