cornfedkiller
5 year old buck +
New guy here from Iowa. Been reading through lots of topics on this site and love all the knowledge here! I have a few questions for you guys and I'd like to get your suggestions...
I live and hunt on 80 acres (timber and CRP mix), and the timber was very mature, very open, not much foliage on the ground, and it held a few deer in the summer and early fall, but typically no more than a couple does and fawns and a buck or two, and during the late season, there were hardly any deer on the property at all. Anyways, after talking to a few people, my landlord and I decided that a timber stand improvement would be beneficial. He hired a forester to come mark the crop and cull trees, and decided in order to increase the cover ground as much as possible, that rather than girdling the cull trees, we would hinge as many as possible. There are 2 or 3 areas that are very thick and tangled with trees, but the rest of the timber just has trees laying randomly all over.
The canopy has been opened up a ton, the undergrowth has already started taking off quite a bit, and it seems like everything is going according to plan so far...except for one thing. Maybe its a little soon to notice any changes, but I have some cameras out over some food plot edges and some corn and I'm not seeing nearly as many deer this year.
I'm sure there are many other factors such as different crops rotated in the area, water sources (very dry here), etc.. but I'm curious if hinging as many trees as we did was the right thing to do, or if that made it TOO thick and now the deer don't like it? Should we have only concentrated the hinging to a few small areas and left the rest "open"?
Or maybe there is so much browse in the timber now that they don't have to come out to the plots to get food? Does it take a few years after a TSI before you start to notice an increase in wildlife?
I live and hunt on 80 acres (timber and CRP mix), and the timber was very mature, very open, not much foliage on the ground, and it held a few deer in the summer and early fall, but typically no more than a couple does and fawns and a buck or two, and during the late season, there were hardly any deer on the property at all. Anyways, after talking to a few people, my landlord and I decided that a timber stand improvement would be beneficial. He hired a forester to come mark the crop and cull trees, and decided in order to increase the cover ground as much as possible, that rather than girdling the cull trees, we would hinge as many as possible. There are 2 or 3 areas that are very thick and tangled with trees, but the rest of the timber just has trees laying randomly all over.
The canopy has been opened up a ton, the undergrowth has already started taking off quite a bit, and it seems like everything is going according to plan so far...except for one thing. Maybe its a little soon to notice any changes, but I have some cameras out over some food plot edges and some corn and I'm not seeing nearly as many deer this year.
I'm sure there are many other factors such as different crops rotated in the area, water sources (very dry here), etc.. but I'm curious if hinging as many trees as we did was the right thing to do, or if that made it TOO thick and now the deer don't like it? Should we have only concentrated the hinging to a few small areas and left the rest "open"?
Or maybe there is so much browse in the timber now that they don't have to come out to the plots to get food? Does it take a few years after a TSI before you start to notice an increase in wildlife?