October 29, 2024 • 17 mins
On this week's show, Tony explains why he tends to use doe decoys during the rut instead of buck decoys, and how that might be the right move for most whitetail hunters.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by First Light,
creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about why you
might want to use a doe decoy instead of a
buck decoy. If this week doesn't make your giblets tingle
as a deer hunter, you might want to check your pulse.
(00:42):
It's go time and all of you folks who sat
out the hot weather or the lull or whatever to
hunt the best time of the year, well it's here
and you better get out there. But first you might
want to consider a doe decoy, which is something I'm
going to lean on pretty heavily this year. But first
I need to explain why I keep leaving the buck
decoy at home and going with the dough. So buckle
(01:04):
up my pre rut buttercups, because it's time to talk
to your Let's do a little imaginary lesson. To start
this one off, Let's say you're a guy, because that's
a pretty safe bet for a podcast with this level
(01:25):
of juvenile humor that is centered on trying to outsmart
rabbits with antlers, and you're about to head to the
local watering hole. Now, let's also say that you are
a single fella. I don't care if your main squeeze
got hit by a train and it has been the
appropriate amount of time since the funeral, or you're just
a pioneer not a settler. Whatever. So you walk into
(01:46):
some fine establishment adorned with plenty of Neon signage in
the windows, and you stroll up to the bar to
order I don't know, seven shots of fireball or whatever
the kids are drinking these days. I've been out of
the game for quite a while on that front, so
you got to fill in the blanks yourself here. Now
you look to your right and you see what is
clearly a large collection of women dressed in cowgirl themed
outfits that they clearly bought for some bridesmade get together
(02:09):
type thing. Maybe one of them has a veil on
or something and is carrying a balloon that is shaped
a lot like a not safer work balloon. If you
get my drift, you take a head count, you realize
there are eleven of them and they are doing shots
and having fun. Then you look to your left. At
the other end of the bar is a collection of dudes.
They all have Affliction T shirts on. They are about
(02:31):
two sizes too small, Several have barbed ware tattoos around
their biceps, many of them have backwards hats on, and
all of them are drinking what looks like brown hard
liquor that is mixed with nothing more than an ice
cube and bad decision making. To further clarify what's going on,
one of the bridesmaids she goes to the jukebox and
(02:52):
plays Mark Kenyon's favorite Taylor Swift love song. Then one
of the Affliction T shirt wearing dudes struts over and
plays a German death metal song that sounds a bit
like what they used to use to make it very
uncomfortable for the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. You have two choices.
What group do you approach first? Now, let's say that
(03:14):
you pose this question to the next one hundred guys
you run across. Some of them are five feet tall
and one hundred pounds soaking wet, while others look like
they failed the NFL draft for being too big and
too violent, and of course there's everything in between. What
percentage of guys do you think would stroll up to
the barboyer tattoo crowd? First, it's probably a pretty small,
(03:36):
pretty low amount, although there might be a few mixed
in there that just like the thrill of throwing haymakers
on a Saturday night, the smart money is on the ladies.
Maybe not all the guys go that way, of course,
but the numbers would be in your favor there. Now,
let's think about deer. I had the recent pleasure of
snort wheezing in a giant eight pointer on public land.
(03:58):
That was clearly a dominant buck, and he was the
kind of deer that could handle the deer version of
you know what are you looking at? Pal? I also
had the displeasure of cutting hairs off of his back
when I guess the rains wrong, because I was in
full meltdown mode from thinking that he was going to
walk out a frame and get out of my life,
which he did later on, and which stung a lot.
(04:20):
But that buck was the buck to challenge I tried
the same thing on a smaller deer and it worked
exactly like it often does. That buck was a lover
and not a fighter. In fact, almost every deer you
see will choose the lover approach because in nature it
makes more sense to burn precious calories passing on your
genes versus locking the cage of the octagon for five rounds.
(04:44):
Yet we almost always choose a buck decoy over a
dough decoy. Why is that? Well for starters, the people
who sell you buck decoys tend to hunt places that
you definitely wouldn't be allowed on. If your farm is
hovered up in prime age bucks, a buck decoy is
no big deal. You can weed through the little tiny
(05:07):
one hundred and forty inches and wait on the one
sixty five who rules the roost. You also probably have
a very good idea where he likes to travel and win,
So a buck decoy with an aggressive body posture is
the right call there, and it works. You can turn
on your favorite hook and Bullet channel or go on
over to YouTube and watch this play out a lot
(05:28):
this time of year, and it is cool as hell.
