#389 Premier Lock Down Strategy – Heads-Up Decoy Garrett Roe

August 21, 2017

WR 389 | Heads-Up Decoy

During shed hunting season, finding the right ambush sites for hunting lock down bucks six or eight months away. Having a reliable decoy on hand won’t hurt, too – and the ones from Heads Up Decoy come highly recommended. Garret Roe, founder and owner of Heads Up Decoy, talks about how his premier lock down strategies came into being. He shares hunting secrets that are detailed, crazy specific, and will make you love hunting whitetail bucks more than ever. All these secrets and more can also be found on his blog, Shed Hunting and Scouting for Whitetail Bucks.

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On our episode, we’re heading up to Hays, Kansas, home of Heads Up Decoy. We’re going to meet up with Garrett Roe. Garrett’s been on the show before and he talked about a lock down period, his decoys, and what his strategies are. This show, we’re going to talk about how those strategies come into being when it’s shed hunting time. He has a lot of secrets he’s going to share, but he’s looking for ambush sites. He’s looking for sites that he can get in on lock down bucks six or eight months away. It’s going to be an interesting show, it’s going to be detailed, it’s going to be specific, and you’re going to come away from this show knowing more about hunting lock down bucks than ever before.

Listen to the podcast here:

Premier Lock Down Strategy With Heads-Up Decoy’s Garrett Roe

I’m heading out to the Hays, Kansas and I’m going to meet up with a friend. We’re going to talk with a friend, Garrett Roe. He’s passionate. He’s flat out crazy. If you listen to his earlier show about a using a decoy for lock down whitetails, it was pretty good and I’m excited to have him on the show because he is the Founder and Owner of Heads Up Decoy. Garrett Roe, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Bruce. Thanks for having me again. I’m excited.

I am too for a lot of reasons because I put it in for a whole bunch of tags early. If I pull some tags, I’m going to be getting some product from it and putting it to the acid test here in Colorado. I’m looking forward to that, pronghorn, elk, whitetails, mule deer, and all that. We talked about shed hunting but really we’re going to talk about shed hunting and more. What does that mean? Garrett is going to take us to his blog, Shed Hunting and Scouting for Whitetail Bucks. Take it away, my friend.

Everybody enjoys shed hunting. Most people do the bowhunt, even if you don’t bowhunt, shed hunting has become popular and competitive. I probably use shed hunting more of as a scouting tool than anything and to get out of the house. It’s another excuse to get outside, maybe drag your son or daughters with you or your whole family and get outside on a nice March day or late February. That’s what shed hunting for me is, not necessarily about stacking up a pile of bones. We run trail cameras; we have an idea of what’s lived or what was around the area during the season. We want to see if we can find some of their antlers, just like everybody. I don’t have exclusive rights to hunt any piece of property that I bow hunt on.

Usually shed hunting, I get lucky if I find one, but I’m generally out looking for the obvious big antler and then scouting mostly in the process. Generally when whitetail hunting, there are certain areas people do not want to go into and then it’s another opportunity to go in to a place that during the season you may have wanted to keep as a sanctuary, not blow anything out. That’s how I approach shed hunting; it’s more of a scouting mission and probably more than finding shed. That’s how I outlined my blog.

We know the parcel land; you got a couple of places you can hunt. When you hit the woods or the creek bottom or whatever, what are you looking for?

Hidey hole pockets. They can be the size of your living room. Little crevices, banks, wash out, things like that that could hide a buck and a doe, or a buck in general. I try to go back into my memory the best I can to remember where I saw some deer hovering around. Once I find a little spot and it has obvious sign, old deer bed, rub, droppings, then I get an idea. It’s like, “Where can I see this from? Can I see this spot from a distance? What angle I need to use the see it? How can I get in and out of here? If I don’t see a deer in that spot, how can I come in?” Maybe setup with the buck decoy and do a rattling or calling sequence, like what you and I talked about in the first podcast how you can come in try, maybe if you don’t necessarily know that there’s a deer in there, there could be.

