Daytime Sanctuaries!

[MoBuckChaser]

deleted

 

[dipper]

I gave up when I saw buck beds. Clean of debris.....and woody sticks, makes me want to vomit. I think I called that guy the deer whisperer before I left that hack site.
Mo-your description of creating a sanctuary makes a hell of a more sense and is a lot less.

 

[dipper]

Ask that Einstein what a night time sanctuary is, if there is a daytime sanctuary. If you have to keep rereading something about getting deer to use your property, it is over complicating a rather simple issue.

 

[Jordan Selsor]

I thought the same thing with the buck beds! Give me a flipn break! Who has time for that!!!

 

[Jordan Selsor]

I was gonna say the same thing haha

 

[biglakeba$$]

Lapratt written all over it. LOLLL.
Am I right?

 

[phil@thesidehill]

I'm not a huge believer in the extreme sanctuary doctrine....at all. further more just because you don't set foot in an area all year does not make it a sanctuary! Noise, scent, line of sight can still cause the deer not to use that area...and further more if that area has no other reasons for deer to be there other than lack of human intrusion....guess what.....they won't be there unless there is intrusion in their actual sanctuary (man made or natural).

I only have 10 acres that i work on. a small parcel. the way it lays it out, the last thing i want is to have deer bedding on it. if they did...i would not be able to get in in the evenings or get out in the mornings...basically it would be a one sit and done type of scenario. I put too much work into it for just one hunt. that being said, i still need the deer to be on the property during daylight hours.

I spend alot of time on the property...probably more than some would suggest...yet i have yet to see it negatively impact the hunting. I firmly believe that because I spend as much time as i do there that the local deer are accustomed to my presence...and since the presence is in a non threatening manner most of the year...the deer are not freaked out by me. when i hunt, i go to great lengths for them to not be able to detect my presence at all, so that they don't associate it with predatory behavior.

 

[dipper]

No it's that other guy, Jeff something or other. You know the deer whisperer. Freaking joke, these guys try to be the PhDs of deer habitat, when all you need is a little common sense and a site like this to teach you a thing or two.
Rule #1 of making easy money, try to create a need for something. Shady auto mechanics have perfected this

 

[wiscwhip]

I read the first sentence and knew it was Sturgis.:rolleyes:

 

[j-bird]

I have 2 of his books and they have been very helpful. Not saying he knows it all, but his books have caused me to consider perspectives I had not before. I had never considered long narrow foodplots - or how to maximize sanctuary area by only access the perimeter of a property until I read his books. Maybe I was living under a rock, and these may or may not be original ideas - not here to argue that.

What I have learned is that I can use these different concepts and alter them to fit my application and apply them as I see fit. Just because he writes it, doesn't make it some sort of rule!

My question is simply this - how are to you manage a property (hunting, plotting and habitat work) if you essentially live in constant fear of bumping a single deer? This isn't you managing the property, this is the property managing you! I believe in sanctuaries, but I am not going to focus my effort on making beds for a mature buck when I know I struggle to have my property hold a couple of doe groups.

 

[wiscwhip]

Inner sanctuary, surrounding sanctuary, true sanctuary, dedicated sanctuary? WTF? For any given area, it is either sanctuary and you stay the he!! out of it(other than to do yearly improvements, of course) or you enter it and it is no longer sanctuary. I never knew there were gray areas where sanctuary was concerned, and that there were so many types of sanctuary? Somehow I think that crawling around removing twigs from beds under overhanging cover on a high spot near escape cover is going to jack up your "sanctuary" worse than letting the deer bed where they want within such areas.

 

[wiscwhip]

I have nothing against Jeff(nice guy, I have meet him at a sportsman's club day, and he lives like 20 minutes from my house, pretty sure I even figured out where his lease is)or any other guy who is in his line of work, but most of their talking points are quite over embellished and glorified, for the sake of writing books and articles I suppose(Steve B. is almost always matter-of-fact with his commentary). As in the example above, 4 sentences of info turned into 4 paragraphs of filler and repetition. There aren't a lot of "secrets" left in the industry any more, so I suppose to make it sound like the info is "fresh", one has to present it in colorful ways? None of this is really "rocket surgery" or "brain science", mostly common sense to those of us who have been around the block a few times. But, the primary purchasers of those books and magazines are the weekend warrior types who haven't/can't put in hundreds or thousands of hours over the course of their hunting careers doing the "homework" for themselves, so the "need" for that type of information is out there and the way Jeff presents it works for him and his readers. I was simply stating that I could tell by the writing style that it belonged to Jeff.

