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Bruce: Five, four, three, two, one. Welcome to another episode of Whitetail Rendezvous. And we’re heading over to Wisconsin today to talk to Brian Sparks. He’s the owner of Nelson Creek Outdoors, and he makes some great scents, and cover scents, and attractant scents and he always, he just told me he caught a five-pound bass this fall. So this guy’s got a lot of skills and Brian Sparks, welcome to the show.
Brian: Thank you, Bruce, it’s, I’m glad to be on.
Bruce: I know this is a whitetail show, but let’s tell the folks about the bass success you’ve been having, a five-pound bass in Wisconsin that’s a pretty nice bass.
Brian: Yeah, I’ve, using my, our product Gamefish Attractant in liquid and in a stick form. I’ve been out doing a lot of bass fishing and with the fall, cooler weather they’ve, I really put on the feedbag as of late. And so I’ve been taking advantage of that. And a little local lake here and another I don’t know 50-acre lake I ended up pulling a 5 pound, 12 ounce, 21 inch largemouth.
Bruce: Hey, good for you. I’d love to see a picture of that on your website. And Brian at the end of the show you’re going to be able to give a shout out to any sponsors, any people, friends, anything thing that you want to. So you’re going to have a shameless promo at the end of this show, but let’s start right off because folks I’ll just share with you what happened to me last year.
I hunted a couple of different states and I got Love Potion 7 that was recommended on, I think on Bo’s [SP] site and I’m a big attractant type guy. I believe you can, you know, you can sway the odds. Not 100% increase, but you can sway the odds by using scent and especially cover scent and attractant scent if you do it right you got an opportunity to have just a wonderful walker underneath your tree.
So anyway, I did that, I was able to take a buck in Iowa and a buck in Wisconsin. And part of it, the stuff was out there. And Brian’s going to talk about that, so why do you think your scents work? Now you’ve got, if you go to his website at Nelson Creek Outdoors you’re going to see, you know, he’s got a number of products and let’s talk about them. What’s your number one selling whitetail product?
Brian: Our number one seller is the Love Potion #7, the natural deer urine estrous scent.
Bruce: And tell us about that.
Brian: Basically, we only sell it during season in fact, what is…today is Tuesday. We just actually started yesterday delivering, mailing out scents. We bring it in a couple of times a week during this time of year. The scent, by the time it gets here is no more than three days old. It needs refrigerated. We bottle it. We ship it. You get a few basically as close to seeming as we possibly can.
That’s really important with deer urine products. The number one thing that drives the effectiveness of it is how soon you can get it. No matter what preservative you use that deer won’t detect in it, fresh deer urine will go bad. And by the time it’s four months old it’s time to throw it out.
Bruce: And so how do control, you just said, you know, four months old and you sell it so sunlight can’t get in it. I understand that sunlight and air really breaks down the chemical composition of the deer urine. Is that, correct?
Brian: Yes. Any light in there…if you put it in a clear bottle, which a lot of places do, and the UV light gets into that bottle, and it’ll break it down even faster. That’s why we prefer the solid, white, plastic bottles that sunlight doesn’t penetrate. And then of course, we don’t, we fill them all the way to the top. There’s no air in there. We only fill them up for the season.
In fact, we started with one bottle here, doing one bottling this Monday. We’ll do another one this weekend. We’re not keeping anything year-to-year. We’re not bottling it in February and hoping to sell it now.
We’re basically, you know, we have contracted with a deer farm, and we found was the most cleanly place as far as, you know, no contamination to the urine. We knew exactly what we were getting. We just basically we hunted for a place that had the greatest product and could deliver it to us fresh all the time. We make sure that it’s, I can’t stress enough there’s just really two things to Lucky 7 that make it great. One is its freshness, the other is that is a doe scent with a secret combination of some subordinate buck in it too, to make sure that that buck would not only smell like a doe around waiting for him. He does have a little competition out there too. It gets a little bit more motivated.
Bruce: Just stay on Love Potion 7 right now and spin that to, I’m Bruce, I’m heading out and well, 30 days I’ll be heading to Iowa, then I’ll be heading to Wisconsin and I’ve got a number of farms to hunt in Wisconsin this year fortunately. And should be, I should hit either pre-rut or prime rut and I’m going to hunt post rut looking for “Mr. Wonderful.” And how should I use your product?
