Deer Hunting with a Decoy | 3 Things you’re Doing Wrong

Decoying Deer | How to Hunt Deer with a Decoy

Powered by Stone Road Media

Decoying deer is a method of deer hunting that has really caught fire in recent years. Why?…It works! Rut crazed bucks are on their feet during the last week of October and most of November looking for hot does and defending their right to breed. Introduce a potential threat to either of these, like a new buck, and any dominant buck in the area will make his presence known in a big way! This is why deer hunting with a decoy can be one of the most effective tools in your rut arsenal.

Your decoy stinks!

One of the best ways to get busted by a mature buck is by getting winded. If you’ve hunted even a short amount of time, you may have caught on to the fact that deer, especially mature deer, can smell and don’t care much for human scent in their woods. We take every scent control precaution to be scent free, so why would a decoy’s scent be any different? The only way to get away with using a decoy is to make sure that it is 100% scent free. Any scent that a buck may associate with danger that is present…and your hunt is over. Wash it down at the beginning of the season, keep it outside, and spray it down right before your hunt. Quick tip: A little cover scent like mature buck urine can’t hurt…

You’re calling too much!

Another common mistake made while deer hunting with a decoy is calling too much. Besides a few days during the peak of the rut, a mature buck will almost always approach slowly, cautiously, and downwind. So, if you’re rattling, grunting, or using any type of call to draw a mature buck in to your setup, the most important part of your calling sequence is to stop and wait! Once a buck has heard your calling sequence, the longer you continue to call the longer he will have to pin point your location or notice a potential mistake. Make your calling sequences short and realistic. Then, hang it up, be still, and wait at least 20-30 minutes before the next sequence. When that first mature buck slowly comes up out of a draw nearly 20 minutes after you quit rattling, you’ll be glad you called infrequently enough to let him close the distance. The decoy will visually confirm what he thought he heard and bring him into range for a shot.

Continue reading...

Is Downwind Enough? | Thermals, Wind Direction, and Terrain Features

Hunting the Wind | How Does Scent Actually Travel

Powered by Stone Road Media

If you were brought up deer hunting or have been doing it for even a short amount of time, you’ve likely heard the term “downwind”. With any experience at all, you will have learned that a deer trusts his nose before all else, making it extremely important to practice scent control. The only option when hunting whitetails is hunting the wind, trying to remain downwind of where you expect deer movement. If you’re caught deer hunting hilly country or an area with any topography whatsoever this becomes seemingly impossible. You may have had trouble understanding why, despite all of your detergents, sprays, and stand placement strategies, you are still getting busted.

It begs the question “is downwind enough”? Here’s the answer you may or may not want to hear. Simply put the answer is no.

Putting yourself on what you deem the downwind side of an animal is not enough. There are far more factors at play than you may realize that affect how your scent is dispersed amongst your surroundings. One major contributing factor is thermals. This term is used to describe the rising and falling of air in relation to the earth’s temperature. Typically, as the sun rises in the morning, it heats the surface of the earth and, consequently, the air closest to it, causing an updraft, as long as the earth’s surface is warming. You may have noticed that you get busted less on morning hunts, that’s because the thermals are taking your scent straight up into the atmosphere. The opposite is true when the earth starts to cool. Colder air will start to settle into the lowest topography, creating a downdraft towards the earth. The result is a higher probability of getting busted during evening sits. The solution? Use this knowledge to your advantage. Hunt ridges in the mornings where the deer move below you, and leave the bottoms for evening hunts where the deer are traveling down with the wind to where your stand is located. Paying attention to these thermals will greatly improve your chances once you understand how they affect your deer hunting property.

Building further on the concept of thermals, wind direction seems to be more of an issue in the afternoon hours or anytime thermals are falling. This is due to your scent falling down toward the earth and unfortunately the deer. During the afternoon hours it becomes more important to take into consideration of scent control and the wind direction in relation to your setup and where you think the deer movement will occur. So, when hanging sets for an afternoon hunt, pay attention to prevailing wind direction and position yourself to be on the downwind side.

