The Complete Handbook of Wildlife Attractants
The professional's field guide to legal, effective scent, feed, and visual attractants for hunting and wildlife management
by Alumigogo Books
non-fiction
The unbiased technical reference for choosing, deploying, and maintaining wildlife attractants that actually work—without the marketing hype.
About this book
Most information on wildlife attractants comes from the manufacturers who sell them, or from forums where one hunter's lucky anecdote gets treated as universal fact. This handbook takes a different approach: it treats attractants as tools with measurable properties, predictable failure modes, and legal constraints. You will learn how to evaluate a product's active ingredients, persistence under real weather conditions, and suitability for your specific target species and property layout.
Coverage includes the full category tree from food-based baits to synthetic territorial scents and visual decoys, with attention to local regulations that vary by state, province, and land ownership type. The book provides concrete decision matrices for choosing between products, step-by-step installation procedures, and a troubleshooting chapter that addresses common issues like scent contamination, bait degradation in heat, and attractant-induced habituation.
For the professional reader, there is an entire section on the business of wildlife attractants: wholesale pricing structures, liability considerations, seasonal demand cycles, and how to build a service model around attractant installation for hunting clubs and private landowners. This is not a marketing document—it is an operational manual for anyone who needs attractants to perform consistently, at scale, and within the law.
Reader Reviews
John Wright
★★★★★I run a small guiding outfit and I've been burned by expensive attractants that did nothing in the field. This book's chapter on specification specs alone was worth it—I now check vapor pressure and aging before buying, not just the label photo. The troubleshooting section on scent oxidation saved me a full weekend of failed setups. Minor gripe: I wish there was a quick-reference card for the legal differences by state, but the book tells you exactly where to look them up, so it's a small knock.
George Moore
★★★★★Refreshingly dry in the best way. No 'buck fever' stories, just numbers and methods. The chapter on understanding olfaction got me thinking about thermal layering in a way I'd never read before, and I've been hunting for about fifteen years. I liked the honest talk about habituation—it saved me from dumping a fortune on corn for a property that's hunted heavy every weekend. I took off a star only because I wanted more depth on mineral attractants in the choice chapter, but it's a solid desk reference.
Joseph Williams
★★★★★It's a well-researched, thorough handbook with no fluff, which I appreciate. But I found it overly technical in the first chapter—paragraphs about volatile compound evaporation rates felt like a chemistry textbook for a while. I wanted more practical 'do this, not that' for my suburban feeder setup, and it did get there eventually in the usage chapter. Also, some of the business opportunities felt speculative for a small landowner like me; that chapter is clearly aimed at bigger operators. Overall good, but not always the right depth for a casual hobbyist.