Calling Bucks

EDITOR'S NOTE: Will Primos, the founder and president of Primos Hunting Calls, lives in Jackson, Mississippi. His company, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2001, has produced "The Truth Video Series" since 1986.

Question: How do you call bucks?
Answer: The big issue lies in the time of year you plan to call to them. During the early season -- bow season -- the buck's horns may be hard. The blood has quit flowing to the horns, and the deer have rubbed off the entire velvet and are ready to breed at any time after that. The shorter length of light in the day really gets the deer's hormones going and puts them into the rut. The light and the buck's hormones activates the buck's pituitary glands to put him in gear, which makes does receptive. As you travel from October through November, December and January, the occurrence of the rut depends on what part of the country in which you hunt. If you hunt in the Midwest, the rut primarily occurs in the middle of November, give or take a week, depending on your location. The way you call to bucks and what the actual call means to the buck depends on the time of year. A call will mean one thing on October 1, and on November 18 it'll mean something totally different. You have to understand the deer's language and understand when to call, when not to call and when not to call too much.

What happens when you call to a deer is very involved, and I can't cover it all here. But basically when you grunt at a deer, you tell him you're a deer. If you grunt during the rut and you repeat the grunt several times, you tell a buck you're actively pursuing a possible doe. A lot of people don't realize that when a buck chases a doe, he crunches leaves, breaks sticks and makes a lot of other noise. So, bucks become suspicious when they travel by your stand at, say, 60 yards out, and you go to grunting a bunch, and they don't hear anything else. You make them curious. However, they won't close that distance and come to you because they think, "Where's the buck? I can't hear him. I can't see him. Are we going to get in a fight? Why should I go over there?" You've got to convince them. For this reason, terrain features within 10 yards of your stand such as a ditch, a cliff, a drop-off, a fallen tree or a cane thicket become so important. Since a buck can't see well, and if you can't make any sounds in the leaves or whatever, you've just got to hope he gets curious enough to come to you.

We've cured a lot of that problem with the estrous bleat, which is real hard to make with a mouth-blown call. You can best make this sound with what I call a can call. It looks like a little can just like you may have had as a child when you received a toy barn set that had a thing that sounded like a cow. You turn the can over and back up and it goes "moo." That's the same thing Primos Game Calls uses to make the estrous bleat of the doe. We make two of these type of calls, the Easy Estrus Bleat and the Hyper Estrus Bleat. They're very similar. They're both can calls that you turn upside down and back up. They have phenomenal accuracy with sound. I've killed two deer with the estrous bleat call this year. A buck knows what this estrous bleat call sound means: a doe wants to breed, she's just been bred, or she wants the company of a buck. She'll just stand there to make those sounds. So when a buck hears that, he doesn't expect to hear a lot of other sounds like deer chasing each other and that kind of thing.

One buck I grunted to last year would look but wouldn't come. I'd grunt very softly and not a whole lot because I didn't want to make my sounds resemble a buck that's just stood there -- grunting at another buck. I had a creek behind me so I had a terrain feature that kept him from seeing everything. He stopped and looked, but he wouldn't come. When I did the estrous bleat, he turned and came immediately because he knew a hot doe had to be standing there. That's the most effective calling I can tell you about.

Tomorrow: Knowing When to Shoot