A buck that approaches sort of sideways while licking his
lips and side eyeing a plastic rival. It's just a
sight to behold. And when he sucker punches a fake
buck in the guts, it's pretty damn amazing. But again,
if you choose a buck decoy, you're playing the odds game,
(05:51):
and what you're doing is saying I don't want a
certain number of bucks to come in to range, and
I certainly don't want any actual doze around me. This
is the equivalent of casting a huge bucktail for muskies.
You aren't going to accidentally catch very many bass on it,
and maybe, just maybe you might catch a mongo pike,
(06:13):
but mostly you're going to either catch nothing or hook
into a big musky. Now, if that's what you're into,
doughnuts for deer doughnuts, But if you're listening to this podcast,
my guess is that maybe you're open to the possibility
that decoying in one hundred inch dear would be pretty
sweet too. That's where I'm at and I'm going to
get to it, But first I should talk a little
(06:35):
bit about a third option. You can use a small
buck decoy. I'm trying to get Dave Smith to make
me a realistic looking basket rack six pointer. But it
turns out he knows the decoy market better than me
and isn't interested in my suggestion for how to run
his business. I also asked him to make me a
feeding dough decoy, and that got me a response that
was similar to what I told my wife that I thought,
(06:57):
after this whole filming whitetail run, I'm on wraps up.
I'm just gonna go hunker down in Wisconsin for a
few weeks until I run out of season or kill
a big buck. Anyway, a little buck decoy opens up
your options more. A big buck's not usually going to
fear a little buck, but that doesn't mean he's gonna
mess with him. Sometimes they come in and it seems
(07:19):
like they just want to push them around, kind of
like when you use a quarter strut jake for spring turkeys.
But sometimes they almost don't pay them any mind at all,
even if you pair that decoy up with some rattling
or grunting or snort wheezing or whatever. The bucks that
are out there this time of year are looking for
one thing first and foremost. That's not a fight. It's
something that while I'm not a dear biologist here seems
(07:41):
like it's more likely to get offered up by doze
than bucks. There is also the reality that putting out
a buck decoy has a ripple effect on the rest
of the non target deer That doesn't seem to do
you too many favors if you like having non target
deer around you. What I mean by that is, by
the time the pre rudd is really kicking in, it
(08:02):
seems like the doughs have had enough of the harassment already.
They are generally pretty leery of decoys anyway, which I
think is funny because we always talk about them as
if they are easy to kill while acting like big
bucks are super smart. I think the average dough, at
least pressure dough, has better survival instincts than the average
big buck. But that's fodder for a different podcast, and
(08:24):
one that might get me shunned out of the deer
on In community because it's built on the notion that
mature bucks are the masters of avoiding hunters. Any huski.
If you put a buck decoy out, you are generally
admitting a few things. The first is you're calling out
bucks that are just not big enough, or the ones
that don't have the right mentality to mess with your decoy.
(08:45):
The second is you're probably going to alarm some non
target deer with its presence, which can have a negative
effect on your sit. With a dough decoy, you mitigate
a lot of that stuff, And to be honest, doesn't
it just makes sense to give the deer what they're
looking for. I really don't get the idea that it
should always be a buck decoy, but maybe that's a
(09:07):
personal problem. This really started to take shape for me
a long time ago when I started using some portable
fold out deer decoys. One of them was a meal
deer decoy, but represented a feeding meal deer, so in
other words, it just looked like a relaxed deer that
was munching on some greenery or acorns. The white tails
didn't seem to notice that it wasn't their species. And
(09:29):
what blew me away was that I could use it
in the early season, like in a beanfield setup, and
almost all of the deer would eventually come over and
feed by it. Now, some of the dose would look
very suspiciously at it at first, but almost always they'd
end up feeding over to it. It kind of shattered
my notion of what I knew about decoying at the time,
(09:51):
but the lesson there was one that stuck with me.