 

[Bucks&Ducks]

Agree with most of you guys. I have read his books and thought they had a lot of good information.

That said whenever I hear about cleaning out beds, I just roll my eyes. What would these bucks do without our help? Poor guys would never be able to sleep.

I love the idea of sanctuary but I think it gets overblown. If coyotes or wolves run through your sanctuary once a week, is it still a safe zone for the deer. Someone could tresspass, a neighbor could be doing fencework, etc. I think keeping hunting pressure down is a huge factor but deer are just trying to survive anyway possible and any number of things can cause them to move.

I am not sure I would enjoy hunting if it was as easy as some of these guys try to make it. "I will have a buck bed here and here in cleaned out beds, then he will take this fully groomed and sprayed trail to this kill plot....." I think we are all trying to increase our odds to kill mature bucks but that is all it is, increasing your chances.

 

[bueller]

As I re read this article over and over, if I made my whole property into a off limits sanctuary, I would never enjoy my property. Does that make any sense?

100% agree! I'd rather enjoy year round activity on my property with my family and shoot a doe than never step foot on my land and shoot a nice buck.

 

[Jordan Selsor]

100% agree! I'd rather enjoy year round activity on my property with my family and shoot a doe than never step foot on my land and shoot a nice buck.

X2 although I do have no four wheeler rule during deer season unless retrieving game or hanging a stand or something

 

[phil@thesidehill]

Sturgis has some good stuff (not sure if its his or not...doesn't really matter I suppose), but I think most of what he writes is for folks with high deer densities.

I Agree. I have both books...some chapters of each really raise great points...others i start reading and then skim to the end, because they really do not apply to my situation....or i straight out don't agree with the concept and find it contrary to my own observations. to each his own, what works for him, won't work for everybody everywhere....I'm cool with that.

 

[SD51555]

Like Phil, I don't have a square mile either. To work on my property, I have to be on my property. We try to minimize our traffic and disturbance, but deer are an odd character. When we spent a day blasting trails with a skid loader and chainsaw, we had deer tracks all over the trails we made by the next day. Plus, if a deer left the region every time it was spooked, they'd all be living on a remote island in lake superior. They can't afford to burn a day's calories each time a dog/yote/wolf/bear/etc comes close.

Here's my $.02. Make your property like the garden you can't keep them out of at home. Tons of native browse and winter forage. Replicate what the suburbanites complain about when it comes to deer eating mom's landscaping. Make your property "The" destination in your greater wooded area.

On my piece, I'm building out a buffet of soft mast, as well as highly desired winter browse.

 

[dipper]

Lots of great points, I especially like the predator aspect. I don't think any deer is smart enough to Really know the difference between a wild predator and a person. Predators have huge home ranges, they are constantly coming and going. Now if Johnny q hunter is sitting in the same spot for a week straight while the rest of the sloppy orange army has been doing the same, odds a pretty good Johnny q hunter isn't going to see deer. It happens all the time.
This is probably a hypothetical situation, but if a pack of wolves is strictly using Johnny q's 40 acres for a week straight, those same wolves will have a hard time killing a deer on the 8th day.
Not real complicated

 

[Native Hunter]

I try to get my work done as early in the year as possible and then limit my movements as much as possible toward deer season. There is no way I can stay out of most of my land all the time, because 60 of the 100 are native grass fields, and they have to be maintained.

I've often wondered about what dipper just brought up about deer looking at humans differently than other predators. I've always leaned toward thinking that they do, but have absolutely nothing to base that on - just a feeling.

 

[SD51555]

It's got to be a matter of frequency of association. Consider town deer or the deer that a farmer sees every day when spreading manure in the fall. When I lived in Duluth, deer would walk up the sidewalk about 6 feet from my apartment patio. They would keep a 50 foot radius from people, but the presence of walkers or patio sitters didn't spook them much. What was really neat, I had a crab apple tree about 15 feet from my patio, and I watched a doe vacuum green apples off of it in July. I tried eating one in October and darn near turned inside out from how bitter/sour it was. I gained a real appreciation for the deer palate from that experience.

If a deer doesn't see a person more than once a month or more, it could generate a little more alarm. But where they have to interact, they develop associations of danger and non-danger beings.