Studies using collars on hunted whitetails report different amounts of change when hunters show up, but the results follow a pattern. Deer moved less where researchers assigned hunters at a known density. Deer also visited hunted food sources after dark, although the South Carolina study could not tell hunting effects apart from inborn behavior patterns. Changes were slight or absent when hunts were brief, occurred after peak breeding, or involved deer already living away from hunters. We read these papers as pointing to both hunter numbers and the share of a deer's range hunters can see. The studies measure hunter numbers in different units, which prevents them from ranking those two factors.
STEP 1 · Assigned doses
Oklahoma deer moved less without leaving familiar ground
Oklahoma's rifle-season research on adult bucks offers the best-controlled study design. Researchers tracked 37 adult males, 2.5 years and older, on a property spanning 1,861 hectares. They assigned three hunting levels: no hunters, one hunter for every 101 hectares, and one hunter for every 30 hectares. Over 36 days, they measured daytime movement rates from 06:00 to 18:00 and nighttime rates separately (Little et al. 2016).
All groups moved at progressively lower rates, even the control group without hunting. The control and low-risk deer slowed at comparable rates. Compared with both, high-risk deer slowed more quickly during daylight and more gradually after dark. That assigns some of the decrease to the passing season and some to hunting. Relative displacement describes the proportional change from one collar location to the next in a deer's direct distance from its initial location. It began at its greatest value and dropped after the season to roughly one-third of that value. The researchers interpreted this as more intensive use of less ground.
Another paper published in 2016, with some of the same researchers, examined travel distance and the area of small ranges in two-day intervals. Its controlled study varied risk across time and space (Marantz et al. 2016). Travel distance, area used and exploratory movements decreased. The sharpest reduction came while hunting was active for 16 days. Small ranges, called microranges, did not grow, and deer remained faithful to ranges they had established earlier.
An extension bulletin from Mississippi State supplies two additional figures from research its deer lab conducted in Oklahoma, without identifying a paper for that study. By gun season's second weekend, daytime cover use had increased by 240 percent. Sightings by hunters of collared bucks confirmed to be within hunted ground had dropped by 62 percent (MSU Extension P3927). Its authors conclude that bucks under hunting pressure remain nearby but shift the timing and location of their presence.
STEP 2 · Food and the clock
Bucks still visited hunted feeding areas, but after dark
That bulletin also follows GPS-collared adult bucks on privately owned ground beside Mississippi's Big Black River. For hunters choosing stand locations, the reported scores were about twice the natural-vegetation score at feeders. At summer food plots, scores were five times the natural-vegetation score; at winter food plots, nine times. As risk shifted from low levels to high levels, bucks reduced their use of pine, bottomland, upland hardwoods and herbaceous cover. They avoided crop fields when risk was high. Daily models made food plots appear safe, but a separate look at daylight and darkness revealed the pattern. At night, selection of winter food plots was five times greater, while two-thirds of visits to feeders occurred from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Neither the size nor the complexity of a buck's daily home range changed. Bedding locations used most often offered twice as much screening cover as unvisited locations within that buck's home range.
We read the abstract of a paper published in 2023 by that Mississippi State research group. It describes the same mismatch for 42 adult males wearing collars during firearm seasons spanning 2017 to 2018 and 2018 to 2019 (Henderson et al. 2023). During daylight, deer showed the weakest selection for locations hunters favored most. Selection for certain areas, including food plots, was up to five times higher after dark. Because the bulletin gives no citation to this paper, we regard them as compatible results from the same research group rather than a single data set.
Deer visibility to hunters gets another look at Brosnan Forest in South Carolina. From 2009 to 2018, Stewart and colleagues put collars on deer of both sexes on a property with hunters as the leading cause of death among adults (Stewart et al. 2022). The researchers captured 111 adults. They retained 70 whose collars had high success in recording location fixes: 42 females plus 28 males. Weekly effort per 100 hectares averaged 5 hours, a level the authors say could count as low risk. Hunters rotated. On any given day, stand occupancy was only about 10 percent.
