Estrus scent for the Rut
Massachusetts
Ok so I learned alot about cover scents for hiking in on the other thread.
Now lets hit the Rut,.. do any of you use doe estrus scent? Once again do you stay away from the stuff sitting on the shelf for a year and buy fresh stuff?
Where do you get it or do you skip it?
I tryed the fresh stuff last year and thier where two things to note. One having a bottle of deer piss next to the ketchup will not make your lady happy. And second it seemed to work no beter at least from what I saw. I Will end with this because I know how many guys love using scents. Just cosider that the scents are still working when you are not in your stand, so be mindful of leaving them or putting them so close to your stand that the deer simply find your stand and entrace and exit route. I feel like scents are a grate way to bust your set up. That said if you live the conquest type scent in the deoderent stick you can simply open it up when your hunting, and take it when you go. also I have a bunch of glands in the freezer next to the chicken and no my wife isnt impressed with that either, I guess some girls are just hard to please
Last year I went to a butcher and bought all the tarsals off the doe he was cutting up during the rut and vacuum sealed and froze them this year I will be trimming hair and soaking in distilled water to make my own scent
Listen, I’m as guilty as anybody, but did it ever occur to any of you that this whole pursuit might be ass-hat crazy? I know a guy who collected ovulating female human urine. It apparently didn’t work. But my point is, maybe this particular guy went past some tipping point where things became unreasonable.
True that. Tipping point has come and gone
Go to Jerry's Bait and Tackle in Milford. Just before the rut he'll have a ton of actual doe in estrus pee in the bait fridge. Use that. Couple drops here, a couple drops there... My first buck last year, I watched him come in from ~70 yds on a rail sniffing that stuff. I watched him cross my area, nose in the air, then make a hard left in my direction.
Couple things I noticed about the estrus pee: It smells sweet, and the smell is significantly lighter than the pee you get off the shelf at Cabelas/BassPro/XYZstore; the smell of the real stuff is nowhere near as strong as the synthetic stuff. Also, get a couple bottles for that period. After a day or two, even if you put it back in the fridge, it "spoils". And when it spoils, it smells EXACTLY like the synthetic stuff. So, get a couple bottles, take one and use it for a few hunts, returning it back to the fridge (double ziplock bag all of them cuz it's still stinky piss in your fridge), then on the 3rd or 4th day, discard the bottle and bust out the new one.
Final observation: during the rut I saw more bucks between 9-11am than I saw from 5:30-9am. Could of been my area but, I was a little surprised. I wonder what Moons saw.
I just use the real thing. Go to the deer butcher and cut off the tarsals for free. Just hang them from a branch then into the freezer when done. Usually can get a couple weeks out of them.
Stillhunter, I can't speak to the doe pee but I can tell you that after a striper fishing trip earlier this summer I learned that most ladies probably won't love the idea of a bag of live eels in the fridge either...
I've always found Special Golden Estrus to work very well and cause deer to react. Most checking it out, occasionally running away like they smelled my arm pits after a bike ride...
I bought some deer farm direct stuff a while back and had no better results at 4X the cost so dont do it any more.
I've used Buck Bomb a bit as well with decent results - Tazman on here has posted so many good experiences with it I figured it was worth a shot.
I'm debating it this year though. With the potential to introduce bug's to our environment (with any of these) it does make me question what I'm doing.
Sev, that's a wild idea. Do you need to use alcohol or anything to really get it working? How do you avoid creating sort of a rotting flesh situation? It's a cool idea!
