Hunter education · skills

Hunting Techniques Explained

By Hunters Guide. Written to the hunting techniques chapter that Canadian hunter education courses teach. Sources checked September 20, 2026.

Every hunting technique is a different answer to one problem: getting close to an animal that smells, hears and sees better than you do, without it ever knowing you were there.

This page covers technique and nothing else. What you are allowed to do is your province's call, and its regulations are where you look.

The main hunting techniques

Hunter education groups the ways people hunt into a handful of named techniques: still hunting, stand hunting from a stand or blind, spot and stalk, calling and decoying, driving with a group, and tracking. Most hunters end up mixing them. You glass a hillside, stalk to a point, then sit and call.

Which one fits depends on ground, species, season and weather. One thing decides whether any of them works.

Why wind matters more than anything else

Wind is the direction your scent travels, and to a deer, a moose or a bear, your scent is the loudest thing about you. An animal that catches human scent doesn't stop to confirm it. It leaves. Usually before you knew it was there.

So every technique starts with the same question: where is my scent going? Hunt into the wind or across it, never with it at your back. Check it constantly, because it shifts with the time of day, and thermals in hill country pull air downhill in the morning cold and uphill as the sun warms the slopes. A puff of unscented powder or a thread on the barrel will tell you what the trees won't.

Scent control helps at the margins. Clean clothes, no fuel smell, no cigarette smoke. None of it beats the wind. The wind is the plan.

Still hunting, and why speed ruins it

Still hunting is moving through cover so slowly that you spend most of your time standing still, looking and listening, and only a fraction of it taking steps. The name confuses people. You do move. You just move like something that lives there.

The mistake nearly every new hunter makes is speed. Walk at a normal pace and you're a noise machine with a scent plume, heard by everything and seeing nothing. Slow it right down.

Two or three steps, then a full stop. Look for a long time. Look at pieces of animals: an ear, a horizontal line in a vertical forest, a patch of colour that doesn't belong. Then a few more steps.

Rough guide: if an hour of still hunting covered more than a few hundred metres, it was a walk. Use it in thick bush where visibility is short, on damp days when the ground is quiet, and always with the wind in your face.

Hunting from a stand or blind

Stand hunting is choosing a fixed position, elevated or on the ground, that overlooks a place animals already want to be, and then waiting for them to arrive. The hunting is done before you sit down. The sitting is the easy part, at least in theory. If your stand is up a tree, read tree stand safety before the first climb.

Placement is about travel. Animals move between bedding cover and food, along edges, through saddles and funnels, and beside water. Set up where those routes pinch, and downwind of them, so the animal reaches your shooting lane before your scent reaches it. Then think about your walk in. An approach route that crosses the trail you're watching leaves your scent on it. Come in from the side, quietly, and early.

After that it's patience. Real patience, still glassing in the last hour of light when everything in you wants to leave. Most of what a stand produces shows up after you'd given up on it.

How spot and stalk works

Spot and stalk is finding an animal at long range with optics, then planning and walking a route that gets you inside your effective range without being detected. It's the open country method: foothills, cutblocks, alpine, prairie coulees.

Spotting is slow, seated work from a vantage point. Brace the binoculars, work the country in overlapping sections, and check shadow lines and edges twice. Once you've found the animal, stop and plan before you move a step. Where's the wind? What ground can hide you the whole way in? Where will you lose sight of it, and what landmark will put you back on it?

Then commit to the route and go slow. Stalks fail because a hunter gets impatient in the last hundred metres and skylines themselves, or the wind swings and nobody checked.

When do calling and decoying fit?

Calling and decoying are ways of bringing the animal to you by imitating something it wants to investigate: a rival, a mate, a companion, or prey in trouble. They work when the animal has a reason to respond, usually in the breeding season or with social and territorial species.

Calling is timing and restraint. Too much of it sounds like nothing in nature. A decoy adds the visual confirmation a wary animal wants before it closes the last distance, and it pulls the animal's attention off you.