Brian: Well, first I would say a lot of people [inaudible 00:05:26], you know, in Wisconsin [inaudible 00:05:28] around here. I mean what usually happens the peak of the main rut is November 7. It could take a couple of days to move things and that, but it’s right around there.
A lot of people don’t realize the months prior to that a lot of older does will go into heat actually in October. It’s nature giving the older does a little bit of an advantage there. So you can actually start using a doe heat scent effectively around then. You know, October 7, October 10 marking it. You’ll see it actually begins getting effect from there. So [inaudible 00:06:01] hobby, make sure that it works the best for you. Make sure to keep it refrigerated when you’re not using it. As soon as it starts warming up, it starts breaking down. So try and keep it in the refrigerator.
My favorite thing to do is, generally two things depending on how often I’m hunting the area. I like the little cotton scent wicks, put them near a scrape in a tree. And the day I’m going hunting, I’ll take one and I’ll hang one there, and then I will bring it back in. Other stands, which may be a little harder to hunt because of wind conditions, you know, some of those stands you have to wait till the wind is just right to get into it without spooking the deer.
I also like to use one of those daylight sun drippers. It only drops scent out of its urine during the day, not at night. So then, the bucks get conditioned to come in during the day and they will be there when you’re in your stand, and not midnight.
Bruce: Now you mentioned too, you mentioned the wick and sticks and then you mentioned the drippers. Now how close to the stand do I want to put those?
Brian: Well, I’m more of a bull hunter than I am anything else. And I don’t like to shoot past 30 yards, so most of the stands it’s within 30 yards of my stand if I’m going to hunt over a screen.
If I have a concern with wind and I’ve used her scent and I use a detergent and stuff that [inaudible 00:07:24] except for my clothing. So I do, do other scent control. But if I’m worried about standing where the wind is blowing or something like that, or I know it’s one of those stands where you might get a squirrel in or two. I may hang the wick on a scrape and I may hunt down on a [inaudible 00:07:38] lane for that scrape and not actually be over top of it. In those cases, I could be, you know, 50, 60 yards away from my scent. I have had success with [inaudible 00:07:49] than in certain stands in the past.
Bruce: Okay, so you’re setting up on the scrape, and everything isn’t just right so you’re using one of the trails that come in. It’s going to lead to the scrape. Now if you’re in a hub or, you know, if you’re fortunate enough to find a community scrape, man there’s a lot of trails leading to that scrape, now how do you set up on that?
Brian: I know most of the areas I hunt very well. I do a lot of scouting. Generally, I know where the other attractants are and we have, on my property, which is here in Wisconsin. We’re allowed to bait. So I have mineral sites that I place strategically between bedding areas and then the stream.
And then generally after they get home, they get up, they have a little, some minerals or maybe some bait, go to the stream. The next thing they’re going to do is go check their scrapes out. So I learned, you know, I learned to know which direction they’re coming from at any given time from knowing my property. And that’s how I set up. I’m probably going to be a little farther out for those scents.
Bruce: Now you mentioned, you know, attractant scents and cover scent. What about your clothing? Are you into the carbon fiber and rubber boots, or talk to me about the set up of what you do to keep yourself scent free, which is hard. You can’t do it, because every time we breathe our scent goes out, so…but we want to minimize it.
Brian: A lot of times, what I do is I have an older GORE-TEX suit. It’s a shell that comes with a, basically a set of long underwear that go underneath it, so that you can take those on and off depending on the weather conditions.
I don’t use any of the no-scent screens or anything when I’m out in the woods. What I like to do is, I like to wash them in the dryer, in the washer and dryer with different no-scent products, different detergents that don’t have any perfumes or dyes or any of that stuff in there. Because, you know, you watch out for the, you not only have to watch out for the scents on UV brighteners and stuff in detergents, so I mean you kind of have to glow in ultraviolet light to deer too.
So I like to just keep those clean. Put them in a garbage bag once they’re clean right out of the dryer. Keep them outside in the garbage bag or out by the barn here. Keep them out there and then I just take clothes out in the woods there.
And then for cover scent I’m big into food attractants for scents for deer. When I’m not using a wet product, I’m using a food scent trying to lure them in for their, you know, their need to feed kind of thing. And I also use a cover scent that’s, we have two of them. A vanilla, it’s called our Sweet Vanilla Thrilla which is vanilla based. And then our Brazen Butternut, which is a, it’s a masked based product. And we spray those in the brush and stuff around us or in the stand around us. And that’s what we use for a cover scent.
