I will add this. We had 5 above the average for mature deer on our place before season opened. Grand daughter killed one - and four are still alive with five days of mg left. Usually, 2/3rds of the quality mature bucks get killed. Not as many folks hunting.
I don’t think many people understand the hunter efficiency increases provided by using bait. Even with archery tackle. With cellular cameras, even the oldest bucks are efficiently removed from the herd. Add in rifles … I think you know. Baiting is the ultimate game changer. It attracts bucks, in the daytime, reliably, and to a 20’x20’ spot on the landscape.
There will usually be some come along and claim that mature bucks don’t use their bait stations. I don’t know what to tell them. Get off your phone??
This is pure fact. Pic below is one of my neighbors front yards. He owns 7 acres.
These two feeders are in this neighbors front yard. I know he killed two does from his front porch three days ago. I have at least five more adjacent property owner small acreage neighbors who do the same thing. The large acreage neighbors also bait - but the difference to me is, the large acreage neighbors typically have enough land to feel like they can grow a bigger deer by passing them until they are older. The small acreage landowners have no such thought. Large acre neighbors may be killing a deer per 50 to 100 acres. The smaller landowners are killing a deer per one to two acres. The small land owners would struggle to kill a deer off their property with no bait.
I bait a lot. We started about 8 yrs ago with a corn pile for the grand daughters to hunt on. Because our neighbors seemed to be killing all the big deer - we upped our feeding/baiting game. While we dont usually hunt over bait, it does tend to cause the deer to spend more time on our land as opposed to our neighbors. We now kill a much greater percentage of the mature bucks - as opposed to our neighbors getting most of them. But, we kill them late season in a food plot after rut, or during rut and cruising or chasing.
I have killed one deer over bait. To be honest, I have tried to kill two more. At my place, just because a deer is hitting bait does not mean you are going to kill it. I hunted a deer two years ago 21 out of the first 24 days of season. All but two of those days with a bow. Either a morning or an evening - sometimes both. He hit the bait about half of those days. Twice during shooting hours. One I was not there - and the other evening I was there - and he winded and spooked about three feet before I had a shot. I have three ladder stands around the bait site to play the wind - and it wasnt enough. After he spooked, he pretty much quit the bait. My son killed him with a rifle the next year as he was checking does in a seven acre food plot. This deer would not hit a spin feeder - only hand spread feed.
We have hunted the other deer for two years. He will hit a spin feeder or hand spread feed. He will hit all of them. Including my neighbors spin feeder a mile to the south. And he feeds in the food plots. The only time he is ever regular is when he is in a bachelor herd. I have seen him twice, crossing a road in 1/2 mile to the north of my property. We named him roamer.
Every mature buck on my place will come to hand spread bait. Less than half of them will come to a spin feeder. Probably one out of five of them would be consistent enough on bait to consider hunting them. And you better have two weeks in a row to do it. That is what makes my small landowner baiting neighbors so successful. With a feeder 100 yards from the front porch, They are hunting when they are in their living room watching tv, out grilling supper, or working on the car.
Just because every buck visits feed, does not mean they are easily killable - not in my area. The neighbors have proved that - we still have mature bucks.
As an example - on a sixty acre property I own, I have one hand spread bait site that has taken 64 pictures in the last three days. Four of those were during shooting hours. One was a 3 yr old buck in shooting hours. There was one morning and one evening when any deer was there during shooting hours. In a food plot 250 yards away, there were 27 pictures in the last 3 days, 14 of them with deer in shooting hours - most with multiple deer, including the biggest deer in the area. There are deer in the food plot every afternoon during shooting hours. This is on a property that has been hunted four times since oct 1. Again, the food plot would be the spot I would hunt.
I dont bait just to kill deer. I run three or four spin feeders with corn year round. I do this for a couple of reasons - they are easy - fill them once every couple weeks. I place them in areas where I know my does like to stay with their fawns. I also hunt hogs off them. I have personally never seen a mature buck at a spin feeder - even though they will visit on occasion.
I also have four bait sites where I hand spread a protein feed. I start this in June and am phasing it out now. I believe it helps the does with fawns and possible provides a benefit to bucks growing antlers. We have definitely seen increases in body weights and we at least have a perception of antler increases.
I maintain about 30 acres of both summer and winter food plots. By far, the food plots are the most consistent for hunting - BY FAR. We have one stand where we can see a protein feed site, a spin feeder, and three acres of food plot. This year, I would guess about a third of the deer seen from this stand will go to the protein - after feeding in the wheat and clover. We have yet to see a deer feeding on the corn at the spin feeder. It is really odd to me they readily feed on corn at the spin feeder at night - but rarely during shooting hours. It is in a secluded nook, also. The protein feed gets visited commonly by about a third of the deer we see during shooting hours. Almost every deer we see enters the wide open food plot.
All that said - I would be the first to support an anti baiting law during deer season. I would still want to provide protein outside deer season and corn for hog hunting. My selfish side knows It would save me a lot of money and save a lot of deer from getting killed on neighboring lands. BUT, my non selfish side knows a lot of these small land owning neighbors are low income, hard working folks who definitely can use the meat. On a bigger scale - our G&F feels baiting helps hunters to reach their harvest goals. We have a lot of thick cover - a lot of ground in commercial timberland where a mast tree is rare and it is hard to get deer out of cover in areas food plots are not permitted. If you believe the numbers, we are killing about 19% of the deer herd annually - which is a relatively low percentage when states like Iowa see harvest rates of 25% of the herd annually. An this is with 60 days of firearm season, five months of archery/crossbow, baiting, dog running, and centerfire rifles. So in this case, baiting could be considered a management tool to help keep deer density at management goals.
While I dont support baiting - I do wholeheartedly support food plots. I have several food plots where I could kill far more deer than I could any of my bait sites. Some days, I may see 30 deer in my food plots. I doubt I have ever seen over ten deer in a day on bait. And commonly the pure baiters will claim food plots are just another form of baiting - providing a food source that would not naturally be there.
So many folks are so deeply entrenched in baiting it would be very - interesting - to ban it after so many years. Our state did not even ban baiting in the cwd zones.
