Pushing deer for success

I spent many hours listening to tales of my late grandfather’s epic deer drives. From the 1940s to the early 1980s, Ora Ellis spent dozens of seasons hunting for deer in the Manitoulin Island/McGregor Bay portions of Ontario. He and his large group did all their deer hunts by drives. These were major operations. Gramps would drop hunters off at various spots along the shore of long points sticking out into Lake Huron and get them to walk into the bush at intervals. Then, he’d take his old boat, the Ballyhoo, down to the tip of the point, park it, and set up on the main deer escape route. Once he was in place, the push was started at a predetermined time. The hunters would move slowly towards the point, where my grandfather, and occasion­ally another shooter, was waiting. A dozen or more hunters were involved in these mas­sive pushes. Stories of multiple bucks crashing through the woods, only to meet their demise via my grandfather’s .308 Savage lever-action were told repeatedly throughout my youth. I’m sure my eyes were as wide as loonies as I tried to imagine what that scene was like. Photos of the buck poles from those old hunts are impressive. Today, deer drives or pushes remain a great way to harvest a buck. Pushing deer Deer drives are done to move animals out of heavy cover or from bedding areas. They’re most effective when deer are the least active, generally mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Drives can often be done after a morning still-hunt or before sitting at dusk. Drives also work exceptionally well after the rut when deer hunker down in cedar swamps or when they’ve been pushed into backwoods by hunting pressure. Although I’ve been on drives where tree branches are snapped purposely and much noise made, there’s no need to do this. The steady movement of a hunter through the woods is enough to get deer up and mov­ing. If you make a lot of noise on a drive, deer will run flat out, often snorting with a high-pitched wail. Few of us can hit a running deer in the open, never mind in thick bush. Yet, a deer trying to avoid an unseen threat will walk at a steady clip, checking its back-trail from time to time for a glimpse of the potential threat. A walking deer is a much easier and safer