WR 389 | Heads-Up Decoy
Heads-Up Decoy: Even if you don’t bowhunt, shed hunting has become popular and competitive.

If you can get into a spot without blowing it out or anything else, you sneak in and out. You set up, you do a call, nothing comes in, nothing reacts, then you can get out quick. You didn’t do any harm to your spot. You didn’t blow anything out. That’s what I look for. I look for little nooks and crannies of place in pockets where a buck is going to push a doe. I assess it, how I can see it from a distance and then how I could get in and out of there and set up, if there’s one in there. It’s more of a midday type of thing. A lot of these places are off the beaten path, but there are times when I’m smack dab in the middle of a piece of property that I generally don’t walk right into during the season. I like the dirt places and play the wind, just like most whitetail hunters do.

You’re hunting during the rut because you’re not hunting to catch a deer that come from the food, to bedding, to water, bedding to food, transition zones, and funnels. You’re looking for bucks that this is going to be a travel corridor or this is where he’s going to lock down the does.

Everybody does hunts those travel corridors and looks for them, like you had outline, but you’re not always going to be in the right spot. Let’s say you dedicated four or five hours in the morning from sun up until 10:00 or 11:00 in a spot you didn’t see anything. I didn’t see anything here, but I know over here where I couldn’t see, there’s this pocket that I scouted last March and I’m going to go over there and glass it if I could see anything in it or maybe set up and try to rattle and call something in because they’re not obviously where I’m at. It gives you more opportunity. If you’re hunting all day long, you’ve got an opportunity to have some luck. That’s how I assess some of these places I like to hunt or like to go into it. There are small pockets of property or very small areas that might have a buck that I didn’t see in the morning using a traditional setup.

We’re talking from 10:00 to 2:00 possibly. We’re talking of long distance scouting. You’re hunting off the ground, correct?

Correct. I do 99.9% of my hunting off the ground. I can go back to the traditional type of whitetail hunt or how I used it to almost perfection where I was shed hunting. I was scouring a place and I stumbled onto a ridge that was soaked with yuccas. It was about a half a mile off of the main river bottom. It faces south east, it was dense, and I told myself, “I’m going to find a buck in here. I know it. I’m going to find a deer in here. If not, a quarter mile away, there’s a small finger of trees and then another half mile was the main river, but there’s going to be a buck in this yucca patch,” because the crop rotation also allowed that. I was adjacent to it so it was going to be weak for the next year.

Food source, travel corridors, and the off the beaten path was this ridge that was choked with yuccas, a dense cover. When they lay down, they disappear. Sure enough, everything played out just like I had thought it would. I had some gear using this ridge the day before. I snuck in in the morning and sure enough, this buck had already locked down a doe at first light and I blew it. I missed him at 35 yards coming in to the decoy. It’s skirting and getting into my wind so I had to take the shot and I miss ranged him. I’d already played it all out. That’s what the shed hunting and locating these little spots came to fruition. It’s like, “This is what I need to start doing, finding these little spots of pockets that are probably going to have deer in it for the future.” That’s essentially how this whole story came about and it’s forecasting and plotting. That’s what normal people do when they’re scouting for animals, is they’re looking for potential ambush spots. That’s how I came out with this little blog post.

Why don’t you tell them where they can find all this information? This guy’s got it down and I’ve got over 130,000 downloads so I know when somebody’s got something locked in. Tell people how they can read the blog and then how they can click over and see the picture of where that was. Was that a booner buck or 150? What class was he do you think?

When I first saw him, I thought he was 170. I saw one antler and it looked to be 13 inches long. That’s all I needed to see. At that point, I knew he was big. You don’t ever know until they’re on the ground, but he was large. After I missed him and he stood there about 95 yards away looking at me wondering what buzzed his armpit, I was like, “I just missed the biggest buck I’ve ever shot at.” That’s the story. There’s two stories here and they’re both outlined in the blog. If you go to HeadsUpDecoy.com and you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there’s a link that goes to our blog.

