For decades whitetail hunters have been trying to lure and trick bucks by fooling them with scents and lures. If you are to visit your local sporting goods store over 85% of the hunting products have something to do with tricking a deer’s sense of smell, including scent elimination products, cover scents, and scent applicators. A whitetails sense of smell is the most important factor when it comes to hunting. Like most great products, trial and error and many years of experimenting has led to top-of-the-line items now available to hunters.
Three Key Steps to Making a Mock Scrape
You’ll need a desired licking branch species. We like to use Grapevines, Cedar or Apple tree limbs So you’ll either need to do this near a tree with a low hanging branch or install your own on a high traffic area. We like to chose to use a vine or limb that was already suspended high above and normally worked every season. If you need to install one on your own, use a rope and tie it between two trees over a deer trail or corridor. then you can tie the licking branch you brought in to set-up.
Now, take a stick or bring a clean rake, one that’s pretty sturdy and has a decent pointed end to it to irritate the soil below the scrape site. Find a spot that you know deer are religiously using and that is also within shooting range of your tree stand set-up. Use the stick or rake to scrape a circle of loose dirt underneath the licking branch site. Make sure that you really rough up the dirt so that you would leave a footprint in it if you stepped in it. Also, push a few catching holes with the end of the stick or rake to hole any urine overflow to last longer in the scrape. The last step is to hide a camera on the site and only check that camera on proper wind directions that will not interfere with deer using the location or use a wireless camera set up. We would see deer check out the scrape within 24 hours on wireless cameras, within about a week we had multiple bucks visiting these sites during shooting hours.
We use a scent company called Buck Fever Synthetics for our go-to scrape scents and the results are amazing.
The Hot Ticket
You can use Buck Fever Synthetics all season long depending on what type of scent you are using. A scent like Red Moon Estrous, which is a blend of whitetail doe estrus collected at peak cycles blended with other key ingredients, can be used from Mid October through December. You can also use Buck Fever Forehead Gland the entire season to keep deer visiting these locations. We begin using mock scrape set-ups as effective hunting and inventory locations the last two weeks of September. These sites are effective the entire Fall, during those pre-rut and rut stages, during the heat of the rut and even post rut events.
