Sorry bueller...:oops: but it has been a ridiculously busy day and half at work and then at 2:00 this afternoon I got some news that made me want to snap on somebody...and the fine gentleman just happened to be from Chi-town...:mad:;):p anyway time for some relaxing habitat talk, and sorry about Bart Simpson and his bad luck but "I will be having a 'Cow', man!" or 3 or 4, 'Spotted' ones anyway! LOL
It didn't take us long to figure out that we had areas on our land that were basically devoid of deer 90% of the time. Sorry about the grainy old cell phone pics, but these are from like 8 or 9 years ago with a flip-phone and have been scanned. :oops: Many guys on here have areas that look similar to ours.
Really simple and you won't be impressed at all, but on our place, when the areas looked like the photos below, which was about 50% of our acreage south of the river, we pretty much just left them be. It was next to impossible to even find a half decently used deer trail in these areas. Most of the time, if deer used these areas at all, it was primarily at night and they totally wandered through them at random.
The 2 pics above are of an area that we left alone other than we hand seeded Canada wild rye and little bluestem into it. It already had a limited amount of both growing naturally, so we knew we could get it to grow there. The primary reason to even do that, our main access trail is directly behind where the photos were taken and we just wanted a little taller cover between the trail and the trees.
The next photo is of the area where our shop ladder stand sat overlooking our south plot. The red
x marks the spot where the stand was tucked into the jackpines. The plot is directly to the right and behind where the pic was taken. We chose to put the plot there because it was so open and easy to clear. The pic was taken while standing on the plot edge, another part of our main access trail runs beyond the distant snow patch.
I will post some photos of the north side of the river in another post, to give an idea of the difference in the areas.