The blog that I have about shed hunting and scouting is from March. I have a link that takes you back several years ago to my time that I had in that yucca patch. The frustrating thing for me as a hunter is always seeing deer where I’m not. That’s why I’ve decided to come up with this product that allows me to take the hunt to them and it’s allowed me to be successful hunting them locked down in these little pockets or somehow catching them when they’re cruising from a food patch or a travel channel looking for a doe.

I’m looking to the yucca plant. If you don’t know what yucca plants are, are they 1.5 feet, 2 feet high at most?

They can be pretty big. A cluster of them get 3 feet high. They’re prickly but it can be CRP too, but it happens to be that we have yuccas out here where I live, basically half of Kansas I’d say there’s yuccas in. It could be a cedar; it could be a lot of different things. In my case, these yucca pastures are good because that’s where they go after pheasant season. Once pheasant opener hits and all these awesome CRP draws had been walked over fifteen times, people don’t pheasant hunt these yucca patch pastures where the cattle are. That’s where these bucks go during November after opening day of pheasant season. That’s where you find them in there.

It’s interesting because once they lay down, they’re hard to find. If you know where these patches are that face the sun so they can stay warm and they’re off the beaten path, then those are ideal places. It does take a little work to hunt them. There’s more than that. There are so many washouts, plum thickets, and those types of things that are ideal locations for a buck that’s shy. They’re smart, they know that know these travel corridors, these river bottoms, they’re going to be in there, but they also know that there’s danger there from people.

There’s a little terrain break that looks like a hill down. That helps. How close was the doe to the buck?

In this particular hunt, what I did was I crawled in on him and the doe, she stood up and she wasn’t alarmed. The next thing I know, I lost sight of her. She was off to my right about 25 yards and I was waiting for horns. I couldn’t find him. I was waiting for horns to be in my face. He had skirted around the ridge and was trying to get into my wind because I didn’t have perfect wind, my setup wasn’t ideal. He was angling off, trying to get into my wind before he came up. They can be on top of you. Those does can be right. Those bucks, they don’t leave their does, they don’t stray from them unless a dominant buck is coming to harass them. They’ll escort you off is basically what they like to do.

What Garrett has done, he’s created Heads Up Decoy. You can go to his website and check all those decoys out. What he’s figured out, especially during the lock down period, is where the bucks go. “I can’t find the bucks.” I don’t care if you’re in Manitoba or even Florida, when the doe comes in estrus, the dominant buck in the area is going to find that doe and he’s going to stay with her. If you come in with the Heads Up Decoy, tell us the rest of the story, Garrett.

If you're hunting all day long, you've got an opportunity to have some luck. Share on X

Basically they’re going to push that doe away from competition. Whereas most of the competitions on these corridors and river bottoms, they’ll push them and isolate them away. That’s where I find them and that’s where they’re most vulnerable. I’ve been to a lot of places. I lived in Eastern Kansas and I’ve been all over the entire state of Kansas. I know Kansas is a part of the Midwest, but I’m sure Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, Missouri and Iowa, all those places that you think of whitetail hunting have all these places that I’m describing. It may not be yuccas, but that buck will push into a small place that is isolated where they can see and where they feel safe and inconspicuous. That’s when you sneak in and you challenge them with this buck decoy.

A mature whitetail buck, even a scrub during the rut, they all think they’re badass. A dominant buck will feel threatened and his biggest problem is that he’s going to protect his prize at all costs. When he rises up and he sees those antlers on the buck decoy, he can’t help himself. He’s going to escort that buck out of here. That’s when he leaves the doe. If you’ve got one hot doe and three or four bucks hovering around, he’s not going to leave her. That’s when you have to move in. If you can get 50 yards, 60 yards away, which isn’t that hard to do, and you know a buck is in there and you’ve presented the decoy, either call at him using a grunt call or snort wheeze, he’s going to feel threatened. He’s not going to tolerate that. That’s basically when he comes in and he’ll escort you. They’re not looking at you. They see the threat and they begin. They posture in, I don’t know what they do with their eyes, they come in, and you shoot them at point blank range.