We absorb a lot of information about deer hunting vicariously.
I you it at least partially as an academic pursuit,
which it is, but it's all so experiential. In fact,
experience is just the real difference maker between being good
(10:12):
at this stuff or not. In my experience messing around
with that feeding mule deer dough decoy and then later
their white tailed dough decoy, was that a lot of
what I'd always heard about decoying is just not always true.
(10:32):
You can say I had a natural bend toward doe
decoys to begin with, but that really became something different
last season when I hunted with my daughters. Now I
know I've talked about this a lot, so bear with me.
After one of my daughters shot a spike on the
first night of the season, her sister was up to
bat and while I tried really hard to get a
buck in front of her, I couldn't even get a
deer to show itself. We sat in the north woods
(10:55):
and blanked and blanked and blanked, and it got to
be the first week of November, and I told her
that our shot was going to be to post up
with that dough decoy and just wade out a buck.
My rationale was that in a low deer density area,
a lone dough would draw some serious attention if we
could get a buck to even look at it. And
it took us all day, but the buck that did
(11:15):
look at it liked what he saw so much that
he put on a scraping show for us and then
trotted into about fourteen yards and gave our fake deer
a good butt sniff. He seemed very confused at what
he got a whiff of, but he didn't get much
time to ponder it because my daughter shot him right
through the lungs and in a matter of seconds we
were getting out of the blind to go look at him.
(11:36):
A week later, I sat in the exact same blind
with the doe set up in the exact same spot
and watched a cruising two year old eight pointer pop
out of the field and trot right past my setup.
It was one of those deer hunting moments that went
from oh he's in so much trouble to oh shit,
please come back, please come back so fast that happened
that you can barely believe it. I could almost see
(12:00):
that buck stop at the edge of the swamp and
process that he had a plan to go cruise somewhere else.
But his rut dulled brain had just seen the very
thing he was looking for, even though he wasn't expecting it.
He turned to one eighty and came back into my life.
And while he made a tiny bit farther than my
daughter's deer, it didn't matter. We went two for two
(12:20):
after struggling all season, all because of a Doe decoy.
Now you might be thinking, well, if I had such
sweet ground to hunt like those dumb ass podcast hosts,
I could decoy one too. Now, I assure you most
of the public land I hunt in the Midwest is
better than this private ground up in northern Wisconsin, and
I can barely see a deer on it with my
(12:41):
best efforts, which sometimes are pretty good. It was just
the right situation to put out a fake lady. And
that's just it. In fact, I'm really hoping that by
the time you listen to this episode, I'm posing with
a giant public land buck down on Iowa that falls
for the same trick. That's a TB kind of thing
at the moment, though. The truth is a dough decoy
(13:04):
is a good idea for a lot of folks, but
it isn't just as simple as putting it out and waiting.
You want visibility first. You don't have to post up
on one hundred acre alfalfa field to make it happen,
but obviously you want it where a buck might look
at it and see it. You don't want to surprise
anyone with it. Deer like a lot of things, but
(13:25):
what they don't like is walking into a small kill
plot or meadow and suddenly seeing a deer that they
haven't heard or smelled before getting there. Now, some bucks
might tolerate it, but you're likely to get a reaction
that's negative out of a lot of deer. You got
to give them some space and then think about what
deer would naturally do. In that setting where my daughter
and I killed, a lot of the deer come out
(13:47):
of the corner of the field from this nearby swamp
where they bed. So a deer that looks like it's
forty yars out from that corner facing in the right
direction just looks very natural. Now, maybe this isn't as
big of a deal as I believe, But I do
the same thing with turkey decoys in the spring. I
want them to look as much like how real turkeys
would use the landscape as possible, So with a dough decoy,
(14:09):
I look for that kind of thing, even though maybe
that's just to settle my brain down and make it
think that it's doing some smart stuff. But you do
have to think about how they'll approach. This is one
of the reasons I like doe decoys more than buck decoys.
While bucks will generally approach a buck decoy head on,
or at least in the general direction of the head
which has all of the weapons on it, a dough
(14:32):
decoy is not a threat, it's an invitation, and they'll
generally approach it from straight behind. This gives you a
very good chance to position them exactly how you want.
