Land Management Help Needed!

Any chance of securing hunting permission on the 200 acre property ?

You may wish to try moving the feeder up into the timber near the 200 acre
property or even closer to the timber. They may feel more secure if they don't have to cross open pasture.
If it changes the pattern, then set up a stand accordingly.


If that doesn't work and it may not, maybe try not feeding them at all and see what happens then.

The photos say Bloomfield, may I ask what state that is ? OYE

Douse the area with doe-in-heat pee .. or hunt somewhere else (probably the best choice).

The deer have you patterned for the most part. Add to that, even in the best of scenarios, other than during the rut and inclement bad weather, mature bucks rarely expose themselves during daylight hours.

22 acres is not a big area, especially when there is so little cover. If you are there constantly hunting, checking trail cams, mowing the grass, filling the feeders, the pressure it creates on the deer, has them avoiding it until it is safe......and that is after dark. If there is no reason for deer to use the area naturally and there are other food sources around, you may need to seek another place to hunt, or limit your activities greatly on the parcel. You also should concern yourself with giving deer more dense cover. That way, you give deer a reason to come back when they are kicked off or pressured from adjoining properties. Because it is so open, the deer probably see you coming and wait till you leave.

My son has a nice 50 acre parcel that is similar in layout to yours. It is a great bow hunting spot because it is a travel corridor between larger, densely covered areas. Not hard to shoot a nice mature buck during bowhunting, specially during the rut. Come firearms season, you're hard pressed to see anything but a small scrubhorn 1 1/2 year old buck because there are large "sanctuaries" on the adjacent properties where the deer see no pressure. You can sit all day during gun season and see only a few deer. Come back the next day and you can't see your tracks from the previous day in the mud for all the deer activity at night. But....if someone is hunting those adjacent properties and kicks the deer outta those sanctuaries, you may just get to see the buck of a lifetime during legal shooting hours. But we have no control or access to those areas. So during gun season we sit and wait or go somewhere else where we have more chances. One thing that works is to have folks at the cabin make a lot of commotion and leave in their vehicles. Amazing how the local deer have learned that generally means they're safe.

IOWs, if you have no control or access over the adjoining properties, there may never be any thing you can do to make mature bucks travel your small parcel during daylight hours. Even if you would let it all grow into heavy cover, odds are you would push the deer out on your way in and without someone to drive them back, they would stay away until the fall of darkness.

My suggestion would be to promote the growth of cover and to leave the proprty alone as much as possible. Make trails thru the cover to make access easy and quiet to your stands and to sit all day.

My first questions...

Which way is north in the photos and what direction are the sunrise and sunset prevailing winds?
Which direction are you most comfortable shooting and any direction completely out of the question as in towards 409?
Todd.

Get doe tags.

any big buck i see never comes out during the day, that is why they are still alive. but you can get the doe in you can get him in during the rut. that will be the only time unless you can find the couple places he likes to bed.

It's the open space making them uncomfortable for the day. Do the adjoining areas get hunted by other people, particularly the 200 acre woods? Also, you have no water on the property, thus no reason, other than the corn, for the deer to go there.

This seems all REALLY super simple to me. Deer have basically three areas.

(1)...Bedding areas (daytime, or rather maybe 7 am to 7 pm)
(2)...travel lanes
(3)...feeding areas, inhabited between 7pm and 7 am

You obviously have the feeding area. Your only hope is to catch a buck during gun season is when he's moving during rut. When rut is on, you gotta be there an hour before daylight to an hour after. And not leave the stand. They move any time of day or night and can come thru at any time. Gotta be ready as they usually move fast. First day I ever hunted I killed an eleven pointer at 11:45 am.

Next alternative is being in stand during the very first part of archery season. Deer tend to move pretty much the same time, dark or light. During early archery that is daylight. By gun season, that time is dark. Deer don't care.

Other alternative is to turn your land into a bedding area. To attract big bucks, you need the thickest, crappiest, nastiest tangled mess they can find. The bigger, thicker and more remote the better. There is no such thing as too thick and tangled for bucks. Plant pines thick together, laurel, brambles, cut some trees and leave the tops, plant Russian Olive ( kinda like lilac but thicker, bigger, and more tangled)

Once you have your own bedding area, you can hunt the travel lanes

I've hunted our family farm for over thirty years. We have about eight acres like I just described. There are areas where you literally could not see a deer five feet from you. It's held HUGE deer nearly every year. My hunting partner took a 183 two years ago as he was traveling from feeding to bedding area at daylight

My feeder is throwing a LOT of corn out every day and it's mostly getting eaten by the does.

Click to expand...

Right there is part of your problem. The deer have a meal any time they want. Cut down on the quantity of corn dispensed. This technique has worked for me: The big bucks sometimes come in earlier.

Set up a couple false scrapes, or better yet, pour some buck pee in an existing scrape. Fill the pee drippers at your false scrapes with doe in heat pee and buck pee mixed. This will often cause big bucks to start checking the scrapes in the daytime, looking for their competition.

Found a video on YouTube that might answer some of your questions

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ygotl_D3I

I had not seen this, but it shows exactly what I had posted.

FWIW..... Just this past week end some of our guys were hunting late doe season. Kicked out two BIG bucks from a four acre super thick bedding area.

Hard to manage movement on 20 acres.

You need to move your feeder to the north near the 200 acre plot. The narrow spot in the field looks like a good spot. Your mature bucks are reluctant to expose themselves to cross the entire field. By moving the feeder closer to the entry point at the 200 acre plot you have a better chance of a buck exposing himself when he checks the does near or during the rut. It might be better if you moved the feeder into the timber instead of out in the field.

