making cover scents?

[beesobrien]

has anybody made their own cover scent or lures? care to share any tips?

[mrjbigfoot]

I always bag my outermost camo wear in a big garbage bag with some cedar branches & natural leaves/dirt and I keep it tried shut in the back of the truck till I get to where I'm going to hunt. I guess you could call that my own natural scent effort... With that said, I've made it a point to kill a few does, from the area I hunt, during rut season, over the years and I kept their bladders full of urine, bagged it in gallon sized ziplock bags & froze it until the next season! Beat the heck out of paying all that money for friggin piss...

[hogdogs]

I feel that the box of baking soda with the tear off piece for fridge use and a couple of the charcoal aquarium filter packs from the fish tank department dropped into the bag with your hunting garb should suffice and is pretty cheap as well. Brent

[Win Mag]

Now iv'e done the arm and hammer, but never thought about the charcoal bags.

One year a friend and i tried boiling sticks, bark and leaves and bottled the juice in a spray bottle and used it as a cover spray on outer garmints.Thats what we did with our traps when we were trapping some,then dipped them in wax set.

[kahuna]

I keep my "outer wear" in scent proof bags from Hunter Specialties. But a nice, easy clean way to keep them smelling right is I use the scent wafers, sometimes pine, sometimes cedar, and a fresh earth wafer also. No muss, no fuss, and they are reusable.

[tphunter]

For years I used plain old vanilla extract as a cover scent...You smell like food so the deer never got alarmed...infact I found they would come in looking out of curiosity...But after 30 years of using it I decided lastyear to do the total scent free thing because I was afraid the deer were getting used to the vanilla smell as a human smell...

[beesobrien]

this is all great advice and an interesting thread, but i'm more looking along the lines of a something i can stick in a spray bottle and take with me because the prices of scentshield and the others is just too expensive.

[ccromnes]

My dad had a friend that was a trapper. Once in awhile, he'd get a skunk or find a roadkill one. He would somehow remove scent gland or what ever it is and would put it ina very small vile with a screw top. He would keep it frozen. Come season he'd take one out and tape it to the barrel just above the stock. Ya could always tell ya were getting close to him when making drives! My dad used it for a few years too.

[beesobrien]

sounds a little extreme for my liking

[shaman]

Cover scent? I've pretty much given up on the idea, except that I'll probably throw some cedar boughs in the trunk that holds most of my clothes. If the deer are going to smell anything on me, cedar is probably the best choice for my woods. Mind you a do this very conservatively.

I am about ready to start processing my hunting clothes for bow season. I've got about 2 loads to do. The rest are all still bagged up from last season, and will not require any work. These are the few pieces I left out for Turkey Season.

After tonight, Girlfriend will be done with the washing machine until Friday. I'll start by running a full cycle with nothing but a handful of baking soda. That will get everything rinsed out.

Although I agree with those who say hunt the wind, and you won't need anything else, here's what I do additionally to cheat:

1) I wash all my clothes in nothing but baking soda. Nothing. Ever. When I'm washing, I run the washer once with nothing but baking soda to clean out whatever stink has accumulated in thh machine.
2) I wash the outer camo layer separate from the inner layers (underwear, etc.)
3) I air dry all my stuff-- almost always on a clothesline outside. Nothing ever sees the inside of a dryer.
4) I pack it all in a trash bag or plastic bin with a handful of baking soda thrown in. I do this sparingly, so there's not all that much to shake out. Inner and outer layers get packed seperately.
5) When I'm hunting, I shower before going out with baking soda. I also use an unscented deoderant.
6) I hunt with an outer layer of camo that never sees the inside of the house.
7) When I'm done hunting, my clothes go back in a separate bag for dirty clothes.
8) I never hunt in the same clothes two days in a row.
9) In warm weather I change the outer layer between the morning and afternoon hunts.

When I'm meticulous in this method, I can be within 20 yards upwind of a whitetail deer, and they won't bust me. If I screw up and wear the same shirt two days in a row, I can be busted from 70 yards down wind or 20 yards upwind of my stand. The deer always let me know when I've screwed up.

The key to this is finding a source of sodium bicarbonate in large quantities. I order it in 80 lb sacks from a chemical supply house. It's cheaper than laundry detergent, and it does as good a job on my hunting clothes.

