The Woodsman's Journal Online

Sunday, November 2, 2025

Rubs, Scrapes and What Does The Deer See, Part Two©

Author’s note -- I hope that you enjoy learning from this resource! To help me to continue to provide valuable free content, please consider showing your appreciation by leaving a donation HERE. Thank you and Happy Trails!

It’s that time of the year and the white tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are running, the bucks are rubbing trees and making scrapes. “But what does the deer see ... Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding!?”

What does the Deer See!?

Hunters used to think that white-tailed deer were colorblind, only seeing the world in shades of gray, but now researchers know that deer can see colors, just not in the same way as humans. So, what does the deer see and what does this mean for hunters and other visitors to the wild parts of North America?

Basically, rods in the retina provide coarse detail in low light situations and cones provide finer detail and color vision, containing photopigments that allow you to see the colors. The biggest difference between human and deer vision is the different number of rods, cones and the number of photopigments, pigments which convert light into color signals, found in their retinas.

Humans have trichromatic vision because their retinas contain three photopigments which allow us to see colors. The first is at the short wavelength of very dark blue-violet at 420 nm (nanometer), the second one at the moderate wavelength of green at the 530 nm range, and the third at the long wavelength of orange-red at 565 nm. Additionally, human eyes have more cones than deer eyes, while deer eyes have significantly more rods. And because of this, humans can see details and colors much more clearly than can a deer. But our lenses filter out almost all the available UV light, preventing us from seeing shorter wavelengths which are visible to many other animals, including deer.

The University of Georgia Deer Lab (UGA) has done much of the research on the white-tailed deer’s visual capabilities. They discovered that deer have dichromatic vision and that a deer’s retina only has two photopigments with just two peaks. The first one is at the short wavelength of dark blue at 450 nm, and the second at the moderate wavelength of green at 537 nm. And deer are 20 times more sensitive than humans are too blue. In fact, deer see blues much more vividly than a human sees red and can even see ultraviolet (UV) light between wavelengths of 300 nm and 400 nm. This is one reason deer can see so much better in low-light conditions than can humans. Also, unlike humans, deer’s eyes don’t have an ultraviolet filter that protects them from the Sun’s harmful rays. According to Dr. Gino D’Angelo, “The lens in a deer’s eye are perfectly clear, where ours are more like yellow shooting glasses that filter out some of that ultraviolet”.

All things on the Earth are exposed to UV light all day long, but this wavelength is overpowered by visible light. As the visible light begins to fade at the end of the day, the shorter UV wavelengths make up much of the remaining light. UV light is most abundant around sunrise and sunset, although it lingers deep into the night, and the moon and cosmic rays shed some all night long. Deer eyes have adapted to the low-light conditions of dawn and dusk when UV light is dominant, and this is when they can see their best and are most active.

What does it all mean?

Since deer’s eyes can’t see longer wavelength colors like red and orange, to a deer bright oranges and reds, look like muted grays and browns.

According to Blaise Newman at the University of Georgia Deer Lab (UGA), “Deer don’t see blaze orange the way that we do, but it’s not like you disappear. It can be very neutral, but if you don’t have some form of breakup you can look like a dark blob in the forest. So, if you can get blaze orange breakup, that’s always a good selection”.

Also, per Newman, “Deer are a prey species ... Having detailed discrimination isn’t really important to deer. They just need to be able to detect and escape something”. With a deer’s dichromatic vision limiting the number of colors that it can see, deer have less “chromatic noise”, and not having to process so many colors, allows their eyes to detect movement much more quickly and easily. Newman explains, “They see motion at an astounding rate compared to our own ability”.

To us deer vision might seem like a pale imitation of what we see, but that’s only because we’re seeing the world through our eyes. As omnivores and tool makers, we need to see in finer detail and to be able to recognize a wider range of colors.

But with a deer’s ability to see into the ultraviolet wavelengths, there are things that they can see that we cannot.

According to Daniel DeRose-Broeckert of the UGA, when viewed with a black light, fresh rubs glow more during the pre-rut, and fresh scrapes glow more during the rut, he explained that to deer “rubs look like highway reflectors ... When the rest of the woods are dark, the rubs and the urine in the scrapes are highlighted because it’s throwing a different color, a brighter color, than the light that’s contacting it”.