They also seem to forget about swinging down wind more
with dough decoys than buck decoys, which is an added bonus.
Although it's not a hard and fast rule, you should
(14:52):
think about the wind in any ascent. You might leave
around the decoy, for sure, but generally they walk in
right behind her and stick their necks out to give
her a good sniffing. This means, if you like fifteen
or twenty hour broadside shots that distracted deer, a doe
decoy is a great idea. This is something that is
amazing even for forty four year old adult hunters with
(15:15):
pretty extensive resumes, but who still screw up shots enough
to think about it way too much when they are
trying to fall asleep and their dumb brains decide to
run a low light reel of failures just to remind
them that they should probably be golfers. And it's even
more amazing when that happens for inexperienced hunters who need
shots set up as predictably as possible. Plus, and I
(15:38):
want to stress this all lot, it's super fun. Deer
hunting should be fun. And watching a buck c and
then approach a decoy that's just about as fun as
it gets. It's cool knowing that you have that ace
up your sleeve where instead of waiting for them to
choose a route that brings them close, they might walk
(16:00):
in from anywhere to exactly where you want them to be,
all because they decided it was better to approach the
bride'smaid party instead of the dudees chugging yagger bombs and
mean mugging the rest of the patrons. So think about
that if you're looking to juice up your rut hunts
this year, a good dough decoy might be the missing
(16:21):
piece there. And think about listening next week because I'm
going to talk about how people get the rut wrong
and what they should do to get it right. That's
it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has
been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought
to you by First Light. I know you need some
hype content this time of year. You want to see
(16:41):
some big bucks get killed. You want to listen to
some podcasts on the way out to your hunting spot.
The meat eater dot com has you covered. We just
recently dropped my North Dakota hunt from last year that
happened on public Land. You can watch me struggle mightily
on that one. Or if you're not in the mood
for tons of whitetail content which we have, you can
go listen to Clay's podcast. He's always covering something just fascinating.
(17:05):
We've got Meet Eat Radio on Thursdays now dropping on
Fridays too. You can check that out. A whole bunch
of stuff there, tons of content the mediator dot com.
Please go check it out, and thank you again for
all your support.
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by First Light,
creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind.
First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about why you
might want to use a doe decoy instead of a
buck decoy. If this week doesn't make your giblets tingle
as a deer hunter, you might want to check your pulse.
(00:42):
It's go time and all of you folks who sat
out the hot weather or the lull or whatever to
hunt the best time of the year, well it's here
and you better get out there. But first you might
want to consider a doe decoy, which is something I'm
going to lean on pretty heavily this year. But first
I need to explain why I keep leaving the buck
decoy at home and going with the dough. So buckle
(01:04):
up my pre rut buttercups, because it's time to talk
to your Let's do a little imaginary lesson. To start
this one off, Let's say you're a guy, because that's
a pretty safe bet for a podcast with this level
(01:25):
of juvenile humor that is centered on trying to outsmart
rabbits with antlers, and you're about to head to the
local watering hole. Now, let's also say that you are
a single fella. I don't care if your main squeeze
got hit by a train and it has been the
appropriate amount of time since the funeral, or you're just
a pioneer not a settler. Whatever. So you walk into
(01:46):
some fine establishment adorned with plenty of Neon signage in
the windows, and you stroll up to the bar to
order I don't know, seven shots of fireball or whatever
the kids are drinking these days. I've been out of
the game for quite a while on that front, so
you got to fill in the blanks yourself here. Now
you look to your right and you see what is
clearly a large collection of women dressed in cowgirl themed
outfits that they clearly bought for some bridesmade get together
(02:09):
type thing. Maybe one of them has a veil on
or something and is carrying a balloon that is shaped
a lot like a not safer work balloon. If you
get my drift, you take a head count, you realize
there are eleven of them and they are doing shots
and having fun. Then you look to your left. At
the other end of the bar is a collection of dudes.