Bruce: Well, thanks for that. And I just went to your Facebook page and everybody, Nelson Creek Outdoors, LLC and I know fisherman kind of talk but it…he’s got his bass live and in charge. He’s got a little video there, 34-second video. So check out [inaudible 00:11:08] bass. I couldn’t resist going there and there it is so…
Brian: And you get to see it go back in the water, so she’s still swimming around out there.
Bruce: Okay. So it’s catch, photo and release. CPR your fish and hey, folks, you know, when you catch a bass like that she’s going to lay a lot of eggs come next year and so, you know, think about that. That was kind of cool.
Brian: [inaudible 00:11:36] I always do, I like to, one of my more personal [inaudible 00:11:38] of my company is my 16-year-old daughter. And she actually got earlier this year out of, I’m sure you’re familiar with Fox Lake in Dodge County.
Bruce: Yes, sir. Yep.
Brian: She caught a 5.2-ounce, 5.2-pound, pardon me, largemouth bass out at Fox Lake herself.
Bruce: Well, that’s good…
Brian: So when I put those big ones back in there the next person I hope catches it is her.
Bruce: Well, I hope so too. Because I’ve done a lot of goose hunting, you know, in your country. The closest I hunt there is I hunt the Baraboo River around La Valle, and Wonewoc, and Hillsboro and up that way. But I’ve never deer hunted over by you.
Anyway, let’s get back. Let’s talk about how you set up your tree stands. Now you got scent, you got cover scent, and attractant scent. Now how are you setting up your tree stands on your properties?
Brian: I tend to use a lot of ladder stands. I’m a big guy. I no longer go, after taking a few rides down in a climbing stand in rain conditions and stuff, now at my age and size I don’t do that anymore. So I do ladder stands, they tend to stay in the woods all year round. The ladder stand of course they do see the rungs on the bottom, and I do feel the more use to them they are, the better they are.
Deer generally, you know, over time they change their patterns and I have to move those stands. But in, you know, two, three, four year chunks the patterns seem pretty consistent with, you know, all around my property. So I’ve set them up…the biggest concern with setting them up is generally when, you know, my property is actually one’s north and south and it’s fairly narrow west to east. And the way the funnels run through my land, I have a large, in the front is lots of grass and bedding areas. And then they go up on the hill, so I have a hard time approaching a lot of these stands without getting busted. So that’s always my number one concern is we’re trying to place the stand in a good area, the best area I can get it in without having to spook any deer on my way in.
Bruce: Now we all know that whitetails love the fringes. And you know, I’ve been told by a number of people, and unfortunately I’ve busted deer when I drove the truck…it was just a crappy day and I drove the truck too close to the field and gently, I didn’t slam the door, gently shut the door, and there were deer in the field. They couldn’t see me because I lay on the side of the hill. They couldn’t smell me, because the wind was in my face, but they were gone. They were absolutely gone.
Brian: No matter what you do sometimes, you’re going to get busted, whether it’s on your way out or even when you’re in your stand. Mother Nature doesn’t always play nice with you that’s why, you know, you always try and keep a cover scent with you at all times. And you got to remember, you know, to spray your cover scent and it blows out and then it’s going in one direction, if that wind shifts on you, it may be [inaudible 00:14:44] if you’re doing the surrounding area, time to reapply and keep the, keep your scent down in that area.
There have been times too where if I knew there was a big buck in the area and he was on my hit list and that wind changed for the worst, I’ve left my stand and gone somewhere else. Because sometimes you, you know, there’s been more than one year that I’ve had a buck on my hit list, unfortunately, you know, you’re [inaudible 00:15:06] he busted me, and you never see him again.
Bruce: Nope. I agree whole-heartedly to that. In our warm up, I asked you about your products and you stated, “It improves your chances because bucks rely on their nose.” Let’s talk about that a little bit and expand that.
Brian: Well, just for communication purposes alone, deer use their sense of smell and taste to keep in touch with other. You know, they use their urine in a scrape and the smells there to communicate when they’re in heat. They also have the licking branches that they go to, and they rub their glands on those and they put saliva on them. And it’s all a scent based, their way of communicating with each other, and let everybody know they’re around. The other big thing, their scent of course, all the time is finding food, and the last, you know, the alerting that the danger that’s around.