The reason for this is that when deer leave rubs on trees, the bark layers, saps and other plant parts photo-luminesce, and so do the secretions from a buck’s forehead gland. The wavelengths produced by the urine in the scrapes, according to DeRose-Broeckert, glow in the UV range “like spilled milk” or “spilled white paint”.

And now we know “what does the deer see!?”

I hope that you enjoy learning from this resource! To help me to continue to provide valuable free content, please consider showing your appreciation by leaving a donation HERE. Thank you and Happy Trails!

I hope that you continue to enjoy The Woodsman’s Journal Online and look for me on YouTube at BandanaMan Productions for other related videos, HERE. Don’t forget to follow me on both The Woodsman’s Journal Online, HERE, and subscribe to BandanaMan Productions on YouTube. If you have questions, as always, feel free to leave a comment on either site. I announce new articles on Facebook at Eric Reynolds, on Instagram at bandanamanaproductions, and on VK at Eric Reynolds, so watch for me.

That is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!

Notes

Sources

Durkin, Patrick; “Buck Rubs Never Fail to Fascinate”, February 10, 2017, https://www.bowhunting.com/blog/2017/02/10/buck-rubs-never-fail-fascinate/, October 18, 2025

Honeycutt, Josh; “Learn How to Read Deer Rubs for Greater Success”, October 1, 2025, [©2025 Outdoor Sportsman Group], https://www.gameandfishmag.com/editorial/reading-rubs-scrapes-greater-success/536907, October 18, 2025

Infantry Journal, Psychology For The Fighting Man, [Penguin Books, Washington, 1945], page 62, https://archive.org/details/psychology-for-the-fighting-man/page/4/mode/2up, accessed November 1, 2025

Olesen, Jacob; “Eyes of the Forest: What Colors Can Deer See and How Is Their Vision?”, [© 2013-2025 Color Meanings], https://www.color-meanings.com/what-colors-can-deer-see-vision/, accessed November 1, 2025

“Buck Rub, Buck Scrape”, November 13, 2011, https://prairiegardentrust.org/buck-rub-buck-scrape/, October 18, 2025

Wikimedia, “Deer rub.jpg”, October 22, 2015, by Wasp32, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deer_rub.jpg, October 18, 2025

Sunday, October 26, 2025

And Now for Something Completely Different - The Hands Have It, Part Two ©

Author’s Note – I’m in the process of opening a fencing academy and I’m writing a syllabus and text to complement the lessons. Time is, unfortunately, limited and sometimes I don’t have time to get all the writing I want done, to meet deadlines. Hopefully, even though this is not part of my core focus for this blog, you will find it at least amusing, if not interesting.

Hand Positions One, Five and Six

Positions One and Positions Five and Six are used in making parries, although Position One is also used to form the Hanging Guard.

The First Position was called “Prime”, or “prima”, because it is the first natural position the sword hand assumes after pulling the sword from its scabbard with the tip pointing towards the opponent. This position’s main drawback is the fact that it tends to tire the arm.

Intermediate positions exist between any two adjacent of the four main hand positions. Both Agrippa and Barbasetti taught two in between positions, called ‘second in third’ and ‘third in fourth’. Agrippa in 1553 identified them as “mista” (mixed) or “bastarda” (bastard) positions.

Once you know how to position our hands you can begin to make effective cuts, thrusts, guards, parries and molinets, something we will discuss in future articles.

Don’t forget to come back next week and read “Ten Essentials of Winter Camping ©”, where we will talk about how to camp in the winter wilderness and stay warm and safe.

That is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!

Sources

Barbasetti, Luigi; La Scherma di Spada, [Milano, Tipografia Alessandro Gattinoni, 1902], https://drive.google.com/file/d/16bQcbQ1jND0EDbKTS1jSPpaLK0UEth1H/view, accessed October 11, 2025

Barbasetti, Luigi; The Art of the Sabre and Épeé, [Ithaca, New York, The Cayuga Press, 1936], https://medievalswordmanship.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/the-art-of-the-sabre-and-the-epee.pdf, accessed October 11, 2025

Leoni, Tom; “A Brief Glossary of Italian Rapier Concepts”, [©2002], https://www.thearma.org/rapierglossary.htm#:~:text=%E2%80%9Cperspective%E2%80%9D).-,Prima%20(First).,is%20particularly%20effective%20against%20cuts, accessed October 11, 2025

Sunday, October 19, 2025

Rubs, Scrapes and What Deer See, Part One©

It’s rut season and the white tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) are running, the bucks are clashing antlers, rubbing trees, and making scrapes, leaving love notes to each other.

