Can You Fool A Deer’s Nose?
While I have a great personal passion for the outdoors, spend a lot of time hunting and fishing or preparing to do so, Nelson Creek Outdoors is also a business. Our business is to help our customers enjoy their outdoors activities more and harvest more game, primarily through hunting and fishing scents and attractants. In short, we sell products to outdoors customers. Like any other business, we have to get the word out to our potential customers through advertising and marketing. We rely quite a bit on Facebook for that (no, I won’t go into a gripe-fest about their policies). I make posts, talk to customers and really have a great time doing so. That being said, their is one part I hate: negative people trying to start arguments or attacking products they have never tried. It can be tiresome. But that is the end of the griping; I want to get on to some more productive points.
The first thing I hear over and over is more about scent elimination than deer scents themselves. “You can’t fool a deer’s nose” they repeat over and over. “You have to play the wind, forget about scent control” is another common refrain. If you believe this, more power to you. I certainly agree that you should play the wind whenever possible, but that is just it; it may not always be possible. Perhaps you have a limited number of stands. Or, even more common, you choose your stand to take advantage of being downwind of the deer when suddenly, the wind changes direction. Sure, maybe you can change stands at that time, but it could also mean going home or ruining your hunt. I prefer to stay out and not change stands mid-hunt, which is why I not only play the wind, I also control the amount of stink I emit into the air.
Some people believe you have to eliminate 100% of your odor for scent elimination to be effective. Since that can’t be done, why bother? If they thought about it more, they would see why their thinking is in error. No, you cannot eliminate every human odor. You breath, you sweat and bodily gases emanate from your person all day long. You cannot remove them all. But, you don’t have to be complete scent-free to improve your odds. Many deer are used to smelling people. How MUCH they smell of you has a dramatic affect on what their reaction is. A full whiff of stinky human and they are off to the races. They can also smell you quite a distance away and you won’t even know you spooked the buck you never saw. But, if they only catch a small bit of your scent, they may just believe a person passed by and the danger level is low. Big bucks are incredibly smart and the less they smell of you, the better.
We make scent elimination products. I assure you, they work very well. They work by killing bacteria and absorbing and trapping odor particles, human or otherwise. This can make you invisible or, worst case, at least reduce your odor footprint to the point they either aren’t alarmed or aren’t alarmed soon enough to get out of the way of your shot! If you want a scent elimination spray that truly works, check out Whitetail Alchemy Scent Eradicator. If the wind changes or that trophy buck comes from the wrong direction, you’ll still have a fighting chance against his sense of smell.
The other common statement I hear is “synthetic deer scents don’t work” or “deer urine doesn’t work”. They will site some study written by a guy that couldn’t identify a whitetail if it climbed in his stand and take it for gospel truth. This is completely false. Deer urine and deer scent glands contain many identifiable volatile compounds that deer can smell or sense with their vomeronasal organ. These are the basis for deer identifying each other, there health and their readiness to breed. They a attractive to the deer and contain the same compounds as pheromones. The deer are genetically inclind to respond to these scents, and they will.
To be completely honest, the scent industry has done a lot to make hunters believe scents don’t work. Companies have sold stale, spoiled deer urine in bottles for many years. All of the good compounds are long gone and you have the equivalent of a bottle of dirty ammonia water. Other scent companies have put out “synthetic scents” that are no where close to real urine, containing only 3 ingredients (water ammonia and urea). While these three chemicals are in urine, they are the least important ones in urine and are not attractive. At best, they may be a mildly effective cover scent, and even that is doubtful. We know this because we tested our competition and they proved themselves to be very poor in quality. It is no wonder hunters aren’t confident in these products!
You CAN make excellent replicas of deer urine and glandular secretions. We have, and they work exceedingly well. But, this does not come cheap and it isn’t easy. Nelson Creek Outdoors is dedicated to the quality of our synthetic scents, so you can trust they are chemically complete and extremely effective. They have all the necessary ingredients to fool deer and have the correct volatile organic compounds to trick deer into believing they are smelling markers for other whitetails. Use our rut lures in a scrape, tracking lures on a drag or our calming scent on a pad, and you can trust that they will improve your odds of seeing and harvesting a great buck due to their ability to provide unparalleled attraction qualities. Deer have evolved to detect and decode the scent from other deer; NCO has evolved to trick even the wariest of deer. Check out our latest synthetic scent offerings. Synthetic Hog in Heat Urine available as well.
In the end, I do have to agree that some deer hunting products are gimmicky. And unscrupulous sellers will make poor products hoping to pad the bottom line. But we never will! Our scents are created by hunters, tested by hunters and trusted by hunters. Our commitment to quality is second to none. We truly hope you choose Nelson Creek Outdoors for your next purchase of quality scents and other products.
Yes, you CAN fool a deer’s nose!