Of the study's total area, 6 percent consisted of food plots. Around stands, food plots occupied 15 percent of the land. Of the ground where a hunter could see deer no farther than 100 meters from a stand, 23 percent consisted of plots. Hardwood drains offered acorns along with woody browse and occupied 4.5 percent of this visible area. Daytime selection probabilities for bucks were 0.71 in hardwood drains and 0.16 in food plots. Those model scores compare habitat use with the habitat available; they do not measure the share of time deer spent in either place. For does, the corresponding values were 0.61 in drains and 0.41 in plots. After dark, plots were preferred by both sexes: 0.72 for bucks and 0.65 for does. According to the authors, this design cannot distinguish fear from a difference the sexes are born with. They also report very low pressure from hunting and no data covering periods without hunting.
STEP 3 · Roads and night
Florida does moved farther from the road and shifted their activity toward nighttime
On Osceola National Forest in Florida, Kilgo, Labisky and Fritzen tracked 14 adult does wearing radio collars between June 1990 and July 1991 (Kilgo et al. 1998; Read the PDF). Those collars used VHF radio rather than GPS. Only males could be taken during muzzleloader or general gun season, making archery season the sole period when these collared females were legal to harvest.
In hunting seasons, roughly 420 meters separated the does' activity centers from a road; at other times, that distance was roughly 367 meters. While seasons were open, their rate of nighttime activity was 63.7 percent; the daylight rate was 44.8 percent. Outside those seasons, nighttime and daylight rates were 57.1 percent and 53.5 percent, respectively. That gap was not significant. The daily range comparison also showed no difference: about 26 hectares versus 22. Swamp and mature pine were preferred, while does avoided young pine, clearcuts and other open habitats. The authors report a concentration of hunter activity within a distance of 200 meters from roads. According to the authors, a small shift in that dense understory was probably enough. There was no control without hunting. The season also coincided with the rut, food changes and stray hunting dogs.
STEP 4 · Small responses
Deer stayed put in three other places
Karns and colleagues fitted 19 adult bucks with GPS collars at Chesapeake Farms, Maryland. For nine bucks, they collected data across both study windows (Karns et al. 2012). Researchers defined the window before hunting as the breeding period. It ran from 5 to 24 in November 2006 and from 5 to 23 in November 2007. Maryland's shotgun season supplied the two-week hunting window. Distance traveled between fixes taken every 20 minutes dropped from about 120 meters to 89 meters. Activity dropped at dawn and dusk, as well as during daylight and darkness. Neither home range, at 306 hectares before and 261 during (P = 0.090), nor core area, at 71 hectares before and 59 during (P = 0.160), differed statistically. Researchers recorded 23 encounters in which a known hunter was no farther than 100 meters from a deer. A turn or flight followed nine of them. Among the seven pronounced flights, the average distance was 257 meters and the maximum was 550. Deer went back to places they had used before. Their vulnerability to harvest did not change: 0.08 before hunting and 0.09 during it. The authors attribute at least part of the reduced movement to the hunt's timing in the period after breeding.
Rosenberger's team monitored 20 does with collars in northern Georgia during seven antlered-deer firearms hunts across two wildlife management areas (Rosenberger et al. 2024). Step lengths measure distances from one collar fix to the next. For both daylight and darkness, those distances showed no difference before, during or after hunts. Core areas decreased by roughly a hectare, going from 7.0 to 6.0, a change the researchers consider unlikely to matter. They explain the result by the does' existing use of places hunters did not occupy. Within a doe's wider use area, the mean relative probability of selection by hunters was 27 percent; rhododendron or mountain laurel covered 27 percent of that area. Separate research tracking hunters by GPS on those same management areas found that just 5 percent of the ground was more likely to receive hunter selection than to go unselected. Those researchers concluded that large areas of refuge probably existed for deer (Rosenberger et al. 2022).