One safety point belongs here. Anything that imitates game can also draw another hunter. Set up where you can see what's approaching, and identify every single thing that responds before you do anything else. Newfoundland and Labrador's code of ethics puts the rule in five words: "Positively identify your target before you shoot."

Why a drive demands the strictest safety discipline

A drive, or push, is a group technique in which some hunters walk through cover to move game toward others who are posted at fixed positions along the likely escape routes. It is the one method in hunter education where several armed people are moving in the same cover, often out of sight of each other, while animals run between them.

That's why the safety rules for drives are stricter than for any other technique. They're not suggestions.

• Everyone knows the plan. Where the line starts, where it ends, where every poster stands, and when it's over. Nobody freelances.
• Everyone knows where everyone is. The whole time. If you lose track of a person, the hunt stops until you find them.
• Zones of fire are fixed in advance. Each poster has a defined arc. A shot outside it is not a shot.
• No shots toward the line. Drivers don't shoot toward posters. Posters don't shoot toward the approaching line. Ever.
• Bright clothing, always. Movement in cover is exactly what a hunter's eye is hunting for.

Drives put animals up fast and give you seconds to decide. That is the whole reason they need the plan. If a group can't hold this discipline, it shouldn't drive.

What tracking adds

Tracking is reading sign on the ground to work out what passed, how long ago, and where it went. It's both a hunting technique in its own right, on fresh snow or soft ground, and the skill that every other method depends on after the shot.

A track's edges tell you its age. Crisp walls mean minutes; softened, drifted or dried ones mean hours. Stride length and depth hint at size and pace. Tracking as a hunting method is slow, wind-aware work, because an animal on a track is often watching its own backtrail. Tracking after a hit is a separate discipline with its own rules, and it's covered in shot placement and tracking.

The same code of ethics that tells you to identify your target also says to "Ensure that every effort is made to retrieve wounded game". Tracking is how you keep that promise.

How do these techniques show up on the exam?

Hunter education exams test techniques as matching and judgement questions. Which method fits which terrain, what wind does to a stalk, and what the safety rules of a drive are. Ontario's programme administrators list the course content as "will teach new hunters about: hunting laws and regulations, hunter responsibilities, wildlife management, hunting safety and equipment, hunting techniques, wildlife identification", with techniques sitting in the middle of it. B.C.'s CORE course, run by the B.C. Wildlife Federation, describes its scope as "safe and ethical hunting, your role in the protection and conservation of wildlife and natural habitat, bird and animal identification, first aid, and firearms safety", and technique questions sit inside that first item in every province.

Try the Ontario chapter in our hunting techniques practice questions. Miss the wind questions and reread this page from the top.

Questions about hunting techniques

What is the difference between still hunting and stand hunting?

Still hunting is moving through cover very slowly, stopping far more than you walk, and looking hard from each stop. Stand hunting is staying in one chosen spot and letting the animals come to you. One trades time for ground covered, the other trades ground for patience.

Why does wind direction matter so much when hunting?

Because scent travels downwind and big game animals live by their noses. If your scent reaches an animal before you do, it is gone and you will usually never know it was there. Every method in hunter education starts with knowing where the wind is carrying you.

How slowly should you move when still hunting?

Far slower than feels natural. A common guide is a few steps, then a long stop to look and listen, with the stops taking most of the time. If you are covering ground at a walking pace, you are walking, not still hunting.

Why is a group drive considered the riskiest technique?

Because it puts several people with firearms in motion in the same piece of cover, often out of sight of each other, while game moves between them. It only works when every person knows the plan, the line, the posts and the zones of fire, and no shot is ever taken toward the line.

What does spot and stalk mean?

Spot and stalk means finding an animal from a distance with optics, usually from a high vantage, then planning and walking a route that uses terrain and wind to get within your range without being detected.