The other guys are right about cutting the rations too. You can control doe movement by altering the feeder time. That is, until the acorn crop comes off. Then it is a whole new ball game.

I ran into the same thing this year. I had 7 or 8 bucks patroling the edges of some pastures at night. Once in a great while they would come through in the daylight. When the acorns fell the deer movement slowed to a crawl. I had to hunt the feeding areas back in the timber then.

Depends on the real issue

If the deer aren’t coming out until dark it sounds like they have been conditioned not to do so. As in one way or another they learned that coming out during the day is going to be bad for them… this occurs more often than not in heavily trafficked hunting lands. Best bet is to not let anyone go out there for a while. Usually in Wisconsin it takes a few weeks before you start to see deer coming out into fields or other open land including public land during the daylight hours. They are scared and just learned that if they move someone will shoot at them…

I’ve also found that deer become much more bold during the evening so much so that you can walk pass them whereas during the day they would have run from you first sight. They aren’t genius animals but are smart enough to know when they need to run and when they are safe.

Plan A. Be sure that your land is not molested.

The other possibility is that your land does not have what they need/want to have during their daytime activities… if that’s the case your best bet is to change it up but this won’t be easy. Not feeders also suck… they screw with a deer’s natural habits and you are better off with a small agricultural field left standing the whole year.

Plan B. Transition area between wooded areas and open areas are the key to good white-tailed hunting land.. they want both and tend to linger in-between the habitat that the transitional area provides.

From your description of your property what you've described is a lot of open area and a small amount of woods. There may be plenty of cover, trees, even agricultural food sources but they still need a place to call home and open fields and a small chunk of woods ain’t it. Home tends to be a crossroads between differing habitats. Edges of woods along agricultural fields, wetlands or savannah type fields or some combination thereof. It’s not the woods or open field alone that attracts them it’s the combination and where they but up against each other.

The areas between forested lands and grasslands or agricultural land is the most ideal habitat for deer. They will linger in these areas and eventually make their home in it when they can… when it’s undisturbed. The deer in your area are likely lingering in these areas. So you have a few choices… most of which revolve around creating this type of habitat on your property. Basically you’d try to maximize the amount of transitional land between the forest and open land on your property. You will also need to consider what the surrounding habitats are like as well. i.e… forest, agricultural, savannah, etc… don’t just go cutting trees or planting food plots randomly it doesn’t always work as well as you’d think.

1. If you have enough trees feld them in a zigzag pattern into the fields. So that if you looked at an aerial photo of your property it would look like the tree line is zigzagging against open areas and agricultural fields. This will maximize transitional habitat on your forested areas.

If you only cut a few trees or cannot cut a lot just make sure when you do it follows a zigzag or a pattern that optimizes forest butting up to open land. You can also attempt to plant trees in manner that they jet out into the fields if you don’t have enough wooded area to cut. This will take years to work out properly but it will work. And not 20 years but more like 3-7 depending on the trees and soil conditions. Cause small trees and fresh cut forest with new growth is excellent deer habitat providing enough cover is left.

Pay attention to the type of trees that are on the property too. Deer eat trees at the end of the winter when all other browse is gone. Young sugar maple, aspen amongst others are actually late winter food source for deer even if they are only a few years old… i.e. saplings. Tall oaks make acorns but deer can’t live off acorns alone especially at the end of the winter.

2. Try to break up open fields with trees or food plots… plant large patches of trees in rows and again plant them in zigzag patterns and break up large continuous stretches of open field. Rarely does a deer linger in the middle of a field unless they are passing through a food plot or the grass is soo tall as to provide excellent cover… trees will provide the transitional area that has the cover they want and need.

Plant a variety of trees in your fields.. don’t just rely on acron producing oaks. They are not enough. Young pine trees are great too. They provide excellent cover. Some of the best hunting I’ve done was along 4-7 year old pine trees planted in rows in between a forest and a soybean field… Some trees are good for cover, some for food some are just forest.

3. And the most obvious is to plant a food plot… but the key is that the food has to be something that the deer are used to eating. Deer can pallet a wide variety of food but they don’t readily change their diet. The enzymes/bacteria in their stomach actually has to change for them to properly digest different foods. So they tend to stick to similar food sources as what they are used to. That is why planting greens from those big bags from Cabellas and what not don’t always work as anticipated. No doubt it’s good food for deer but they may not be used to eating it and will pass it buy for something they have been munching on the rest of the year like corn or soybean.

4. You may also break up your forested lands. I hesitate to say this cuase what you described is a small amount of forest. If this is the case then likely you don’t want to cut too many trees. Cutting openings in the forest and even planting some small food plots in them will attract deer all year round for various reasons. You can also use the timber. Maybe look for patches of old forest that my no longer be producing. But also be sure to leave some of those huge trees so other critters can make their home there too. Be selective in what types of trees you leave and what you cut.

Obviously there is more to it especially in terms of what type of trees attract deer, what plants will help what food plots to be planted but you are looking to create as much transitional land on your property as you can. SO grassland to food plot, to agricultural to forest to pine rows etc… all that area butting up against each other and deer will gladly make a home in it.

I've got the day off due to bad weather, so I've spent a lot of time looking at deer habitat videos on YouTube. There's some pretty good stuff. One was really good.

Showed a neighbor 's land that is basically open wood lot. On this guy's land, he's put down a bunch of trees to make tangled cover. He shows deer moving all day, including coming out of standing corn during the daylight

Deer will change their routine when the weather changes. I have a lot of thick cut over on my land. Most of the time you do not see a deer. But if you hunt right before a rain or cold wind you will wonder were all the deer came from. Another thing I have noticed is once deer go into the rut you will not see a buck before the school bus runs or after the bus runs. Bucks move at midday when everyone is gone and the neighborhood is quiet.