Ep. 838: Foundations - How a Doe Decoy Can Help You Get a Buck to Swipe Right During the Rut

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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.

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