Rubs and Scrapes...

A “buck rub” is the term used to describe the scrapes and abrasions caused by a male deer rubbing his forehead and antlers against a tree. A buck will use its antlers to strip the bark off saplings, brush, small diameter trees, and even fence posts, to mark his territory and polish his antlers. Throughout this process, the bark is peeled away to expose the fresh wood underneath.

Bucks make rubs for four reasons, to mark their territory, like a signboard, to signal their presence to other male deer. To demonstrate dominance, the size and height of the male white tailed deer rubs offering clues to the buck’s age, size and health. Bucks rub their antlers and forehead on trees to leave secretions from their glands, which signals their presence and readiness to breed to other deer. And lastly male white tailed deer use rubs to strip the velvet off their fresh antlers.

Bucks rub trees with the bases of their antlers, sometimes they rub head-on, with the tree trunk between their antlers. Sometimes they turn their head sideways, dragging their antlers perpendicularly up and down the trunk.

Rubs start to appear in late summer when male deer rub the velvet off their freshly grown antlers. Early in the season it’s to remove velvet covering their new antlers. Some bucks don’t worry about rags of velvet hanging from their antlers, but others are obsessed with rubbing off every strip. Some bucks clean the velvet off their antlers quickly, others take longer.

During the autumn mating season, or rut, and on into early winter until the antlers drop, the bucks will continue to make rubs, since after the velvet is shed a buck’s testosterone levels increase, and that brings with it frustration, anger and aggression. Some believe that bucks rub trees to blow off steam, but it’s also a practice for fighting, and the trees become training dummies. The rubbing helps strengthen head, neck and shoulder muscles needed for fighting.

When a buck rubs its antlers on trees or saplings, secretions (scent and chemicals) from its preorbital and forehead apocrine sweat glands, as well as the nasal and sometimes even salivary glands, are left behind on the exposed wood. These secretions left behind on the exposed wood of the rub communicate messages to the other deer The size of the rub usually varies with the size of the deer, with the bigger and older the bucks, leaving rubs higher up on the tree.

While single “buck rubs” don’t tell you much, rub lines with consistent rub orientation do. Normally, the direction a rub faces is the direction from which the buck approached. If numerous sequential rubs face in the same direction, this tells you the general course a deer is taking in travelling from one location to another.

To mark areas they regularly pass through bucks will make scrapes, often occurring in regular patterns known as “scrape lines”. A scrape is made when a buck paws the ground with its front hooves to expose bare earth. As the buck scrapes the dirt, it deposits secretions from the interdigital glands found between the toes of each hoof. Scrapes are mostly oval-shaped and are often found with a sapling or tree branch hanging out over them. This overhanging branch or sapling is called a “licking branch”. When the buck digs the scrape, it will rub its forehead and pre-orbital glands on the licking branches to deposit scents and chemicals. And once it has scraped up the earth under the branch, the buck will urinate into the scrape with the urine passing over the tarsal glands located on the inside of each of its hind legs. When a doe nears its estrus cycle, it will also urinate in the scrape, alerting local bucks that she is or will soon be ready to breed.

Scrapes and rubs, are called “sign-post markings” and are an obvious way that white-tailed deer communicate. Although bucks do most of the marking, does visit these locations as well.

But there is more to these markings than meet the HUMAN eye because deer see farther into the UV spectrum than humans do.

Don’t forget to come back next week and read “Rubs, Scrapes and What Deer See, Part Two©”, where we will talk about what deer see and what it means for hunters.

That is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!

Sources

Durkin, Patrick; “Buck Rubs Never Fail to Fascinate”, February 10, 2017, https://www.bowhunting.com/blog/2017/02/10/buck-rubs-never-fail-fascinate/, October 18, 2025

Kenyon, Mark; “3 Lessons You Can Learn from Whitetail Rubs”, March 4, 2021, [© 2025 MeatEater, Inc.], https://www.themeateater.com/wired-to-hunt/whitetail-scouting/3-lessons-you-can-learn-from-whitetail-rubs, October 18, 2025

“Buck Rub, Buck Scrape”, November 13, 2011, https://prairiegardentrust.org/buck-rub-buck-scrape/, October 18, 2025

Wikimedia, “Deer rub.jpg”, October 22, 2015, by Wasp32, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deer_rub.jpg, October 18, 2025

Sunday, October 12, 2025

And Now for Something Completely Different - The Hands Have It, Part One ©

“Nails up” ... “Palms down” ... Quarte or is it Carte? ... First, Second, Third and Fourth Position? ... What does it all mean?!

