5 MOST EFFECTIVE RUN - TIME SCENT STRATEGIES

Anyone who has hunted and observed white-tailed deer understands how scent oriented deer are. I envision whitetails living in a three-dimensional world consisting almost entirely of scent, with sounds and visuals supplying peripheral input. Everything they do — avoiding danger, finding ample nutrition, interacting with other members of the herd and reproducing — is wrapped around olfactory input.

Hunters work diligently to minimize human scent to help avoid detection from our sharp-nosed quarry. We offer deer tantalizing foods — where legal — to bring them beneath our stands. We dispense doe and buck urines and other glandular secretions to put deer at ease around stand sites. But sexual scents deployed during dates surrounding the rut produce the most dramatic results. During that time, normally wary white-tailed bucks become vulnerable. Filling a trophy buck’s nose with estrus scent can make a typically savvy deer temporarily foolhardy.

But getting the best results from rut-time scents begins by understanding how those seasonal aromas translate into whitetail communication