In Bruce’s words, the buck doesn’t want you around. You’re a so-called challenger because he’s got the doe. He wants to do what naturally he wants to do, pass on the gene pool. He will stay there until you’re on top of him and then he’s going to come out and kick her up. Is that how it is?

Yes, you were try to get into that inside. 80 yards, 60 yards, seems to be the magical distance. The farther they can see; maybe the farther you have to get away. I generally try not to get too close but close enough to be threatening. Sometimes if you surprise them at twenty yards, they’re going to blow out of there because they’re going to think, “I should’ve seen that,” or, “I should have heard or seen this guy before he was in twenty yards.” My magical spot is 60 yards, but if it’s 100 yards it’s 100 yards, if it’s 40 yards it’s 40 yards, it depends. That is ultimately the case. If you’ve observed whitetail bucks in your tree stand, I know you’ve seen whitetail bucks escort other bucks away and that’s exactly what’s going to happen to you, except you’re going to have an arrow.

It’s probably the most thrilling and totally unique to our product as well is to do that, to hunt like that. It gives you that option. If you still want to do the traditional thing with the tree stand and in the mid-day, this will break up the monotony for you. I usually like to find the deer but sometimes you don’t spot anything and you want to try to give yourself an opportunity. You go back, “I remember this spot when I was shed hunting. I got the wind to get in there the day. I’m going to sneak in, I’m going to clamp the decoy to this one shrub and I’m going to lay down some calling and some rattling and see if I can summon the buck.”

There’s nothing else to it. Anybody can go to a site and figure it out, but it sounds simple but the biggest thing is the scouting. He said, “He was shed hunting and more,” but it’s the scouting. What he does during the season is he’s already got his hit list of places, not the deer, because you don’t put out trail cameras?

I do now, but obviously it’s fun to have a catalog, a buck that you’re interested in shooting. After you went to find him, you’re not seeing him. It could be in one of those little spots that I have identified in March.

Is this technique during midday?

A lot of times, yes. The buck that I shot this year, I shot at 3:00 in the afternoon. You know how warm it was this November and it was 85 degrees the day that I shot him at 3:00 in the afternoon. I spotted him at 1:00, figured out how to get him on, and waited for him to bed down with this doe, and made sure that another buck didn’t push him off. As soon as he lay down, we gave him a couple minutes and then I snuck in on him and killed him. From the time he laid down, I had shot him fifteen minutes later.

Take us through this. You spot him, that’s the first thing you did.

We were looking. I found a spot many years ago, honestly at a hunting expedition. I had figured out how I could see that spot from a distance with my binoculars to half a mile. In route to that I pulled over and between me and that yucca patch was the buck and the doe, but they weren’t in that. We had a lot of moisture so the grass was tall and he was there. That’s basically how he did it. He wasn’t in the yucca patch but he was near it. We just let him sit because he would have seen me approach. Once he lay down with that doe, he isolated her there because it was much denser cover. Once he lay down, we had marked him and then I went in because I had gotten wind in my favor and that’s when I crawled in on him and got just 35 or 40 yards and then called him up out of his bed and challenged him and shot him at fifteen closing.

You challenge them when you get the wind in your face, then you get the decoy in front of you.

It was this time because it wasn’t very windy. I had it on my bow.

We’re out of the truck, we get all geared up, and now we’re going to close the deal. Walk me through it so the audience can understand.