Here in Wisconsin the last few years, wolves have been introduced back in near my property there and I do have a small pack that runs around there. And I’ve actually seen the deer, you know, bust those wolves by scent as well. So no matter what they’re doing, no matter part of their life it is the majority is spent using their nose to have to survive.
Bruce: So because they use their nose let’s talk about your food attractant. So they’re smelling the food, but when they get there, there’s no food. How does that work?
Brian: The scent based attractants I like to use although the main ones that we use are Sweet Vanilla Thrilla and our butternut product, our Brazen Butternut cover scents. A lot of times we use let say our vanilla. It’s an old time favorite. Old timers used to use that, you know, 50, 60 years ago and that’s kind of the idea. We brought back up. We improved upon it by finding the ultimate sweetness the deer like, the type of vanilla smell they wanted.
It has a strangely calming effect on deer if you seen a deer around the scent of vanilla. It sometimes, it seems to put them at ease and I don’t really have any scientific explanation for it. Just things that they had told me and we tested, and tested, and tested and sure enough, you know, the reports you get back is it certainly seems to have that affect on them.
All our stuff is truly food based. You can, well anyway, it’s not for human consumption or anything, but it’s all food based ingredients. So one of the things we do is they don’t, not that there’s no food there, we spray the grass, and the foliage and mulberry tree leaves and stuff like that. And the deer will actually come around, and eat those leaves and stuff with this, with the scent on it.
We actually learned kind of the hard way I guess is we’re on these scent felt pads. We’re using our doe in heat scent. I don’t use those with the food-based scents, because we had deer eating them off the trees and I didn’t know how good that was for them. So we actually don’t do that anymore. But there’s actually one of our videos on our YouTube channel where you actually see the doe that eats the scent pad off the tree. As long as you have it on some grass and some foliage, when they get there, there is actually something to eat. It’s not that there isn’t food there.
Bruce: That’s interesting and folks if you go to Nelson Creek, right on his links is a YouTube channel and go there and see for yourself that it works. How about your trace minerals? You mentioned trace minerals. What applications does that have?
Brian: Well, that’s one of those rumors that I don’t like is, you know, put a ton of minerals down and you’re going to grow huge antlers on your bucks. It’s just simply not going to happen anymore than if you have a 10-year-old son, if you feed him a handful of food and some vitamins every day, you’re not going to get an NFL lineman out of him, you know. You’re in design to the bucks especially is to grow their antlers. They have everything they need already as long as they get the minimum requirements.
And that’s where trace minerals come in. You don’t need to overload them with calcium and phosphorus and all those other things they say you need. Because they’re actually taking that, they’ve stored up all year in their bones, and transferring it to their antlers. They can’t directly convert it from their stomach and put it into their antlers so, you know, we, with what doctor Carl [SP] said, we just keep them healthy with the trace minerals that they need every day, and a healthier deer will produce better antlers.
Not only that, fawns in the spring, the mothers when they’re, you know, feeding the milk those trace minerals and all will pass from the mother to the mouth of the baby keeping them healthier. That’s what we’re looking at having healthy deer. Healthy deer are, you know, get to be the biggest deer they can be.
We look at our mineral product as an attractant as well. It is a great attractant, because in the areas that you’re allowed to use bait. You can have it there all year round, in fact, it’s very important in the spring. And then we’ll continue to use our product all through the year until it gets covered up by snow here in the north.
If it’s there all the time, it gets to be a part of their habit it changes their routes. It brings deer that have no other reason to go to your property. They’ll come from the neighbors land over to mine. My mineral scent brings them over there. My neighbor happens to have five, six acres of food plots that are not far from my land. I don’t have that. I couldn’t pull them away doing that.
But that mineral site, now they want, before they go to that food plot, they’ll stop at my mineral site. So it’s just a great tool. Ours happens to have a great scent in it and also combines with chemistry to put that scent in the air. Every time it gets humid or rains out, our mineral product puts scent in the air and it’ll travel for miles. You know, everyone can say I can minerals down where my deer are and they eat it. Yeah, they will if they’re there. Our product you can put it down where deer aren’t and they will come there. And that’s what we think the difference is with our product.
Bruce: Brian, in the warm-up you also shared about your product helped make my time in the woods more productive. Can you explain what that means?