Fencing masters of the late 18^th through the 19^th centuries often assumed that you knew what they were speaking of, and if you didn’t, it can be hard to decipher their writings and understand the correct position that your hand must take when attacking or defending with a sword. But when I first started exploring historic sword fighting of the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, pre-internet, some forty some years ago, questions like these were hard to answer. It took me months, and quite a few inter-library loan requests from collections world-wide, to answer these questions.

There are between six and eight hand positions possible in sword fighting, whether you are using a foil, a rapier or a broadsword. These positions are all defined by the positions of your fingernails, palms and forearms.

The early Italian system, taught by Camillo Agrippa, of Milan, and the later system taught by Maestro Luigi Barbasetti, both had four primary hand positions and two intermediate hand positions.

The four hand positions move in a circle from First Position to Fourth Positions as you turn your fingernails, palm and forearm to face upward (supinate), or you turn your palm and forearm to face downward (pronate).

Hand Positions Two, Three and Four

Positions Two, Three and Four are used to make cuts or to form the Outside, Inside or Medium Guard.

In the Second Position your sword hand is pronated and to the outside, with the palm of the sword hand down. In this hand position the blade’s “true edge”, or cutting edge, faces to the outside line.

In the Third Position your sword hand is neutral, neither in a pronated or supinated position and below. The third hand position was called “terza” and is made with a knuckles-down position of the sword hand, the true edge facing downwards. This is a hand position half-way between the Second and the Forth position and is the least tiring of the positions.

In the fourth position or “quarta”, your sword hand is supinated, and to the outside, with the palm of the sword hand up.

Don’t forget to come back next week and read part two where discuss Hand Positions One, Five and Six.

That is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!

Sources

Barbasetti, Luigi; La Scherma di Spada, [Milano, Tipografia Alessandro Gattinoni, 1902], https://drive.google.com/file/d/16bQcbQ1jND0EDbKTS1jSPpaLK0UEth1H/view, accessed October 11, 2025

Sunday, October 5, 2025

Have you ever seen a Wood frog? They are hard to see among the fallen leaves and ferns of their forest floor homes. I’ve only ever seen them twice in the woods, myself.

But what is cool about these woodland amphibians is not that they are so good at camouflage or that they can vary their color, becoming lighter or darker, but that they can freeze completely solid during the winter, thaw and “wake” up in the spring and hop away, no problem!

Wood Frogs, lithobates sylvaticus also known as Rana sylvatica, are common woodland frogs, found from northern Georgia and northeastern Canada in the east to Alaska and southern British Columbia in the west. They range throughout the boreal forests of Canada and the Appalachian forests of the United States and are the most widely distributed frog in Alaska. But unlike most ranids, or “true frogs”, which spend most of their lives near or in water, wood frogs are dwellers of the forest floor.

And just like other northern frogs that become dormant during the cold season buried in the soil or leaf litter, wood frogs are freeze-tolerant amphibians that can tolerate the freezing of their blood and other tissues. But the wood frog has the most northern distribution of any amphibian on the planet. During the winter, wood frogs may remain frozen solid for over 190 days in northern and interior Alaska where winter temperature routinely fall below -40 °F (-40 °C). Research has shown that the wood frogs in Alaska and northern Canada have a higher freeze tolerance than the wood frogs in more southern regions.

This cold-blooded amphibian can survive these cruel winter temperatures because it can freeze solid, turning into a “frogsicle”, in an incredible example of cryobiosis -- the metabolic ability to freeze and thaw to survive adverse conditions. Wood frogs exhibit selective freezing and typically have between 35-45%, and sometimes up to 65%, of the water in their body turned into ice, and this includes the water in its skin, body cavity and eyes. The wood frog’s heart and lungs stop, its blood doesn’t flow, and its remaining unfrozen cells enter a dormant state. Water is forced out the frog’s cells into the interstitial spaces between them and out of its organs where it can safely crystallize around mineral and bacterial “seeds” collected in the frog’s body for just this purpose.