I’ll take you from the first sun up. Sun up, we went into an area and try to intercept some buck or watch the key field, a cornfield. We were going to wait for a buck to come and settle down with the doe in the adjacent CRP. Nothing happened that morning. We didn’t see the buck we wanted to see. We had lunch and checked a couple other spots. We stopped for lunch. We drew blanks in one spot. I went back to another place that I had it previously identified as a place that could have a buck and a doe in it. We crawled in using the wind that I knew that we could use to get in and out of there without being too intrusive. We called, rattled, but nothing came out. We backed out, got back in the truck, and had lunch.

I told my buddy, “There’s a slope over here. I know it’s 80 some degrees, but the slope is usually got a buck on it and a doe. I know where we can look at it from.”We got in the truck, parked the truck, put our glass up and in route. Basically we saw them, I saw this doe bedded right there and at that point it was a matter of making sure another satellite buck or a smaller buck does not come out and bust him out of there. It was a waiting game, waiting for him to lay down with her. About 45 minutes he stood like a statue. It seemed that long. It was a long time and he was oblivious to us because we first spotted him on right on the road before we hit the truck, to see if he was something we needed to have a closer look at.

That’s basically what it was. We were going to these spots that I had previously outlined from scouting, how I was shed hunting to find a buck the doe pair and that’s basically what happened. He was in thicker cover than what the yuccas was and hidden away from off the beaten path. He laid down with this doe. I let him settle in a little bit. We marked him and I went in. Everything looks different when you’re at eye level. Right in that area everything changes from a glassing spot because that’s how you elk hunt, everything looks different really close. You think you have everything marked really good but I crawled in and had the wind in my favor and I literally had to snort wheeze and grunt and do all kinds of crazy stuff before he finally stood up. Once he stood up, his doe took off a little bit and then I thought it was over, but the snort wheezed at me and then he started posturing right in to escort me out of the area. Little did he know, I was there shooting.

You didn’t miss. I would have been sideways, upside down, inside out, but you get him.

It was because he was close and I shot him at fifteen closing and it was thick cover. My initial setup was to pick my spot. I had holes and lanes in the weeds and he wouldn’t get up. I called ahead another ten yards, essentially giving up all my shooting lanes. He finally got up and he was really close. The cover was good. I could have shot him from when he stood up, but it was so dense all I could see was his head. I was basically where there wasn’t any cover so I could move my bow and my decoy, my arrow wouldn’t get hung up on a bunch of stuff, so I was out in the open. He had already seen me and heard me and knew I was a deer. That’s when he postured in. That was in the middle of the day.

It is possible and we’re talking about Kansas. Kansas, you think it’s flat, it really isn’t. There are plenty of hills, valleys, galleys, and depressions. I call them depressions because in some places there couldn’t be a buck anyplace around. We’re pheasant hunting and there’s no way that there’s whitetail in that stubble field. Guess what? There’s a little depression and he’s in there. Nobody’s screwing with him, he’s all alone and all of a sudden the dog bust him or he gets up and you go, “Holy fright.” We’re not talking about one and a half, two and a half year old deer.

How little cover it takes to protect these deer from wind and give them cover and essentially make them disappear. It’s amazing what they have; the cover can swallow them up. These little spots are everywhere. An 80-acre piece of ground in Southeast Kansas can have seven or eight of these little spots or more. When I shed hunt, I look for these little spots, these little pockets because they don’t need to be big, it could be as big as your bedroom and that’s more than they need to be hidden and off where they feel safe and comfortable, where they can isolate that doe and not have to worry about competition.

There are a couple of take-aways right now. One, we’re shed hunting but we’re really not. Garrett is looking for these little honey holes. Do you have a journal? How do you remember all these places?

I take a fresh look at every place I hunt every year. I wipe it clean and I say, “I have an idea,” but I try to take a fresh look at every spot every year because I might have a new idea. When I tree stand hunted, a lot of times I would take my tree stands down because it would force me to look at this spot a little differently to fine tune fifteen yards, twenty yards and a tree stand is huge. I try to take a fresh look every year when I’m scouting because I don’t food plot so crop rotation’s a huge thing. When are they going to go to eat? There’s always that time late October, early November, they switch off on milo and all of a sudden they’re all on wheat.

