This has been a great thread to read. I am always interested in scientific approaches to questions like these.
Let's see what everyone thinks about my situation. First, some background.
- I hunt in SE Kansas, so my rifle season is post rut
- My land is probably 60% woods, and 40% pasture. Several ponds and small creeks.
- Very heavy this year with acorns and persimmons
- There is a lot of hunting pressure around our place. A lot of the sections are getting divided into 80 and 90 acre plots or less with very heavy recreational and hunting use. Not much agriculture anymore, except for guys who run cattle.
- I started putting out a corn feeder a few years ago, mostly to combate all the other feeding that is going on in the area. Corn works pretty well in terms of keeping deer on the property.
- I have tried attractants in the past with pretty much no luck - primarily apple flavor items. I don't see much sense in the acorn based scents given the woods are full of them this year.
I originally came to this thread wanting to read up on C'Mere Deer. It seems I really have yet to read a positive word about this stuff - at least no one seems to have the miracle results that they show all over TV. Not that there is any surprise there.
Based on this thread, I tried a bag of Black Deer Cane. I got back into some fairly thick ones, on a known trail. Cleared the ground and put about half the bag on the ground, the other half on a stump. I didn't add any water, and we have been pretty dry here.
After two weeks - Im very underwhelmed with the results. The trail cam I hung there had very few pics, and only maybe half a dozen where deer stopped and actually looked at the Deer Cane. Maybe had two bucks, it was hard to tell if they were the same buck or two different ones, the others were does.
Yeah - I was hoping for magic.
Any thoughts on this? Did I do something wrong, or is it just not grabbing them for some reason? Any other suggestions on things to try?
One thing I think might have made a difference, but don't know, is this. We leased our place this year for cattle, and the guy who was running them didn't pull them off until a week into my test. I did get a few pics of cows - which surprised me both becuase cattle are surprisingly nocturnal, and I put it pretty deep into the woods. So, the cows smelled it at least, since I don't think they were down in there before.