Wood frogs can overwinter like this because in preparing for winter it accumulates urea, a component of urine, in its tissues and glycogen is converted to glucose in large quantities in its liver. The glucose is then stored within the muscle and heart cells. This helps prevent intracellular ice formation that would otherwise destroy the cells. Sugary glucose bonds to the remaining water molecules to prevent them from escaping the cells, thereby avoiding desiccation through osmotic shrinkage.

The glucose and urea, act as cryoprotectants and give the frog its ability to freeze almost completely solid during the winter and thaw out in the spring with minimal cellular damage. These agents mix with water and lower the freezing temperature inside the cells, protecting them from damage. And the urea has an extra role in suppressing the frog’s metabolism.

Wood frogs can return to normal body functioning within 24 hours of thawing and can become active as soon as temperatures rise above freezing. This makes them among the first cold blooded creatures to “wake” in the spring, this gives them sole access to vernal or spring pools for breeding. These small ponds or pools of water are collections of melted snow or spring rain that usually drain away or evaporate by summer. The brief nature of these seasonal pools prevents fish or other predators from taking up residence in them, which makes them ideal nurseries for vulnerable wood frog tadpoles, and these early “waking” wood frogs have almost no competition for this critical resource.

So next time you are out in the northern woodlands and forest, look for this amazing amphibian, but good luck finding them hidden in the leaf litter.

That is all for now, and as always, until next time, Happy Trails!

Sources

Knight, Jen; “Wood Frogs”, Appalachian Wildlife Refuge, https://thelaurelofasheville.com/outdoors/conservation/wood-frogs/, accessed October 4, 2025

Larson, D. J., Middle, L., Vu, H., Zhang, W., Serianni, A. S., Duman, J., & Barnes, B. M.; “Wood frog adaptations to overwintering in Alaska: New limits to freezing tolerance”, Journal of Experimental Biology, [ 2014, vol. 217, no. 12] pages 2193 to 2200

https://cob.silverchair-cdn.com/cob/content_public/journal/jeb/217/12/10.1242_jeb.101931/6/2193.pdf?Expires=1762641107&Signature=nHZrHXdvVMPnZN4rEOHiwWk7IwOhXjp~7by6oN8x0ePkMTR~9suCYdtUYBH6g7l8ATe8rLwSmNfUn2NPk0n8iVcWf01Yhn7rix~BRnFwvBkiViuMdL~ooQb9085yX6TL7ZgXupDRj9wtpRn2gRMt3Sm2pYLBl61RGhRFlSMvDTWDh9W~NWo93HggDOUvOhwiaqeIr3ZuLiqsa50qWdiFN4uE6h64TSpk9qbhJHrrc6Pcfvk7NTL2IbbKtl3QE8gDaJA3JmETM8qm2KdcWON-eVrlT23SYdemYryr7XqXjxaXQ0TIsMz0qscB227QQKSjvvovsKZa5KBMShnkIWX37w__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA, accessed October 4, 2025

Petersen, Lee; “Wood Frog – Lithobates sylvaticus”, August 18, 2020, https://www.lwpetersen.com/alaska-wildlife/wood-frog-lithobates-sylvaticus/#:~:text=Classification-,Identification,larger%20and%20more%20brightly%20colored, accessed October 4, 2025

Tabler, Dave; “The frog who freezes solid for the winter”, February 7, 2019, https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/02/the-frog-who-freezes-solid-for-the-winter.html, accessed October 4, 2025

About Me

I live near Buffalo, New York and have more than 25 years of experience in the outdoors. I enjoy being in the wilderness, paddling a canoe or exploring the woods, when I am not researching survival, woodcraft, camping skills or life on the Old Northwest Frontier of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I am a published author and I have been a guide for Birchbark Expeditions and an Outdoor Skills trainer for the Boy Scouts since 2014. I am also a martial artist, having studied several different combat arts over the past 30 years. Currently, I am the author of The Woodsman’s Journal Online and BandanaMan Productions on YouTube.

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Sunday, November 2, 2025

Rubs, Scrapes and What Does The Deer See, Part Two©

Sunday, October 26, 2025

And Now for Something Completely Different - The Hands Have It, Part Two ©

Sunday, October 19, 2025

Rubs, Scrapes and What Deer See, Part One©

Sunday, October 12, 2025

And Now for Something Completely Different - The Hands Have It, Part One ©

Sunday, October 5, 2025

Hippity Hoppity...Wood Frog!©

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