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Review of Kirschner’s deer lures

The whitetail deer rut is now under way across the Americas, and although writing about politics (especially a handful of days before such a momentous Election Day) is the bread and butter of this blog, man does not live on bread alone. Occasionally there must be a beverage. And Kirschner’s deer pee lure is it.

Twenty years ago I first met Bob Kirschner at the Pennsylvania Outdoor Show at the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex, in the traditional archery section. Among a slew of often cantankerous iconoclasts (think about the kind of people who hold onto traditional archery against the tide of ultra high-tech training wheel bows), he was a funny guy. As in kind of odd, as in not a huckster or a salesman, but almost shy.

Even though he was surrounded by a big display of his wares, which included his own videos on how to bowhunt wary deer using his unique deer pee lures, Bob was not a hard selling, fast talking circus barker. Instead, he seemed almost embarrassed that he had to take your money at all. Such is the way of the pure hearted, because of all the deer pee lures out there, Kirschner’s is among the very few that are worth anything. And that is because his pee is pure. No jest.

Somewhere at camp I have one of his videos that shows him making his deer lures. In one scene he is wearing a work smock, a big toothy grin, and carrying a large tub of deer legs sticking out in all directions. Each of those legs has a tarsal gland on it, which deer use to communicate with each other through their highly refined sense of smell. Bob painstakingly cuts out each gland and grinds it up into a paste, which forms the base of his very smelly deer lures. This takes a lot of work and a lot of time.

Contrast Bob’s laborious hands-on process to the over-the-counter stuff sold by the gallon at the big box stores. Not to knock anyone in particular, but my experience with many different brands is they are at best watered down versions of Kirschner’s lures, and at worst they are synthetics that don’t last very long and that lose their smell within a few months of purchase. Like Code Red and Code Blue….golly, guys, what do you put in your bottles? I do not think it is 100% estrus deer pee.

Somewhere a few years ago I saw an article about how much doe pee lure was sold nationwide, which is a LOT, like hundreds of thousands or millions of gallons, compared to how many penned farm doe deer there are, which is very few, and how a basic back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that the vast majority of “doe pee” lure sold in the USA is not actual doe pee. At least not 100%. Because the standards are so lax or even non-existent, what is sold as doe pee lure might only have 1% estrus doe pee in it.

There just are not enough penned farm deer to produce the vast amount of “deer pee” sold to hunters. Not even close. Which means that a lot of what is being sold as deer pee lure is not.

And this sorry situation is NOT what Kirschner sells. He sells stuff that will curl your hair if you sniff it, because it is that nasty tarsal gland paste he made mixed with actual pee from his own pet deer. No, you don’t want to ask how he gets the deer urine….same story with foxes, coyotes, and bobcats, all of which are kept in farms where their excrement is collected and made into lures for trappers and hunters. It is all expensive stuff, and it all works very well.

From the time I bought a small squeeze bottle of Kirschner’s SilverTop at that year 2000 outdoor show (what is now the Great American Outdoor Show, which will not be held in 2021), until four years ago, when it ran out, I killed a PILE of deer coming in to his lure. When I say a pile, I mean a literal pile, like piles of deer stacked like cord wood in the back of my pickup trucks. How, you ask? Answer: I get as many DMAP and doe tags as possible, which might number ten each season, and then usually fill 75-100% of them from archery season through the late muzzleloader season and late shotgun-only season in southeast PA.

Then I ran out of the Silver Top, which only required a few drops on a tampon hung on a tree branch each time hunting, and so it had lasted so very very long. And I thought, “Why not try some other brands, see what they can do, how they work.”

And what I found was that not one other deer lure has worked anything like Kirschner’s in the southcentral and northcentral regions in which I mostly hunt. Not even close.

Bob Kirschner tells me that very few people make deer lure like he does any longer, and at age 74 he is about to hang up his spurs from his incredibly physical work. He says that some Amish farms are beginning to make deer lure the way he does, and that they will have to take up the slack when he shuts down his operation (hint hint young people out there, here is a chance to run your own business and have fun).

