Thoughts on the Grunt Call

Grunt calls are such a big part of my deer hunting, that I always carry two with me into the woods. And there is another spare or two in the pickup. OK, I'll admit that I have been known to go overboard in some areas of my life and I guess grunt calls might well be one of them. But gosh-darn-it, when you have a tool at your disposal as effective as a grunt tube, you want to make sure that you have one dangling from a lanyard at all times. Nothing not scent, rattling or decoys has proven itself to be as consistently effective at bringing deer within range as the time-proven, simple to use grunt tube.

The one I have depended upon for the last 15 years is the HSS True Talker. And no, I don't work for them. I mention the True Talker because it is a good call, which sounds like a deer. In fact, the call sounds like several deer. With just a little finger pressure adjustment you can make the call sound like a buck, a doe or a fawn. I like that, because there are times each season when I do not want to grunt like a buck.

Sometimes I want to mimic a fawn in distress, a very, very effective vocalization for bringing in does, especially in September and the first couple of weeks of October. After that, a doe seems to lose much of her maternal instinct and is less likely to respond to a fawn bleat. And there are times when a doe bleat is the ticket. Usually, I mix some doe bleats in with buck grunts to give the impression of a buck chasing a hot doe, but there have been times each season when a series of doe bleats on their own have done the job. And of course there is the buck grunt.

During the rut and late in the pre-rut, most bucks do a lot of grunting. They might grunt while shredding the bark of some hapless sapling or grunt continuously while pawing out a string of stinking scrapes. They will almost always grunt when ground trailing a hot doe and then pick up the tempo of the grunting when they actually have the doe in sight. It is not unusual for a buck to do some grunting when he is simply cruising through the woods hoping to encounter the sweet scent of a doe in estrous. So anytime a buck without a doe hears another buck grunting during the rut, he is going to assume that the other buck has a doe. Usually that is all it is going to take for the buck to come looking.

How far away can a buck hear a grunt call? In an open field, with no wind, I have had them come from 300 yards away. In the timber, you can quickly cut that distance in half. Throw in some wind and you cut that number again. The grunt call is not a long range tool.

One tip when it comes to bringing big bucks in close: so long as the buck is headed your way, resist the urge to call. The more often you blow the call when a buck is working in your direction, the higher the odds he will figure out that something is not right. This is especially true if you are hunting from a tree stand.