They all have Affliction T shirts on. They are about
(02:31):
two sizes too small, Several have barbed ware tattoos around
their biceps, many of them have backwards hats on, and
all of them are drinking what looks like brown hard
liquor that is mixed with nothing more than an ice
cube and bad decision making. To further clarify what's going on,
one of the bridesmaids she goes to the jukebox and
(02:52):
plays Mark Kenyon's favorite Taylor Swift love song. Then one
of the Affliction T shirt wearing dudes struts over and
plays a German death metal song that sounds a bit
like what they used to use to make it very
uncomfortable for the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. You have two choices.
What group do you approach first? Now, let's say that
(03:14):
you pose this question to the next one hundred guys
you run across. Some of them are five feet tall
and one hundred pounds soaking wet, while others look like
they failed the NFL draft for being too big and
too violent, and of course there's everything in between. What
percentage of guys do you think would stroll up to
the barboyer tattoo crowd? First, it's probably a pretty small,
(03:36):
pretty low amount, although there might be a few mixed
in there that just like the thrill of throwing haymakers
on a Saturday night, the smart money is on the ladies.
Maybe not all the guys go that way, of course,
but the numbers would be in your favor there. Now,
let's think about deer. I had the recent pleasure of
snort wheezing in a giant eight pointer on public land.
(03:58):
That was clearly a dominant buck, and he was the
kind of deer that could handle the deer version of
you know what are you looking at? Pal? I also
had the displeasure of cutting hairs off of his back
when I guess the rains wrong, because I was in
full meltdown mode from thinking that he was going to
walk out a frame and get out of my life,
which he did later on, and which stung a lot.
(04:20):
But that buck was the buck to challenge I tried
the same thing on a smaller deer and it worked
exactly like it often does. That buck was a lover
and not a fighter. In fact, almost every deer you
see will choose the lover approach because in nature it
makes more sense to burn precious calories passing on your
genes versus locking the cage of the octagon for five rounds.
(04:44):
Yet we almost always choose a buck decoy over a
dough decoy. Why is that? Well for starters, the people
who sell you buck decoys tend to hunt places that
you definitely wouldn't be allowed on. If your farm is
hovered up in prime age bucks, a buck decoy is
no big deal. You can weed through the little tiny
(05:07):
one hundred and forty inches and wait on the one
sixty five who rules the roost. You also probably have
a very good idea where he likes to travel and win,
So a buck decoy with an aggressive body posture is
the right call there, and it works. You can turn
on your favorite hook and Bullet channel or go on
over to YouTube and watch this play out a lot
(05:28):
this time of year, and it is cool as hell.
A buck that approaches sort of sideways while licking his
lips and side eyeing a plastic rival. It's just a
sight to behold. And when he sucker punches a fake
buck in the guts, it's pretty damn amazing. But again,
if you choose a buck decoy, you're playing the odds game,
(05:51):
and what you're doing is saying I don't want a
certain number of bucks to come in to range, and
I certainly don't want any actual doze around me. This
is the equivalent of casting a huge bucktail for muskies.
You aren't going to accidentally catch very many bass on it,
and maybe, just maybe you might catch a mongo pike,
(06:13):
but mostly you're going to either catch nothing or hook
into a big musky. Now, if that's what you're into,
doughnuts for deer doughnuts, But if you're listening to this podcast,
my guess is that maybe you're open to the possibility
that decoying in one hundred inch dear would be pretty
sweet too. That's where I'm at and I'm going to
get to it, But first I should talk a little
(06:35):
bit about a third option. You can use a small
buck decoy. I'm trying to get Dave Smith to make
me a realistic looking basket rack six pointer. But it
turns out he knows the decoy market better than me
and isn't interested in my suggestion for how to run
his business. I also asked him to make me a
feeding dough decoy, and that got me a response that
was similar to what I told my wife that I thought,
(06:57):
after this whole filming whitetail run, I'm on wraps up.
I'm just gonna go hunker down in Wisconsin for a
few weeks until I run out of season or kill
a big buck. Anyway, a little buck decoy opens up
your options more. A big buck's not usually going to
fear a little buck, but that doesn't mean he's gonna
mess with him. Sometimes they come in and it seems
(07:19):
like they just want to push them around, kind of
like when you use a quarter strut jake for spring turkeys.