The doe movement can change basically in a couple of days. You’ve got corn here, but it’s not going to be corn this year, it may be nothing. The next year you’ve got winter wheat or you’ve got a milo field and then at certain times during the year, milo is a magnet. I try to take a fresh look every year, think about crop rotation when I’m shed hunting, and project what this field is going to have in it the next year, what areas I’ve thought about or seen in previous years that are going to be back onto being on fire again. Some areas can really be hot and then the next year it’s a graveyard, because the crop rotation is different. I try to take a fresh start every year, and then I catalog as much as I can.

In a book or on a laptop or on a spreadsheet?

In my head, because some of the areas I hunt aren’t that big.

How big are they?

I got one spot that really is my favorite, it’s an 80-acre CRP field with a little bit of tree in it. There’s a couple of trees and someone or two little locus thickets in it.

What’s around it?

Miles and miles of crop land. It’s like an island in the middle of a huge crop land area.

Where’s the water?

Sometimes there, sometimes in a windmill. There’s few farm ponds there but as soon as those freeze up then they’re moving. I like to hunt there prior to pheasant season opening up. Occasionally I’ll catch one in there after the opening day, then it’s straight to pastures, the river bottom and pasture with yuccas where people don’t pheasant hunt, that’s where the deer is. You get back into these little washes, these little tickets, these yucca patches off the main river bottom where these bucks will isolate does. I chase them up and out into and then pin them down basically.

You’ve never been alone the creek bottom or river bottom in Kansas, those cottonwoods and those thicket and there’s everything whitetails need. The thing that I’ve learned is that all of a sudden you look for a finger that goes out and it’s like honey elk when you go into drainage, you go into basin, there’s a natural path where they’re going to lead that and head out into open country. Sometimes you get above tree line and there’s a finger of spruce, and all of a sudden you’ll see it. If you watch it long enough, they stay right in that finger until they get to go out to feed and they all stream out of that one finger. It could be washout or whatever, but the bucks will come out of the bottom because they know where they’re going. They don’t want anything to do with you or me or any other buck, because they’re in competition. Does that make sense? Help me out with this.

Yes, it does. Movement during the rut is random as well. Hunting bucks during the rut, it’s random. You could blow an opportunity and 30 minutes later you’d have another one. Their movements a little bit random, more random as far as here’s their bedding area, here’s their staging area, here’s where they’re going to feed, and they’re going to be moving somewhere between that. For a buck, he’s going to be checking those areas and if he draws blanks, he’s going to go to another spot because he knows where the does are. Just like if we’ve done our good scouting in March, we know where these little hidey holes are that they may be isolating a doe with. He’s going to go to the next spot and he doesn’t care how he gets there, he’s just going to get there. There’s a lot of random movement with bucks. It’s all based on whether or not there is a hot doe or does in heat in that area. He’ll stay around for a while and that’s why you get some areas that are cold and some areas that are hot with buck activity.

When I shed hunt, I look for these little spots, these little pockets because they don't need to be big. Share on X

When I’m looking for sheds, I look for little pockets somewhere around a food plot or a natural travel corridor like a river bottom. That buck is going to push the doe. The reason is I spent my whole life seeing that. I’ve never acted on it until the last seven, eight years. I’ve been on it mercilessly and I have been an agonizing experience watching these deer that have been “untouchable” in these little pockets away from my tree stand and I’m watching them helplessly. Now I’ve said, “I’m not hunting out of my tree stand. I’m going to let them do their thing,” and they’ve got this buck and he’s got this doe and he’s pushing her in some and he’s got his spot. They bed down and that’s when I go in. A lot of times I identified these places during shed season, because I’m on foot I can see they’re using this spot. They’re here. With that yucca patch, I know there’s almost always a buck and a doe bedded there. At some point during the November season, there’ll be a buck and a doe in this yucca patch. I just need it to be the day that I’m there.