Brian: A lot of us don’t have a lot of time to spend in the woods. You know, a 9:00 to 5:00, you know, often we come 9:00 to 7:00 and stuff like that, yeah. You don’t get to spend as much time out in the woods as you’d want to do, because you’re other responsibilities take you away.
What our products do is they’re meant to attract deer and bring them to you. I guess that anyone can, you know, feed stuff to deer wherever they are. It’s quite another thing to bring them to you. That’s what we’re trying to do. If you have a limited time in the woods, you can use our product and it will give you a better chance of seeing them.
On our website, there is that giant buck that was shot with a bow using our Sweet Vanilla Thrilla scent. His first buck ever and a trophy better than I’ve ever harvested for sure. And you know, part of it is he said originally that, you know, in his letter, “He was a bit skeptical.” But when he used the product and he seen it did bring more deer into him, and it made him a more effective hunter, and even as arrow that quality buck that you saw and now we talked about.
Bruce: Yeah, and that’s again Nelson Creek Outdoors under pictures, and exceptional, his brow tine’s got to be 10 inches and his G2s, G3s and G4s. It’s just a solid 10 point, you know, a score’s a score but that’s a trophy of a lifetime for a first deer. I feel sorry for the guy actually.
Brian: Yeah, it’s all going to be downhill from there, right. Who knows, you know, he may be one of those guys that next year he arrows in a bigger one.
Bruce: Yeah, you just never know, but you know. I’ve never shot one that big. I can tell you that, but that’s, you know, that’s something folks. And listeners, you know, we all have responsibility, and jobs, and family, and recreation and other things that we get involved in. So make the best of your time, and what I’ve found is Nelson Creek products have a product as a lot of companies out there. They’re not the only one, but I’ve had some good success and that’s why I asked Brian to be on the show tonight and just talk about it.
Now you talked briefly about at the beginning of the show that some products are collected six, eight months ago put in a bottle, put in a shelf and by your own admission, you know, deer urine’s going to be at its peak for no more than four months. How did you come up with that framework of time?
Brian: It’s really simple. I mean, if you just take a deer urine product and just look in the frig yourself. You know, if you want to do it, buy a fresh product and do the test yourself. You’ll notice as the urine when you first get it, it isn’t offensive, the smell. It has a kind of a flowery aroma to it, doe in heat urine does. Buck urine is a little bit stronger. But it isn’t anywhere near offensive.
Buy a lot of that stuff that’s been bottled in February or whatever and sitting on a shelf for months before you get it or from last year. You open it up, it’s offensive, it smells like a bottle of ammonia, because that’s what you have is a bottle of ammonia. All urine breaks down into ammonia. And I’m guessing the medical community has the same problem when you’re doing urine tests and stuff for health reasons. There’s no way to preserve it that doesn’t destroy it. I mean, if you wanted to preserve urine for a long time you just put formaldehyde in it.
Of course, the deer’s [inaudible 00:25:00] hate that. He’s not going to like that stuff. You know what, there’s just really nothing you can do. If you’ll watch it in the bottle over time, if you keep one around, it’ll turn, it goes from yellow to brown and then eventually it will go to black with slime in it. You’ll pour it out of the bottle and, you know, on the snow or something. It’s a very dark brown or black almost tarry looking substance.
And that’s what you’re buying when you buy something that old. Everybody knows that story. Someone has told them, “I bought some of that doe in heat. It didn’t work.” “Well, what happened?” “I put it on the ground, and a deer sniffed it, and he ran away.” Yeah, he sniffed, if you know, sniffed something that you knew was rotten and out of place, you’d be suspicious of it too.
Bruce: Yeah. Talk to me about drags. How do you use your love potion or any of your scent attracter on drags? Because I’ve watched deer follow me, you know, when I hit the woods they followed me literally to the base of my stand. They weren’t mature deer but they were bucks, and they were inquisitive. How does that work?
Brian: Well, you know, a buck has to trail a doe. A doe isn’t ready 24 hours a day for breeding. She comes in for a very, two short hours there when she’s at her peak. And if they’re not there at the time, they’re not going to be the buck that gets to breed.
So what happens is these bucks tend to trail these does. They follow them around for, you know, a day or two at a time. I actually live near a prison where there’s a lot of deer living because you can’t hunt there. I get to watch their behavior here. Old deer, you know, big bucks you can see them reign in that area there that’s protected and some, just some monsters. A kid hit one of the doe here that was 308 pounds dressed on that [inaudible 00:26:54] so…
Bruce: Oh, my goodness.