So I bought an 8-ounce bottle of Kirschner’s SilverTop the other day, and I am hoping this will last me a good twenty years. How can this one bottle last so long? Because only a few drops are needed each time out.

Here is another hint to hunters: Don’t overuse deer pee lure. It does not need to be sloshed about by the bucketful, and it should only be used during the actual rut, which is end of October into mid-November.

When hunters mis-use deer pee lure, either by using too much or by using it in early October, they are desensitizing deer to their world of smell, and instead of luring in deer, they confuse them and make them cagey and wary.

Using too much deer pee or using it at the wrong time eventually trains deer to stay away from it, or to be skeptical of it.

Two years ago I watched a Maryland hunting guide set off an enormous bottle of “Buck Bomb” for a youth hunter, which filled our woods with a chokingly sick scent that vaguely smelled like doe estrus. One buck was eventually brought in, a nice eight point, but he was so suspicious that he literally ran up to within 75 yards, looked around, and seeing no doe, turned and ran like hell back to where he had come from. Using too much of a good thing is not always a good thing to do, and hunters will do better in the short term and the long term if they are much more judicious in their application of deer pee lure.

So, there, that is my endorsement of Kirschner’s deer pee. I get no royalties, kickbacks, baksheesh, or remuneration from this essay. In fact, I hope Bob does not read it because he will probably object to being called shy. I write this out of simple admiration for a well done product that has made me a very happy hunter for a very long time, and I hope you get some, too. Just use it correctly.

Good luck this season. Have fun and be safe!

My 2019 resolution: Not going pee with the ladies

Last night we were celebrating the incoming New Year with friends at a hotel in New York City.  Lot of fun, beautiful time of year and place, great, friendly people and beloved old friends.

…and then I had to pee…

Discharging excess fluid is how a healthy mammal’s body works any day, and especially after copious intake. So, I feel the urge, stand up from the table, ask a friendly staff person about the location of the toilet, and receive clear directions. So far so good.

One of Western Civilization’s chief accomplishments is ubiquitous flush toilets. They even come with sinks and hand towels. They are generally clean, tidy, and hygienic, certainly compared to a hole in the floor like you will find the world over.  This particular hotel is quite nice, and had all kinds of nice little “extras” about for guests, and it stood to reason that my bathroom experience would be top quality.

Nope.

This is in NYC, a major locus of PC crazy, and it turns out that simply going pee in the homeland of PC crazy results in a crazy pee experience.

I approached the bathroom door and noticed beautiful and often scantily clad women coming and going through that door. Then a well dressed young man entered. The see-through door is labeled “EVERY BODY.”

My inner dinosaur screamed “No f*ing way!” as my feet reflexively stumbled backwards. I may have suffered a brief infarct. Maybe a meteor hit Earth or my head at that moment, too. Reality wheeled around me, and I had an out-of-body feeling.

The kindly young bathroom concierge standing nearby smiled knowingly and said, “there’s a men’s room downstairs, here let me show you,” and he accompanied me downstairs to a glittering bathroom that said “MEN” on the opaque glass and brass door.

This was what I had hoped for: Urinals for guys to stand over, breath mints and mouth wash on the spotless counter, stalls with doors giving enough privacy for guys going #2 or even amorous couples to do their business without interference or observation. A typical nice Men’s room. Natural boundaries. Privacy for men, to be men.

After emptying my body’s excess water tank, I washed up, went back upstairs, and walked past the Chaos & Bizarro anti-civilization bathroom, shown in these photos. Young men and women were still entering and exiting simultaneously, and as a result I made my first and likely only 2019 New Year’s resolution: I will not use a Chaos & Bizarro dual-sex bathroom.

Nope.

I like my high civilization and I intend to keep it. One pee at a time.