Secret Vocalizations

The first time I had a go with a grunt tube, I coaxed a spike to within bow range. Exalted, I recalled the events back at camp, and lo and behold, one of my friends using the same call had a spike charge his ground position later that evening. A few weeks later I had a New Brunswick 12-pointer leave a doe and charge to within fifty yards of my crouched position--easy rifle range--after calling to him in similar fashion. I passed on that 125-class buck, but I decided that a grunt tube would accompany me into the deer woods from that point on.

Indeed, I soon realized that with a little practice a good variable-tone grunt tube can be made to sound like a fawn looking for its dame, a fawn in distress, a yearling doe, an adult doe and a doe in heat. It can also imitate a yearling buck, a mature buck, a monster buck, a buck tending a hot doe and even a frustrated buck about to breed a doe. All are proven deer calls.

Each fall knowledgeable hunters imitating these deer vocalizations tag thousands of whitetail deer. Yet sometimes big bucks give these same good hunters the slip precisely because these very calls are used. You see, if you spend enough time in the deer woods, you'll eventually be confronted with a situation where the old standbys are not effective. Sometime producing basic whitetail calls may even be detrimental to your pursuit of a racked buck.

In these situations, you'll want to know how and when to use the following four specialized calls.

Trophy Buck Tending Grunt

Take the tending grunts of a 31⁄2-year-old or older buck. Deep and guttural, they reflect the sexual urgency of a mature buck. This vocalization certainly stirs the imagination and sells a lot of grunt tubes. Unfortunately, when used in heavily hunted regions, this call will often scare away yearling and 21⁄2-year-old bucks. As a result, many knowledgeable hunters often refrain from using the tending grunts of a trophy buck when hunting such areas.

A few season's back while bowhunting in Kansas I watched as a mature 10- or 12-pointer came down and stood silently on the far side of the river. The goal was for me to shoot a good buck on film, and this 140-class buck would have been perfect, but I would have had to move from my ground blind to get a shot, and to do so would have put me out of the camera's eye. I had to somehow call the buck over to my side of the river--he was not interested in any of my renditions. I finally elected to try a series of deep, guttural grunts, and, as you might have guessed, the buck responded by scurrying up the far bank and out of range.

There may have been other factors at play, such as the presence of an estrous doe or even another buck that I couldn't see. He may have even grown suspicious from my earlier calls, but the fact remains that those deep, guttural grunts triggered an immediate escape response. Why? I didn't know it then, but the surrounding farmland held even bigger deer, including at least two 190-class behemoths. Though that 12-pointer was big by my standards, there were even larger deer in the neighborhood that probably at one time or another kicked that 12-pointer's butt, and he had thus responded accordingly.

Therein lies the rub. When hunting wilderness regions where wide-racked bucks die of old age without ever seeing or smelling a human being, the tending grunts of a mature buck do indeed attract trophy bucks in part because there are simply more older-age-class bucks present in the population. If that 12-pointer on the opposite side of the river had been one of the monsters the area is noted for, he might have charged across the river looking for a fight instead of fleeing to parts unknown.