I liked what you said about tree stand. I hate to say it’s traditional, but let’s stay with traditional, get above them and let them come at you and so forth and so on, intercept them like I do, spend all day in the stand and hope Mr. Wonderful runs by or strut by or walks by and you do your calling sequence. That’s a great segue that it came up. Talk to me about your calling sequence when you’re coming up on a buck. You know where he is, he’s been doping down, you know what the game is now, how are we going to call him?

We have a buck that has isolated a doe, we know where he’s at. I usually try to get to 60 yards and then I settle in and I make sure I have shooting lanes and that I’m as close to being directly downwind of him as possible. The next thing I do is I start with a simple grunt. I have a very loud grunt call that I use. I it because it’s loud, they could hear it. I don’t like these soft ones because I want him to hear from it. I want to reach out and tap them on the shoulder basically and get their attention and I start with a simple grunt.

If I don’t get any reaction from him, then I give him a snort wheeze. I just do that with my mouth as loud as I can. I want to sound as mean and bad as I can and then if I don’t get them to come up then I crawl up on him a little bit. I’ll change position. I’ll crawl up. I tried not to crawl and walk up on them because they’re hard to get that way. I like them to come to me and usually that’s enough to get in there. That’s usually what it takes because they hear that and they cannot help themselves. They can’t resist protecting their prize. They can’t help themselves. They’re not going to tolerate you and that’s when they posture in and you shoot him inside of twenty yards.

If I’m downwind, is he going to circle left to right and go crosswind to try to pick up my scent, or he doesn’t really care because he sees the horns, he sees the decoy and he’s going to come in to the buck?

I can’t figure that one out yet. If there’s angle to your wind, they’re going to go that way. If you’re directly downwind, I’ve tried to think they come towards the head side. I don’t know if I can tell you that either. They just come up with a path. Usually they try to angle towards the head side of the decoy. That’s not necessarily true because the buck that I shot this year didn’t do that. He came in, he was just coming in. If I had to let him come a little closer, he may have turned and gone the other way to show his whole body and they want to look as big as they can. It’s an interesting concept, it’s a very effective concept, but it does take some strategy. You’ve got to really know where these bucks are at. If you can’t see from a long ways away then you got to do your homework in March to figure out where these little spots might be, so you can go in there and you’re basically cold calling.

As you and I have talked and you reached out to me with this podcast, I thought all day, even the last weekend, I was like, “I need to do a better job of cataloging how I’m coming up with some of the theories that I have.” I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to get through the day and get through the deer season where I see one and I go and try it. I don’t worry about the philosophy about it, I just see one and I go in and kill it. It is essentially what I’m trying to do, but I need to be more analytical so I could help people and educate people so they can do this better.

Most people get it. Most people understand that there’s this time when these does and this buck is going to be with a doe and he isn’t going to move and they’re not going to move. Identifying those areas, those pockets, you do it when you’re shed hunting, that’s when you find them. It could be an area the size of your bedroom that have a buck in there at least once or twice a year or a doe in it at least once or twice a year.

To make the odds in cold calling, it’s a lot of work. You know where the prospects are. Let’s take it to everybody who’s selling something. We’ve got a product. The outcome is, “I’m going to go kill that deer.” The product is the buck. Now I want to find out, “Where are my prospects?” The prospects aren’t the deer. The prospects are the spots. Now I have to cover as many spots that I can, long distance class in which you talked about before, but now with the long distance counting or cruising and saying, “Within five miles of me I got three spots. I’m going to put the wind in my favor and I’m going to go check them out. I’m going to go in, I’m going to grunt then I’m going to snort wheeze.” Am I going to rattle?

I would rattle, do it at all, because it’s all natural.