But sometimes they almost don't pay them any mind at all,
even if you pair that decoy up with some rattling
or grunting or snort wheezing or whatever. The bucks that
are out there this time of year are looking for
one thing first and foremost. That's not a fight. It's
something that while I'm not a dear biologist here seems
(07:41):
like it's more likely to get offered up by doze
than bucks. There is also the reality that putting out
a buck decoy has a ripple effect on the rest
of the non target deer That doesn't seem to do
you too many favors if you like having non target
deer around you. What I mean by that is, by
the time the pre rudd is really kicking in, it
(08:02):
seems like the doughs have had enough of the harassment already.
They are generally pretty leery of decoys anyway, which I
think is funny because we always talk about them as
if they are easy to kill while acting like big
bucks are super smart. I think the average dough, at
least pressure dough, has better survival instincts than the average
big buck. But that's fodder for a different podcast, and
(08:24):
one that might get me shunned out of the deer
on In community because it's built on the notion that
mature bucks are the masters of avoiding hunters. Any huski.
If you put a buck decoy out, you are generally
admitting a few things. The first is you're calling out
bucks that are just not big enough, or the ones
that don't have the right mentality to mess with your decoy.
(08:45):
The second is you're probably going to alarm some non
target deer with its presence, which can have a negative
effect on your sit. With a dough decoy, you mitigate
a lot of that stuff, And to be honest, doesn't
it just makes sense to give the deer what they're
looking for. I really don't get the idea that it
should always be a buck decoy, but maybe that's a
(09:07):
personal problem. This really started to take shape for me
a long time ago when I started using some portable
fold out deer decoys. One of them was a meal
deer decoy, but represented a feeding meal deer, so in
other words, it just looked like a relaxed deer that
was munching on some greenery or acorns. The white tails
didn't seem to notice that it wasn't their species. And
(09:29):
what blew me away was that I could use it
in the early season, like in a beanfield setup, and
almost all of the deer would eventually come over and
feed by it. Now, some of the dose would look
very suspiciously at it at first, but almost always they'd
end up feeding over to it. It kind of shattered
my notion of what I knew about decoying at the time,
(09:51):
but the lesson there was one that stuck with me.
We absorb a lot of information about deer hunting vicariously.
I you it at least partially as an academic pursuit,
which it is, but it's all so experiential. In fact,
experience is just the real difference maker between being good
(10:12):
at this stuff or not. In my experience messing around
with that feeding mule deer dough decoy and then later
their white tailed dough decoy, was that a lot of
what I'd always heard about decoying is just not always true.
(10:32):
You can say I had a natural bend toward doe
decoys to begin with, but that really became something different
last season when I hunted with my daughters. Now I
know I've talked about this a lot, so bear with me.
After one of my daughters shot a spike on the
first night of the season, her sister was up to
bat and while I tried really hard to get a
buck in front of her, I couldn't even get a
deer to show itself. We sat in the north woods
(10:55):
and blanked and blanked and blanked, and it got to
be the first week of November, and I told her
that our shot was going to be to post up
with that dough decoy and just wade out a buck.
My rationale was that in a low deer density area,
a lone dough would draw some serious attention if we
could get a buck to even look at it. And
it took us all day, but the buck that did
(11:15):
look at it liked what he saw so much that
he put on a scraping show for us and then
trotted into about fourteen yards and gave our fake deer
a good butt sniff. He seemed very confused at what
he got a whiff of, but he didn't get much
time to ponder it because my daughter shot him right
through the lungs and in a matter of seconds we
were getting out of the blind to go look at him.
(11:36):
A week later, I sat in the exact same blind
with the doe set up in the exact same spot
and watched a cruising two year old eight pointer pop
out of the field and trot right past my setup.
It was one of those deer hunting moments that went
from oh he's in so much trouble to oh shit,
please come back, please come back so fast that happened
that you can barely believe it. I could almost see
(12:00):
that buck stop at the edge of the swamp and
process that he had a plan to go cruise somewhere else.
But his rut dulled brain had just seen the very
thing he was looking for, even though he wasn't expecting it.
He turned to one eighty and came back into my life.
And while he made a tiny bit farther than my
daughter's deer, it didn't matter. We went two for two
(12:20):
after struggling all season, all because of a Doe decoy.
