Rye/clover plot onslaught

[Bowsnbucks]

While at camp 4-8-19 to take soil samples and plant apple trees, I checked out a rye & red clover plot we planted around Labor Day last fall. The rye is eaten to the ground and the clover is emerging. The red clover is thick and the whole plot looks like a green carpet. Deer tracks are everywhere to the point that you have to look to find an area with NO tracks. Droppings all over too. I think we're pulling deer from neighboring properties, which are all large parcels of land. The clover should go gangbusters once we get steady, warmer temps. This plot will feed lots of deer this spring & summer.

 

[Mortenson]

Just what you want to see! The deer have been devouring my greened up rye the past couple weeks. Scrawny looking shed bucks are in it in the daylight. Pics of 6 at a time, always with their heads down. Can't help thinking that it's really helping them when they need it most.

 

[yoderjac]

While at camp 4-8-19 to take soil samples and plant apple trees, I checked out a rye & red clover plot we planted around Labor Day last fall. The rye is eaten to the ground and the clover is emerging. The red clover is thick and the whole plot looks like a green carpet. Deer tracks are everywhere to the point that you have to look to find an area with NO tracks. Droppings all over too. I think we're pulling deer from neighboring properties, which are all large parcels of land. The clover should go gangbusters once we get steady, warmer temps. This plot will feed lots of deer this spring & summer.

We had a similar situation a while back. Especially when mast crops are poor and during the heat of summer when native foods dry up around here. Deer begin to range quite a distance looking for quality food. What the biologist said was happening in our case is this: We have no agriculture other than pasture land for about 3 miles. We have about 20 acres of food plots. In late Jan and Feb after the season and in the middle of summer (soybeans) deer would immigrate to our land. Food is one factor, but social structure is another. When we would kill does in the fall, it would create holes in the social structure. Many of the deer that came for the food would fill those holes, and we would have just as many does to shoot the next year.

This doesn't happen everywhere, but when you are the best game in the area, it can. Eventually we had a confluence of events that knocked our population down, but it seems to now be rebounding to that earlier state again.

Thanks,

Jack