One more thought for planning. When we bought our place, deer bedded at a neighbors that had clear-cut with natural regeneration. It was old enough to have a low canopy to shade out most quality food but had a very high stem count for good cover. Our place was becoming a pine desert. About 1/2 of it had a completely closed canopy with no deer food. The other half of our pines were young and had just closed in reducing food significantly. Deer were beginning to bed there as well. We have a pipeline bisecting the farm. Deer numbers were high and we started an emergency room food plot program. Deer would feed in the same field I was mowing and just reluctantly move into the pines as the tractor got within 40 yards or so then come back out when I passed.
For the next few years, deer had a distinct movement pattern between bedding and our plots with not much alternative for quality food. Eventually we got our act together and began timber harvest. We had the mature pines commercially thinned and we clear-cut a couple hardwood ridges totaling about 20 acres for bedding. We then conducted controlled burns in both the thinned pines and these clear-cuts.
Of course the disturbance of the logging changed the deer patterns, but it was not long before we learned the new patterns. However, one thing I noticed was deer were becoming harder to hunt. They were reacting to hunting pressure much more. Before we clear-cut, deer were forced to move between bedding and quality food. While they would avoid specific hunting locations but would still move from cover to food during daylight. It was just a matter of smart stand selection and approach.
After our habitat improvement, we created a bounty of food in cover. Both in the thinned pines we burned as well as in the clear-cuts we created for bedding. With quality food in cover, deer were no longer forced to move between food and cover during shooting hours. They reacted to hunting pressure by staying in the cover and eating quality native foods during the day and waiting until after dark to move to the open food plots. Finding good stand locations with good access routes became significantly harder.
If you can control the pressure on your place, this neighboring clear-cut will be a long-term benefit. If prevailing winds make your place difficult to hunt or if you can't control the hunting pressure, it may be problematic for hunting. Our place is owned by an LLC with several owners making hunting pressure control more problematic.
Thanks,
Jack