Now you might be thinking, well, if I had such
sweet ground to hunt like those dumb ass podcast hosts,
I could decoy one too. Now, I assure you most
of the public land I hunt in the Midwest is
better than this private ground up in northern Wisconsin, and
I can barely see a deer on it with my
(12:41):
best efforts, which sometimes are pretty good. It was just
the right situation to put out a fake lady. And
that's just it. In fact, I'm really hoping that by
the time you listen to this episode, I'm posing with
a giant public land buck down on Iowa that falls
for the same trick. That's a TB kind of thing
at the moment, though. The truth is a dough decoy
(13:04):
is a good idea for a lot of folks, but
it isn't just as simple as putting it out and waiting.
You want visibility first. You don't have to post up
on one hundred acre alfalfa field to make it happen,
but obviously you want it where a buck might look
at it and see it. You don't want to surprise
anyone with it. Deer like a lot of things, but
(13:25):
what they don't like is walking into a small kill
plot or meadow and suddenly seeing a deer that they
haven't heard or smelled before getting there. Now, some bucks
might tolerate it, but you're likely to get a reaction
that's negative out of a lot of deer. You got
to give them some space and then think about what
deer would naturally do. In that setting where my daughter
and I killed, a lot of the deer come out
(13:47):
of the corner of the field from this nearby swamp
where they bed. So a deer that looks like it's
forty yars out from that corner facing in the right
direction just looks very natural. Now, maybe this isn't as
big of a deal as I believe, But I do
the same thing with turkey decoys in the spring. I
want them to look as much like how real turkeys
would use the landscape as possible, So with a dough decoy,
(14:09):
I look for that kind of thing, even though maybe
that's just to settle my brain down and make it
think that it's doing some smart stuff. But you do
have to think about how they'll approach. This is one
of the reasons I like doe decoys more than buck decoys.
While bucks will generally approach a buck decoy head on,
or at least in the general direction of the head
which has all of the weapons on it, a dough
(14:32):
decoy is not a threat, it's an invitation, and they'll
generally approach it from straight behind. This gives you a
very good chance to position them exactly how you want.
They also seem to forget about swinging down wind more
with dough decoys than buck decoys, which is an added bonus.
Although it's not a hard and fast rule, you should
(14:52):
think about the wind in any ascent. You might leave
around the decoy, for sure, but generally they walk in
right behind her and stick their necks out to give
her a good sniffing. This means, if you like fifteen
or twenty hour broadside shots that distracted deer, a doe
decoy is a great idea. This is something that is
amazing even for forty four year old adult hunters with
(15:15):
pretty extensive resumes, but who still screw up shots enough
to think about it way too much when they are
trying to fall asleep and their dumb brains decide to
run a low light reel of failures just to remind
them that they should probably be golfers. And it's even
more amazing when that happens for inexperienced hunters who need
shots set up as predictably as possible. Plus, and I
(15:38):
want to stress this all lot, it's super fun. Deer
hunting should be fun. And watching a buck c and
then approach a decoy that's just about as fun as
it gets. It's cool knowing that you have that ace
up your sleeve where instead of waiting for them to
choose a route that brings them close, they might walk
(16:00):
in from anywhere to exactly where you want them to be,
all because they decided it was better to approach the
bride'smaid party instead of the dudees chugging yagger bombs and
mean mugging the rest of the patrons. So think about
that if you're looking to juice up your rut hunts
this year, a good dough decoy might be the missing
(16:21):
piece there. And think about listening next week because I'm
going to talk about how people get the rut wrong
and what they should do to get it right. That's
it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has
been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which is brought
to you by First Light. I know you need some
hype content this time of year. You want to see
(16:41):
some big bucks get killed. You want to listen to
some podcasts on the way out to your hunting spot.
The meat eater dot com has you covered. We just
recently dropped my North Dakota hunt from last year that
happened on public Land. You can watch me struggle mightily
on that one. Or if you're not in the mood
for tons of whitetail content which we have, you can
go listen to Clay's podcast. He's always covering something just fascinating.
(17:05):
We've got Meet Eat Radio on Thursdays now dropping on
Fridays too. You can check that out. A whole bunch
of stuff there, tons of content the mediator dot com.
Please go check it out, and thank you again for
all your support.
Host
Mark Kenyon
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