Brian: So there’s some big deer in there. Old bucks they, the only time they ever come out of there is, during daylight at least, is when they’re trailing those does. So that’s why the drag works so good. They come across, they want to do their render very close to being ready to breed. They want to follow her, so if you take a piece…and I don’t recommend putting it on your body. You know, we’ve seen the video of a buck attacking guys and stuff. And the same with food scents, I don’t recommend putting on you, especially in areas with bears, stuff like that.
But you put a stick with a piece of string and wood works very well. Happens to be those, either those cotton things you can buy at the store there to put scent on or an unscented tampon works very well to hold scent. You put some of that on there. Put the string out along side you on a stick and walk to your stand and drag that with you, kind of like you’re taking your dog for a drag out in the woods.
Bruce: Now what I’ve done, I’ve gone to about a parachute cord, five feet on each side, and I put drags on both sides and just drag it, you know, through a loop. I got a carabineer and I hook on the back of my [inaudible 00:28:05] and walk in that way. Because my hands are free now, because I got my bow and, you know, who knows what else in my hands. And I found that to be effective.
Brian: There are a lot of different ways to do a drag. One thing I recommend if you’re doing it with your, trailing behind your boots or something, make sure you have a good pair of de-scented rubber boots on. So they don’t, you know, so they don’t smell you and try and minimize your contact with brush and stuff. But yeah, that definitely works too.
Another thing I always recommend is don’t drag it straight to your stand. The best way to do it is, you know, where your comfortable shooting at. You know, I like to shoot a deer, I’d rather shoot it at 20 yards than anywhere else. So then I get to about 20 yards out in my stand and then I will, you know, do a half circle around that side that is on the up wind side. And then when that deer’s following that trail he’ll turn, and he’ll be broadside for that whole entire time alongside my tree.
Bruce: And what I’ve ended up doing, I take them off. I hunt with a crossbow so I’m comfortable with 30 yards. And so I just unclip it and then I make a circle like you do and then I hang it up in a tree so the scent wastes, you know, down wind.
Brian: Yeah, you could definitely use that as the same pad as you put the scent on too. Hang it up, throw a little fresh scent on it and you’re good to go. Like I said a lot of those spots that like have some scent drippers and stuff on there, and in those cases, I’ll just put it back in a plastic bag.
And again too, when you have one of those scent pads remember that that scent is, you know, keep it in a plastic bag, try and keep it cool. That scent will go bad on that pad too. So after a week using it or two you might want to consider just getting a new one, they’re cheap, so…You don’t want to have, you want to get rid of all, any of that older ammonia smell that may be coming off of urine that wasn’t able to keep that in a cold temperature.
Bruce: Now since were on drags, I went out to my truck and my drag was completely frozen because I left it and the truck was cold, right? Now do I just kind of warm that up so I can put fresh scent on it or what should I do?
Brian: Generally, yeah, you would want to warm that up a little bit, if you can to make sure you get some scent on there. Because a lot of times if it’s completely frozen and you try to put scent on it, it’s just going to run off.
And that’s actually one of other products actually works kind of good that’s for cold weather. We have our Lucky 7, Love Potion #7 in the crystal gel formula, which is on our site. It’s a gel formula, crystals, polymers that hold that urine scent in there.
When the scent freezes later in the season, you know, in the bottle it gets hard to use and if you squirt any down it freezes right away. What the crystal gel allows us to do in cold situations is you get one of those little hand warmers, you know, and you crush that, take the thing out, as it’s crushed up it’ll get warm. And you just take the jar of crystals and you set it right on that heat pad. And it’ll keep that gel warm, and it’ll put scent into the air and that can be really effective at moving scent during really cold temperatures.
Bruce: Wow, that’s a great idea. I just learned something. Listeners, so hand warmer and you know, they get hot, but the crystals are in glass, right.
Brian: It’s a polymer gel. It holds it in there to little crystals. And it’s in a plastic jar.
Bruce: Okay, so you have to put the crystals out on the hand warmer then.
Brian: No, we set the jar right on there. The jar is a thick plastic. It’s not going to melt on a hand warmer.
Bruce: Okay. Now those are the flame hand warmers, not the chemical hand warmers?
