Are the glory days of deer hunting coming to a close?

[Brian662]

IMO heavy cover without food will hold scared deer. Could be heavy invasives, could be switchgrass, etc.
Heavy cover with food (browse) will hold near 100% of deer in an area, even adjacent to heavy cover without food. That goes for scared deer or unharassed deer.

If you can make it so your thick cover also has a food component, your deer will be much better off and so will your hunting. Again, that's my opinion.

Controlling invasives doesn't have to be a full time job but it should be a consideration before completing a timber harvest or TSI. Otherwise you aren't being a good steward of the land, IMO.

 

[Telemark]

I'd have to see that to believe it. I've never seen an instance in the midwest where thick cover doesn't hold deer, regardless of the tree/shrub species.

I could show you a few areas in Ohio. The invasive honeysuckle gets to a stage where it shades out the ground, which becomes bare dirt. The height ofnthe canopy is impossible for people to walk through, and difficult for deer. But it's perfect for coyotes. Deer rarely walk through it, and they never bed in it.

 

[Ben.MN/WI]

Watch vids, interesting. They where saying multiflora rose was so thick fawns would get into and die, not able to escape. Also drone survey vids showing bush honeysuckle was making big difference from north Iowa down to STL on mature bucks.

I'll agree multiflora rose is a wicked plant. I've hunted a SW WI farm with a multiflora rose area that was absolutely horrible to walk through. But it was the best spot to kick out a buck while making drives during the later portions of gun season as pressure pushed bucks to the thickest cover around, which was that area.

I have a hard time believing that a large % of fawns would die because of that plant though.

 

[Ben.MN/WI]

I could show you a few areas in Ohio. The invasive honeysuckle gets to a stage where it shades out the ground, which becomes bare dirt. The height ofnthe canopy is impossible for people to walk through, and difficult for deer. But it's perfect for coyotes. Deer rarely walk through it, and they never bed in it.

I've seen and hunted some areas dominated by honeysuckle, but I've never seen areas so thick they exclude deer. I believe your description though, but I've not personally seen it. I know some of my best pheasant hunting locations were SW facing hillsides dominated by nasty bush honeysuckle that was too thick to walk through. Those spots held very high numbers of both small game, predators and deer though.

 

[BC Buck]

IMO heavy cover without food will hold scared deer. Could be heavy invasives, could be switchgrass, etc.
Heavy cover with food (browse) will hold near 100% of deer in an area, even adjacent to heavy cover without food. That goes for scared deer or unharassed deer.

If you can make it so your thick cover also has a food component, your deer will be much better off and so will your hunting. Again, that's my opinion.

Controlling invasives doesn't have to be a full time job but it should be a consideration before completing a timber harvest or TSI. Otherwise you aren't being a good steward of the land, IMO.

This is exactly what drone survays are showing and was learning experience for me.

 

[Telemark]

I've seen and hunted some areas dominated by honeysuckle, but I've never seen areas so thick they exclude deer. I believe your description though, but I've not personally seen it. I know some of my best pheasant hunting locations were SW facing hillsides dominated by nasty bush honeysuckle that was too thick to walk through. Those spots held very high numbers of both small game, predators and deer though.

The places I'm talking about used to be like you describe, but it went untouched for so long that it's like a 3 foot tall labyrinth now. I cut and treated a few, and new ones sprang up immediately. Without intense management over several years, there's probably no getting rid of it, so I'll just keep cutting down the mature ones to thicken up the understory.

The rabbits like to hang out in there to avoid all the hawks. They don't even eat the bark off the honeysuckle, but they annihilate any fruit tree that goes unprotected in there for even a day. I've started sowing a food plot blend where I open the canopy, but time will tell if that gets shaded out too.

Now I'm struggling with cutleaf teasel, which forms amonoculture so dense even rabbits don't go in it until it defoliates in winter. It's really insane what invasives can do. And it's a seemingly infinite amount of work to get rid of them once they're established.

 

[Ben.MN/WI]

IMO heavy cover without food will hold scared deer. Could be heavy invasives, could be switchgrass, etc.
Heavy cover with food (browse) will hold near 100% of deer in an area, even adjacent to heavy cover without food. That goes for scared deer or unharassed deer.

If you can make it so your thick cover also has a food component, your deer will be much better off and so will your hunting. Again, that's my opinion.

Controlling invasives doesn't have to be a full time job but it should be a consideration before completing a timber harvest or TSI. Otherwise you aren't being a good steward of the land, IMO.

I agree completely that having thick, ground level native shrubs and forbs under some hardwood trees is ideal habitat for deer and I spend a large amount of time trying to achieve that in certain areas. I've planted thousands of native shrubs for both cover and food, but to be honest I don't think that work has improved my hunting.

On my places, I've had the best luck logging low value trees, leaving oaks and the invasive buckthorns and bush honeysuckle in most bedding areas that turns into the thickest cover in the neighborhood. I put most of my effort into apple trees and food plots that are the food sources they hit when they leave the thick cover. That plan has worked better for me, but every property is different so what works here may not necessarily work elsewhere.

 

[Ben.MN/WI]

The places I'm talking about used to be like you describe, but it went untouched for so long that it's like a 3 foot tall labyrinth now. I cut and treated a few, and new ones sprang up immediately. Without intense management over several years, there's probably no getting rid of it, so I'll just keep cutting down the mature ones to thicken up the understory.

The rabbits like to hang out in there to avoid all the hawks. They don't even eat the bark off the honeysuckle, but they annihilate any fruit tree that goes unprotected in there for even a day. I've started sowing a food plot blend where I open the canopy, but time will tell if that gets shaded out too.

Now I'm struggling with cutleaf teasel, which forms amonoculture so dense even rabbits don't go in it until it defoliates in winter. It's really insane what invasives can do. And it's a seemingly infinite amount of work to get rid of them once they're established.

Bush honeysuckle makes excellent cover for small game when it is mixed with shrubs like wild plum and dogwood. Wild plum when mature seems to compete well with bush honeysuckle which prevents it from completely dominating an area, providing openings for wildlife while maintaining some ground cover that pheasants and rabbits like. Crabapple and hawthorns also are nice additions to these thickets as well.

Many of the old farm shelterbelts in our area include bush honeysuckle and they hold a lot of small game in the winter but that is typically where it is only the outer row or two with several other rows of hardwoods and conifers behind them.