The vast majority of deer hunters are call-shy. In 50 years of hunting with and talking to fellow hunters, I’m continually surprised at how few of them call to whitetails even half as much as they should. And almost nobody talks to muleys. If that's you, I can just about guarantee that you're not tagging as many bucks as you could be.
I know that deer don’t look or behave like raucous, vocal creatures. They don’t howl like wolves, jabber like chimps, or gobble like turkeys. Outside of the occasional warning snort, we just don’t hear them “talk” to one another very much. But the truth is that deer are quite chatty. Biologists have identified more than 90 different sounds made by whitetails alone. That said, you don’t need to mimic all of them. Not by a long shot. Learning just the nine key sounds below, what they mean, and how to imitate them can be the difference between watching the buck of a lifetime walk out of your life, or luring him into shooting range.