I’m prospecting. I’m banging up some banging horns, snort wheezing, and grunting. I’m not doing the tending grunt. I’m looking, “I’m bad. I’m going to kick your butt. If you’re here, you better come and see me.”That’s a sales presentation. If he’s there, good, game on. If he’s not, then I have to go to X. I work through my prospects for that afternoon and either hit a honey hole or I don’t.

I have a friend of mine that does that to perfection. It’s not unusual for him to rattle two or three bucks in a week. He would do it just like that. He does it with supreme efficiency and I have a couple of friends that are really good at it. That’s what they do. They hunt the morning, “I didn’t see one. I don’t have any options,” then he finds a spot that he’s identified as being a place where there could be a bedded buck and doe or a bedded buck. He sets up on him downwind, grunts, rattles, snort wheezes, and sees if he can get one to come up out of there to challenge him and he shoots him. If you draw blanks, you go to the next spot. You just keep doing it.

WR 389 | Heads-Up Decoy
Heads-Up Decoy: Identifying those areas, those pockets, you do it when you’re shed hunting, that’s when you find them.

When you get to the point in the day when the deer are up on their feet more regularly, evening, then you go back to finding them on their feet and either try to intercept them. That’s essentially your routine. In the morning try to find one that’s on his feet, intercept one that’s on his feet, if you got nothing, find these spots that you have identified long ago and set up on them. Hunt. You set up, move in, set up, call, rattle, nothing. You repeat the afternoon trying to intercept one on its feet. The next morning you get up, you spot one, either intercept him on his feet or if he is way out there and he’s ahead of you, “I’m going to watch him. He’s just bedded down with his doe. Now I’m going to move in, I’m going to kill him.” That’s my day. That’s my November right there in a nutshell.

I’m thinking a lot of ways we can go. To our audience, this isn’t whitetail hunting 101. This is intense, it’s extensive, and I’m going to figure a way to elongate this on a different podcast.

It’s hard for me to truly describe the method in a real scientific, four pointed area. I find some spots that there’s going to be deer activity in it later in the year and I try to find those places in March when I’m shed hunting. That’s when I go in and that’s where a lot of times I have a lot of my action is in those spots.

If you’re selling, you go to places you closed the deal before. It’s not hard. 80% of my sales come from 20% of my prospects. That’s the 80/20 rule. A guy long time ago figured it out. 80/20 works in any aspect. There are no questions about that. Tell people how to get hold of you. Tell people where your website or tell them where the blog is again and give some shout outs.

Bruce, thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be on here. We’ve covered a lot of stuff. HeadsUpDecoy.com is my website. We have a blog at the bottom of the page link. We started revitalize that a little bit. We’ve got some great stories and pictures from people that use all of our products. That’s sometimes where we discuss a particular hunt, and some how-to. We’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, Heads Up Decoy. Just search us and you’ll find that we’ve done some really interesting things. We’ve been at this for a long time. We have checked so many things off the list that we’ve forgotten about how we even started it in the first place because the product and the techniques we have developed over the first two or three years, we learned a lot about our own product and we’ve been repeating them for the last five or six and educating to the best that we can.

Garrett Roe of Heads Up Decoy, thanks so much for being a return guest. Folks in our audience, take notes and think about where you hunt. I don’t care where you hunt during the lock down, you can use this technique to have some excitement and get in on some bucks that you never would any other way. I can say that because I know Garrett Roe and he told me so. Thank you again. I want to thank my audience and my partner Bob Roark for this. Garrett Roe, thank you so much for being a guest on Whitetail Rendezvous.

Thanks Bruce, appreciate it.

You’re in a treat for the next episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. We’re going to connect with John Stallone. John Stallone’s going to talk to us about a mature buck that he took in Long Island, New York. He’s called it The Swamp Donkey. We’re going to find out how a Long Island kid got out to Arizona and turned his passion into a great business.

 

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