Well, this scrape is at the base of a hill between the top and a house...stand is 28 yards away and this cam placement on this scrape for over 5 years has given us the best inventory of bucks around the parent's place. This bruiser came in and I guess didn't want us to have a scrape tree anymore..... ....next spring I know we'll have to be installing/replacing one (probably a oak sapling) This sucks really....but what can you do. Cool Sequence:
Pretty neat. All i got this year was a 2.5 year old trashing one of my dad's 5' apple tree. We put cedar 4bys with holes drilled thru the top to hang branches from in the ground to make up for it.
This is Mock scrape I put in about two weeks ago and only had a few smaller bucks check it, until this buck came on Friday evening. It's setup on an old two track where there are plenty of fresh scrapes and rubs. The rut is starting to heat up here in southern Michigan. (Jackson county)
I just made a mock scrape Saturday. Nothing popping up at all yet here in New York. Getting close though. Should be starting to heat up in a week or so.
Perhaps you can tie down one of the other branches from the tree? I'd do that first if you could before tying in a different branch.
The entire tree they had been scraping got ripped out of the ground. It'd died about a year or two ago when a buck rubbed it too hard....surprised it made it this long.
It might have been on Midwest Whitetail a couple years ago. I could be wrong on where I saw it, but They actually just cut down a small tree and put it in the ground where they wanted it and created a mock scrape under it. Seemed to work ok.
This is more so the approach we will go with....or I've heard untreated cedar logs buried and then a preferred licking branch type like Oak or Apple attached does well.