Brian: We actually just use the ones that you can buy in the store there that you just open up the package, and expose it to air and have some kind of [inaudible 00:31: 53]. And those work fine. The deer do not seem to be able to smell them. I know I can’t smell anything coming off of them. They have a lot more sense of smell, but we haven’t noticed any ill effect. We’ve used that technique effectively.
In fact, this last winter we had deer coming right up to the…we had it on top of a little stump and we had them actually come and knock it off, and while we were watching them. They pushed it right off the stump because they were so interested. It happened to be does at the time, but they did, they were very interested and that, the heat coming off, you know the scent pad it didn’t seem to affect them one way or another.
We’ve tested them out a few times doing different things, because we use them in our boots, and our coats and stuff to keep warm. And we’ve never had any deer seem to spook by them.
Bruce: Well, Brian, I hate to say this but we’re well into the show and you’ve got a minute or two to give a shout out. We’ve been talking a lot about your products, so if there’s any that we’ve missed I know your daughter Shelby’s part of your team there. And then you got a pro staffer I believe his name’s Justin, so whoever you want to give a shout out to sponsors or people that have helped you along the way, go ahead.
Brian: Well, actually the one that, we have one youth pro staffer that has been very good to us, you’ll see him on the website. His name is [inaudible 00:33: 13] Hunter. And he’s 16 years old. He’s been with us for over a year now, almost two. And he has a lot of videos online, has done a lot of tests for us, runs trail cameras for us out in the woods, does a lot of fishing, a lot of hunting. He’s just a big outdoors kid. And you know, he’s been invaluable to us.
We really enjoy, you know, having him on our team and testing all our products and always has some ideas and things for us. And he’s been a great help to us. So I don’t know a lot of pro staffing companies, or companies don’t seem to have a lot of youth pro staff I think it’s time to get a little more kids involved with it and have them help you out. You’d be surprised how much they have to offer.
Bruce: And let’s go over your URLs again, how to get a hold of you.
Brian: Our regular site is www.NelsonCreekOutdoors.com and if you put store in it, store.NelsonCreekOutdoors.com you can shop online at our online store. Facebook of course, is Facebook.com/NelsonCreekOutdoors or just search for Nelson Creek Outdoors and you’ll find us out there. And our YouTube channel if you search for Nelson Creek Outdoors you’ll find us there too. We try to keep interacting with our customers.
You know one product we didn’t actually mention at all here I’d like to throw out too here is our new product this year is the Whitetail Miracle food based scent. An oil based attractant and feed topper that was actually designed from the ground up to be exactly what a deer would want to eat if you asked him at any, “What would you like to eat?” or “What would attract you?” It’s Whitetail Miracle. It’s like no other scent on the market. It smells like nothing else on the market. It’s unidentifiable to us, but deer fall in love with it.
Bruce: Now do you just put that on the ground or do you put it on top of corns or corn?
Brian: You can use it a lot. You can put it on feed topper on corn and alpha pellets, anything else you’re putting out there. We used it to freshen up…You know, people have told me, “I even put it on mineral product it didn’t work, or a mineral block or a feed block. It didn’t work.” “Here throw some near, put some Whitetail Miracle on it.”
Skye Good [SP] [inaudible 00:35:30] is a barefoot huntress, used some of ours last year, Whitetail Miracle, and put it on some feed blocks and some salt block, it makes, that weren’t doing anything. And the buck she had on the hit list and never saw during the season, not on camera or anything else. There he is. He showed up for the Whitetail Miracle. You can put it on the ground by itself as just a scent or use it in any combination with any other food-based attractant. It just works. We spent a lot of time on this one. It is exactly what a deer would want if you could ask them.
Bruce: That’s cool. Well, ladies and gentleman of the Whitetail Nation. This has been a pleasure to have Brian. I’ve got to get him on the show right after the season, because I want to see what happens with his products this year.
And yes, he’s part of a billion-dollar industry that is in scent, and food attractants and trace minerals. It’s a huge industry that we represent and it’s guys like Brian that, he works, he’s got a job, but he found something that works and he’s developing a business and small businesses, you know, make this country grow as a lot of listeners you are small businessmen. So thank you one and all for downloading this podcast with Nelson Creek Outdoors, Brian Sparks. Brian, it was a pleasure and I can’t wait to see how this fall goes.
Brian: Well, thanks for having us on it was really enjoyable. I hope you have a really successful hunting season too.