Make your breaks with mock scrapes

Creating “mock” scrapes during the rut is a deer-hunting tactic many hunters practice.

During the rut, bucks paw oval shapes on the ground called “scrapes,” often at field edges and underneath overhanging tree limbs they can reach with their foreheads and antlers.

Biologist believe bucks deposit scent in scrapes by urinating down their legs and letting the liquid flow over their tarsal glands  and dribble onto the ground. It’s why rutting bucks smell so bad.

Bucks also rub their foreheads near their eyes on low-hanging tree limbs. Glands around their eye sockets secrete a waxy substance that contains each male deer’s identifying odor. Bucks also lick limbs above scrapes, probably to add more of their personal scent.

A buck’s scent informs does that a mature male is in the area and ready to pass on his genes to a future generation. It’s also supposed that these scents warn lesser bucks to think twice about intruding.

Scrapes, naturally, are deer sign posts that can be highly profitable as stand placement sites. Ron Nixon has made mock scrapes and altered existing scrapes to concentrate bucks even more effectively.

“Two years ago at the edge of a (soybean) field, I found five or six scrapes,” he said. “The buck also made one in the woods near the field. I broke off all the licking branches over the field scrapes, then I went to the woods scrape and bent limbs over so the buck could reach ’em.”

Nixon poured Tink’s 69, a well-known deer lure, on the ground to create the mock scrape.

“I wanted to make that buck come to that one scrape, and I didn’t want him out in the open where other hunters might see him,” he said.