I don’t have a good buck on my private property so I was out scouting public yesterday. My expectations are always low, but I found two bedding areas with fresh sign and miraculously no hunter sign. I began strategizing how to attack these areas in the coming months and years and began to wish I had 5-10 more of these spots. But finding and prepping those spots takes a tremendous amount of time. I normally put a tremendous amount of time into habitat work in the off-season and have neglected the time to scout. Then I wonder what I spend all that time doing
. And I have an epiphany. TREES! (and shrubs). I have bought, planted and protected hundreds of the damn things, and they haven’t helped my deer hunting for squat! Sure they help with aesthetics and have been a labor of love, but with no tangible payoff. Kind of like dating a succubus. I have no apples or crabs or pears or nuts or acorns or anything to show for my efforts, and my deer hunting isn’t 1% better. 7 years into “managing” ~70 acres and the only projects with significant ROI are chainsaw work and food plots, those definitely have helped. So therefore my conclusion is that planting trees and shrubs does not improve deer hunting success. It’s not a total waste of time because I do enjoy it, but from an effective, time efficient land management perspective, it is a
massive waste of time and money. Ok, you can fire away. Hopefully I don’t get my habitat card rescinded for putting this thought out there.
I think you have unrealistic expectations, as many of us do. It is easy to buy into the hype. There are no magic bullets. Habitat improvement takes a lot of time and resources in general. Expectation need to be scaled to the particular strategy being employed. Here is an example.
When we first purchased our pine farm, it was becoming a food desert with an overpopulation of deer. Previous owner did not spray the young pines when they should have. Older pines had canopied but still had years to go before a commercial thinning was possible. The young pines, which had produced all the food and cover for years, were starting to canopy shading out both food and cover.
We enacted and "Emergency Room" food plot program. Food was the limiting resource at first, no ag except pasture within 3 miles. Deer would emerge from the pines and feed in one end of a food plot while i was mowing it. As I would get close on the tractor they would reluctantly retreat into the pines and as soon as I looped around and headed the other direction, they would com back out and feed.
In this situation, our food plots produced immediate benefits for both deer and hunting as they were by far the best game in town for quality food. Of course they did so at a high cost, as summer is our major stress period and planting both spring and fall was needed. In another situation, one might get very little benefit from a food plot. At the time, we didn't know any better, and were doing traditional tillage with high inputs. We shot every doe we saw to try to get a handle on population.
As time went on, we began timber management. The older pines were now old enough for a commercial thinning. We thinned them and generated income. At the same time, we clear-cut a couple sections of low quality hard woods for bedding. The executed controlled burns on the thinned pines as well as the clear-cuts. This was an immediate benefit to our deer herd. It created both food and cover in the clear-cuts for bedding areas and in the thinned pines in the mid-term. I increased the BCC significantly at a near-zero cost and actually generated income in net.
Of course, in the short-term, the thinned pines were wide open with no food and so were the clear-cuts. As it happened we had the perfect storm that year. First, we had a mast crop failure, so our food plots were the only game in town. Deer were forced to uses them during shooting hours which made them easy pickings for our hunters. That year we doubled our average female harvest. This was followed by an unusually hard winters in our area. We had ice storms and more snow for longer periods than normal with lower than our normal winter temps. In previous years, we would get a rare nighttime picture of what might have been a coyote. We knew they were in the general area, but not on our place. Things changed that winter. We got regular pictures of coyotes, day and night. The does that survived were not in great condition the next spring so fawning was down and predation was up. We actually had to limit doe harvest the next year. Our population was more than in check.
It did not take long for the clear-cuts and thinned pines to produce great food and cover the next spring. So, we now had an increased BCC and fewer deer. This was great for the deer herd, but made hunting much more difficult. There were fewer deer and they no longer needed to use our food plots during shooting hours. Deer became much more sensitive to hunting pressure. They would simply feed on quality native foods in the clear-cuts and thinned pines and move to our food plots after dark. There was much less movement between cover and food during shooting hours. It clearly hurt hunting.
Over time we learned how to more sustainably produce quality food plots. We stopped tillage, built OM over time, and eventually stopped using commercial fertilizer completely. It took time to improve OM and restore the natural nutrient cycling to our plots, and they did not produce as well during this transition. On the up side, deer had native quality foods in our clear-cuts and thinned pines during this period.
Next, we began to look at permaculture (here is where your trees come in). We converted many of our small food plots into what I call "Wildlife Openings". We first planted them in clover and then planted soft mast trees in them and caged them. No special care for the trees after planting and caging (DR apples, pears, persimmons...). We also propagated native nut trees and planted chestnuts in other areas. We then let the "Wildlife Openings" go wild. No maintenance until woody stuff threatens to get too large for our bushhog. We then mow them and let them go again.
Like you, we have no benefit to either hunting or deer from these trees. We did not expect to for many years. It will probably take 15-20 years for our planted trees to get to the point where they produce sufficient food for attraction. Keep in mind, this aspect of our strategy was aimed at the long run, primarily the next generation. We are not spraying or pruning trees to push fruit production. The idea is to leave the land producing deer food in the long run with no maintenance. Much of this benefit from a hunting perspective will go to the next generation.
The only exception with trees has been grafting native persimmons. They produce fruit in the 3rd leaf after grafting and are producing significant volume after about 5 years.
It really takes a lot of time to analyze a property and figure out what impacts candidate habitat changes will have.
Thanks,
Jack
