Attracting and Holding Deer on Your Property
A common problem with hunting landowners is they often fail to attract and hold deer on the property for observation and hunting. Everyone wants more deer on their hunting land but not everyone knows how to create a place that will hold deer. I will break down the 5 things deer need to stay on your land most of the time. Often times, landowners know what needs to be done but are hesitant or don’t want to put in the work and expense that it takes to get a top notch hunting property. Or, they are afraid of doing it wrong and wasting time, money and energy. That’s where hiring a consultant will pay dividends and save you a lot of wasted effort.
Deer need 5 things in their home range.
- Food
- Cover
- Water
- Space
- Perceived Safety
Food
Deer need to have about 5 pounds of forage every day. A ruminant must eat something every few hours to keep their digestive system functioning. So, they will eat the best, most nutritious food available. Sometimes that will be lush clover and sometimes, when all the good stuff is gone or covered in ice, they will stand on their hing legs to eat pine needles or peel bark from trees.
To hold deer on your property, you must set the table and never clear it. I often see landowners who have a nice clover plot or have some corn left standing to feed deer. But one must always think about what is available in terms of variety and availability. You can grow a corn field but deer don’t need it or eat it in the spring and summer, they need it in winter. So, corn may be a good choice for a supplemental feed for winter. However, deer will often eat all the corn you have planted by late winter, leaving a cleared table with not good forage. Also, they cannot and will not live on one food. Even when acorns are abundant, you will find all sorts of other browse bits in the rumen along with the acorn mash.
By variety, I mean grain, greens, browse, leaves. Depending on the time of year, all of these are consumed at one quantity or another. All of these diverse plants should be planted in all of your food locations, even if you have to split the fields to make it happen. You want to have reliable, year-round food in all locations so there are plots for every group of deer, thus holding more deer on a property.
Cover
Of course, deer need cover, but what constitutes cover? Is a mature forest providing cover? Well, it depends on whether or not there is a healthy understory. But, I can tell you that the understory has been destroyed by man over the past 200 years. Shrubs, grasses, forbs that provided food and cover for centuries are almost gone. So, what do we do?
Cover can be created just with a chainsaw and all it costs is the saw gas. Any TSI done on hunting land is worthwhile, especially in winter, when the buds and new growth on the tips of the tree branches is all good food.
Cover can be planted. Fruit-bearing shrubs can be replaced. Opening the canopy to sunlight and planting native shrubs like cranberry, elderberry, dogwood and many others will provide cover and something for deer to eat in the daytime. The leaves, fruit and stems of these plants are preferred browse. We may have to use a deer exclusion fence or tree tubes to prevent the deer from killing the plants just after you plant them.
Another way to increase cover is to simply conduct a regeneration harvest to encourage new growth to establish itself, providing low cover to hide and to feed on.
Water
Water is probably the least important need to focus on here in Pennsylvania where water is ubiquitous. Deer can get most of the water they need from lush forage in spring and need to drink more in the fall when the forage dries out. However, by providing a watering source near bedding areas where there is dry ground, this can make a great attractant for deer to stop by and take a drink before feeding and they don’t have to go off-property to get water if none is available.
Space
Deer need space to exist in. So, how do you create space when you only have 50 acres? You can create a perception of more space on a small property by stacking thick cover in layers throughout the property with separate food sources. This gives your property the ability to hold more deer than any mature forest or farmland.
Perceived Safety
Everyone hears of sanctuary areas, but what is a sanctuary? It doesn’t have to be an area where we never ever go. It just has to be a place where there is a little food, good cover, not near destination food plots and a place where deer almost never hear, smell or see a human.
Deer know where people are not present or other predators, and they go there. They have been avoiding being eaten for thousands of generations and they are very good at it. Create a place where you know a deer will like to spend the day based on their need to rest in safety.
If you create a place that has all of the above characteristics, you can attract and hold deer on your property for most of their time. It doesn’t take a large tract of land to have a big buck. I would rather have 20 acres of great cover with food, water and safety and space, than a hundred acres of open forest.
For more information on video about this subject check out my youtube channel at chilcote forestry.
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