Continue reading...

Deer’s Sense of Smell | Understanding a Deer’s Nose

How Good is a Deer’s Nose and Sense of Smell?

Powered by Stone Road Media

How good is a deer’s sense of smell? If they rely on this sense above all else to survive, it must be outstanding. Deer hunting often comes down to one thing, beating this keen sense with scent control tactics…but how good is this sense and can it be beat?

Unlike us, deer rely on their nose for survival as well as communication. Deer have 7 different glandular areas on their body. The interdigital, metatarsal, tarsal, forehead, preorbital, nasal, and preputial glands are all understood to help deer in communication. If you have spent a significant amount of hours deer hunting you have seen some of these glands in use. With so many glands, every bit of deer-to-deer language transferred through rubs, scrapes, and urine needs to be noticed and correctly identified. This in part is why a deer’s sense of smell is so good.

Deer have 297 million olfactory scent receptors in their nose…in comparison we have 5 million and dogs have 220 million! In addition deer have the complementary tools that go with this many scent receptors. A deer’s brain devotes a significantly larger area for taking in and determining what a scent is than a human’s brain. And if that wasn’t enough…they have a second nose!

Continue reading...

Deer Hunting Bedding Areas | Late Season Tactics

Deer Hunting High Risk Areas When They Count

Powered by Stone Road Media

By the time winter rolls around your drive for deer hunting the late season might look as desperate as a rut worn buck looking for something to eat! The pressure of unfilled tags burning holes in your pocket doesn’t help either. Deer and especially bucks are wore thin after the rut, they have busted countless hunters not using scent control, and most likely been shot at a couple times. In your mind deer hunting this period may seem pointless, but there is still hope. If you are in this situation read up…every bit of what’s about to be said will help!

If you have just ran a marathon and lost 30 percent of your body weight where would you be? Don’t lie to yourself either! For most, the honest answer would be the couch with a bag of cheeseballs…you can assume the same goes for a whitetail in the northern states or Midwest. The rut takes its toll on a buck, and you can use it to your advantage. The last month or so of your deer hunting season is arguably one of the best chances available to kill a mature buck.

A bucks first priority after the majority of does have been bred is finding food. A standing bean field, standing corn field, recently cut corn field, or field of reasonably sized brassica bulbs are all top picks for a mature bucks. For some lucky hunters, deer hunting during the late season stops here…but for many lacking the luxury of food plots or a big crop field a good late season tactic will require more work. Identifying the buck’s bedroom is the only other hope this late in the game. However finding a buck’s bedding area has to go further than just a thicket.

Continue reading...

Deer Hunting Scent Control | How Does Ozone Make You Invisible to a Whitetail?

The Science Behind the Machines

Powered by Stone Road Media

Imagine sitting in your tree stand deer hunting on a beautiful fall day. You hear a branch crack behind you, directly downwind of your location. But you don’t need to panic. You rotate calmly in your stand, knowing that the buck of a lifetime won’t detect you; at least not from catching your scent. You’re able to make the shot and soon you’re sitting behind your trophy.

We’d all like to be truly invisible while deer hunting, or any other hunting for that matter. Think of how much easier that would make it! Unfortunately, it’s just not possible to be 100% and completely undetectable to such amazing animals as whitetails. Just about every one of their senses is better than ours and we are just hopelessly outmatched. With Ozonics technology, however, we can get extremely close to invisible. The secret is with the all-powerful scent-destroying molecule calledozone. Let’s look at the science behind it to see how it can keep you hidden.

Without getting too ridiculously technical, ozone consists of three oxygen molecules (i.e., O₃), versus normal oxygen’s two molecules (i.e., O₂). This makes it unstable in the atmosphere, which means the extra oxygen molecule bonds to whatever it can “get its hands on,” so to speak. By mounting the Ozonics unit above you in your tree stand or ground blind and pointing it downwind, the ozone molecules bind to any scent molecules leaving your body and safely contains them so that wild game cannot detect you.

Continue reading...