I agree with you Ben. Deer like thick messes.
Absolutely, it sure seem to vary on different parcels.When I had my woods cut I bet I had close to a 1000 red maples cut. The following winter every single stump with sprouts was heavily browsed. This went on for the next 4-5 years. Now on year 8 all those maples are over 12 feet tall. They really liked yellow birch too. I saw very little browse on aspen and never saw any browse on the hundreds of small oaks that are popping up everywhere after the logging. I would say my deer density is medium to high.
I ask because I'm too lazy and have back problems now so cages are not in my future. I have been pushing over maple trees bringing them down to ground level and most of them still have half of their roots in the ground and are still growing and the deer can reach the tree tops all summer long. That has been working out for me. Pushing them over with my small excavator(50G). Weighs about 10,000lbs and pushes over decent sized trees if the ground is fairly wet.
Great idea to push 'em over & keep them alive. Living salad bar. Might have to try this with some smaller red maples at our place.
I started pushing the maples down to make more room for my oak trees. Maple trees don't do me much good but they do grow faster than the oaks and start to compete and shade out the oaks. I avoid taking out any oaks if I can help it.Great idea to push 'em over & keep them alive. Living salad bar. Might have to try this with some smaller red maples at our place.
I should say our camp woods are mostly oaks - white, red, and chestnut oak. Our deer seem to prefer the oak sprouts to even the red maple sprouts, but both get hammered if not caged. Areas across our mountain (on state land) that were mainly red maple & had been logged, didn't get caged. They produced thousands of new maple stump sprouts, but the logged area covered hundreds of acres. Deer couldn't "out-eat" them. That area is now covered in 3" to 10" diameter maple trees - mostly a monoculture - which isn't a good thing either.
I hunt the other side of LOZ in Morgan Co. We have 90 acres. 88 of it is timber. We have one plot that's about an acre and a couple other small ones that I keep in clover. The "large" plot has 3 pinch points across it. I've always had doe and yearling bucks going through it. Over the past couple years I did a lot of "edge feathering" because I could see straight through the woods. I took a brush cutter to the first 5 yards, and cut ever sapling down. next 5-10 I cleared out about 50% of it, then another 10 yards of cutting medium trees here and there to get more light to the surface. It's helped. Last year my father in law killed a nice buck in the plot pushing a doe.