The reason I've given up on cover scents overall is that I began to question their efficacy. Let's say you bought an innocuous bottle called "Apple Scent." You're hunting an orchard, so it makes scence to cover yourself with apples. How can you be sure that bottle of "Apple Scent" smells the same to a deer? To the big buck you're after it might just smell like some cheap industrial imitation.

I've grown up in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is dominated by a valley filled with big industrial plants like Procter and Gamble. It also has related industries like Fries & Fries, the flavor company. All my life, I've known when P&G or F&F were flushing their tanks. There is just nothing in this world like walking out your door in the morning and getting hit with a wall of BLUEBERRY!!!! or hit over the head with FRESHBAKEDBREAD !!! Don't get me wrong. I like berry smell and I like the smell of fresh bread baking, but CHEEZEANDRICE!!!

I suspect that the same thing can happen to a deer. Deer have the ability to track the scent on your boot, and also determine which way you came. With that level of sensitivity, they should also be able to descriminate anything odd in the environment from anything natural. If all of a sudden DOG or GASOLINE or CHEAP IMITIATION BERRY SCENT starts wafting in, they will know it. When I show up on my stand, I generally want to be invisible to the deer.

This is not to say I don't have years of experience with scents. I pretty much gave up on them for a few reasons:

1) Expense.
2) Unreliable effect on the deer -- a $7 of miracle scent might make one deer dance a jig and another deer run like a scalded cat.
3) Difficulty.

It just added another dimension to the hunt, and it was not a dimension that gave me confidence in success. In the days when I hunted with cover scents and the like, I always saw deer, but they often seemed more wary.

Last year, around Halloween, I had the perfect example of what it was I was trying to achieve when I made the leap of faith and went scent invisible. It was a bright crisp cloudless morning. Along about 10 AM a nice young buck came out and hung out below my stand. He had a nice rack, but he was still immature, so I decided up front to pass on him. He stayed for the better part of a half hour. During that time, I was in plain sight in my treestand. At times, were were eye-to-eye at less than 20 feet. I found that I could move naturally, and he would not spook. I even drew on him twice. No response. My guess is that he just did not have enough data on me to assume I was a threat. Having a negligble scent signature probably helped that immeasurably. I was just a freaky part of the tree.

[gonehuntn79]

beesobrien said:

this is all great advice and an interesting thread, but i'm more looking along the lines of a something i can stick in a spray bottle and take with me because the prices of scentshield and the others is just too expensive.

I have taken leaves,sticks,acorns,dirt,pine cones,pine needles, and anything else that is in the general area that I was hunting and boiled them on the stove in a pot of water for a while and transferred this into a spray bottle along with some of the items listed and this works great. Let us know if you try it and what you think.

[RodnGun]

I'm a baking soda freak myself and do just about everything Shaman outlined in his post.....including showering with baking soda....drying off with a towel that was washed in baking soda and bagged until time for use. I don't use a washing machine for my clothes though....I do them all by hand in a large ice chest I got and use only for my hunting clothes.

I don't use any deodorant either.....a handful of baking soda rubbed under my arms after showering and then the layers of clothes with the baking soda wash I've not found a need for deodorant.

I brush my teeth with baking soda.....and put a few branches from the hemlocks where I hunt in my "soda" washed clothes bags.

I dissolve some baking soda in water and put it in a spray bottle and use it on my bow or muzzle loader.

What sold me using baking soda was some years ago (20 or so.....long before Scent Lok'd Shielded Carbon Activated Forget the Wind and Hunt) "stuff" that's on the market today....I had been winded many times.

My first deer season after starting with baking soda I was in a blow-down that was my ground "blind"......next to a heavily used trail.

Suddenly....my eyes focused on a bobcat that had just come out of the creek bottom from seemingly nowhere. He knew something was different about the blow-down I was in. This cat stared for what seemed an eternity.....did a 360 degree walk around of the blow down....which took him directly down wind of my position.....back to the original spot where I first saw him.....then slowly moved on down the trail in the direction he was originally heading.

That sold me.....and the many encounters that have followed with deer that never knew I was there even though they passed or came in down wind of my position.

So to your point.....it is less expensive than cover-up "stuff".....it does take some time and discipline to use baking soda on EVERYTHING you touch or wear......and it will burn your eyes (least it does mine) so watch out for that.....but I feel being neutral instead of smelling like something might just give me that little edge that I'm always looking for.

with whatever you decide to use this year.