Hourly tracking followed 188 bucks fitted with collars through the rut in Wisconsin's southwest. The study found no significant effect on movement rates from hunting season or firearm season's opening weekend (Hunsaker et al. 2025). Firearm season started there after the rut had peaked. The authors suggest that any hunting effect may have been overridden by rut behavior. For the study's results across different parts of a day, read guide to sunrise and sunset movement.
In one Alabama study (Wiskirchen et al. 2022), a response emerged only when the week was examined day by day. Daylight movement declined between Saturday and Sunday and remained low into midweek. For our closer look, read Deer Move Less by Day on Sunday Than Friday.
STEP 5 · Comparing doses
These hunter measurements cannot be compared directly
Hunter counts use a different unit in each paper, making any ranking by those counts misleading. We calculated the following conversions ourselves: an area of 100 hectares equals 1 square kilometer.
- Assigned densities in Oklahoma were 1 hunter for each 101 hectares, roughly 1.0 for each square kilometer, or 1 for each 30 hectares, roughly 3.3.
- Daily permit records on Alabama public ground yielded 0.19 to 0.72 hunters a day for each square kilometer. Researchers regard those figures as a lower bound.
- Georgia: check-ins accumulated over a 4 to 7 day hunt gave densities of 0.8 to 2.9 per 100 hectares (0.8 to 2.9 per square kilometer). A total gathered across the hunt does not show how many hunters were afield at any one time. The researchers say actual density changed with where hunters went.
- Weekly effort in South Carolina amounted to 5 hunting hours for each 100 hectares.
Even though Saturday's peak on Alabama public land (0.72) was lower than Oklahoma's low assignment, Alabama deer reduced their daylight movement by Sunday. Georgia recorded as many as 2.9 check-ins per 100 hectares. That exceeded the Saturday peak for Alabama public land and the low density assigned in Oklahoma, yet movement rates among the Georgia does did not change significantly. Different study designs and measurement units prevent us from ranking these responses. Still, the pattern offers useful information. To explain the null finding, the Georgia authors point to exposure: the portion of a deer's range used by hunters. South Carolina's figures make the same point. Plots occupied 6 percent of all ground, yet their share of a stand's visible ground was 23 percent.
STEP 6 · Field rule
Chart hunters' views and hunt the edge
We interpret the research as showing that hunting pressure on a tract depends more on where hunters' views overlap deer cover than on the count of hunters. Here is a practical way to test that idea on a property:
For a map of where hunters put in effort, read reading public-land pressure by effort, not distance. Crowding on Illinois public sites is covered in How Crowded Is That Public Land?. A rating for the same day cannot convey any of these findings; our movement-score guide describes why.
STEP 7 · What we read
Which sources we read in full
We read Stewart 2022 and Kilgo 1998 in full, along with Karns 2012 and Rosenberger 2024. We also read Hunsaker 2025 and Wiskirchen 2022 in full, plus the MSU bulletin. We read only the abstracts of Little 2016 and Marantz 2016. The same limit applies to Henderson 2023 and to Rosenberger 2022. We therefore leave out their finer figures here. Kilgo's distance of 200 meters concerns a single forest in Florida. A finding at one Maryland farm does not set a rule that applies to a state forest.
Find out what the scouting tool maps: /scout.
What Collar Studies Show Hunting Pressure Does to Whitetail Movement
Checklist
NOTES AND SOURCES
- This guide brings together findings from the published studies linked above. Researchers measured particular deer at particular locations and during particular years. Your hunting ground can produce different results.
- This information offers no guarantee of deer activity or a successful hunt. Before you hunt, confirm the seasons and regulations through your state wildlife agency.
Fully Drawn Research is an independent data analysis desk, not affiliated with any state wildlife agency, transportation agency, mapping provider or outfitter. This guide reports published research and FDR's reading of it; it does not predict deer movement at any stand.
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