Ep. 512: Why Deer Follow His Tracks Right to the Stand (233 Bow Kills) w/ Jim Gallagher

Beau Martonik sits down with Jim Gallagher at Huntstock. Jim is in his 50th year of hunting, has been bow-only for close to 40 years, and has killed 233 deer with a bow, almost all of them in the swamps and thickets of the Northeast.

His system runs the opposite direction from most. Instead of trying to leave nothing on the walk-in, he wants deer to find his trail. Store scents and cover scents didn’t hold up, so for about 35 years his boots have gone in fresh rabbit droppings, later with tarsal gland hair on top, a buck tarsal hangs seven feet up over a mock scrape, and he walks past his tree and hooks back so a deer following him in gives him an angled-away shot. Then he calls, every sit, on a set schedule.

He also gets into why he aims at the very bottom of the deer, going back to around 1986, when he and Gus Park tallied their misses at a picnic table in Pennsylvania, and 30 of 35 had gone over the deer’s back, and a long list of stories from 50 seasons of doing it his way.

In this episode:

Tracking deer in Maine snow and going bow only

39 foot stands and seven busts in 17 years

The calling sequence: one nostril, fawn mew, grunt, rattle

Why store scents failed and rabbit droppings didn’t

Tarsal glands seven feet up over a mock scrape

Shooting out the side of the peep in low light

Why a deer blowing at you can be a good thing

The night bucks fought under his stand in the dark