Things You Can Do To Improve Deer Habitat in Spring

Spring is in the air all over North America. The early flowers are blooming as spring works its way north. Many landowners are thinking about working on their deer and turkey habitat to improve their land for all wildlife and increase the value of their property. As will any chore, it’s good to have a list of chores that need to get done and a plan to implement. This article is about how to improve deer habitat in the spring.

Below is a list of ways to enhance deer habitat in the Spring:

• Improve Current Food Plots and Add New Food Plots
• Test Soil PH Levels
• Know What and When to Plant Spring Food
• Create Fawning Cover
• Make Mineral Stumps

Now let’s go into the list in more detail.  Below we will discuss the particulars of providing food and cover for deer in the spring.

Ways To Enhance Deer Habitat In The Spring

There are many projects to tackle in the spring once winter has lost its grip and days get longer.  Good preparation in springtime will ensure great habitat that will attract deer for the fall hunting season.  You can get away with more activity in spring rather than working the property close to hunting time and risk spooking deer off your property.

Below is a list of must-do spring habitat projects that will guarantee many deer sightings next season.

Improve Current Food Plots and Add New Food Plots

Spring is a great time to take stock of your food plots.  Take a look at what is starting to pop up in them… are there lots of cool season grasses and winter weeds like the biannual thistles, velvet leaf or pigweed?  If so, decide whether to spray selective herbicides to take care of the cool season weeds or do a burn-down application of herbicide and start over.

Frost Seeding Clover Food Plots

Frost seeding is simply spreading new seed over an existing food plot.  Small seeded varieties of plants can be planted this way.  Its called dormant season planting to rejuvenate pasture in agriculture.

Any forage plot should be over-seeding prior to spring green-up as part of a regular maintenance plan.  Simply spread a light amount of clover into existing plots to keep them going.  Switchgrass is another species that can be planted this way.

You don’t absolutely need hard freezes at night if you have wet soil.  Heavy rain will provide seed to soil contact to encourage germination.

Herbicide Application to Maintain Food Plots

Perennial clover plots will always have unwanted weeds creeping into them as deer eat the clover and leave the unpalatable weeds alone.  A good practice that will save your food plots and a lot of effort is to always overseed in spring then spray the cool season weeds and spray again for warm season weeds.  This two-application plan is important.

I learned the hard way that while everything looks great in May, during the hot weather in June some other nasty and aggressive plants show up and take over.  Grasses like foxtail or sedges like yellow nutsedge show up when the soil gets warm and are fast-growers.  Japanese Stiltgrass – an aggressive invasive can show up and spread like wildfire.  It is important to spray for these plants before they are 6 inches tall for the herbicides to be fully effective.

Mowing will not work on stiltgrass and it only seems to encourage its spread.  It is very important to not run vehicles through it as it will spread it everywhere.  The seeds hitch a ride in the dirt that sticks to the tires.  A good diligent spray program will keep it at bay.  Here are two videos I have on stiltgrass treatment: Pre emergent Oust application.  Post emergent application.

Using Selective Herbicides to Improve Food Plots

It is a good idea to plant plots that are all legume so that a specific herbicide can be applied that will kill all but the legumes.  You can add chicory later once the stand is devoid of grass and broadleaf weeds.  Usually, if you have a good stand of clover add chicory, an application of clethodim or sethoxydim will keep grasses out of your plot.

If broad-leafed weeds are present, an application of 2,4D B is warranted.  A good mix of 2,4 D B and clethodim with a very low dose of glyphosate is effective on weeds in clover.  Another choice if you have a clover/chicory stand is Imox (Raptor) that will kill grass and broadleaf weeds but not chicory if used correctly.  Clover late in the season is not harmed by a 1 quart per acre application of glyphosate.

Keep your mower in the shed.  Everyone wants to mow their clover plots but there is no benefit to that.  The only time I suggest mowing is when weeds have gotten away from you and they are about to go to seed. In that case, you must mow them because it will be too late to spray (and you don’t want a million seeds getting loose so you have a bigger problem next year).

The story that clover should be refreshed through mowing is a common misconception.  These plants grow from the terminals and so are always making fresh growth out where the deer are browsing on them. Mowing doesn’t increase the productivity of the plants.

So, let’s say you failed to do any of the above and your perennial plots are full of stiltgrass, foxtail, thistles.  You may consider a pre-emergent herbicide like Pursuit.  This chemical will prevent seeds from germinating and will last all season.  It won’t effect legumes, so an application of it will give you good control so that you can develop a good stand of clover, alfalfa, beans, etc.

I will write a post about herbicides and make a chart to simplify herbicides.

Test Soil PH Levels

ALWAYS get a soil test before you apply any soil amendments to your field.  By soil amendments, I mean commercial fertilizers, lime or other pH influencers, composts or manures.  Never just “wing it” where it comes to fertilizers and lime.  If you don’t know what you need, you will at best waste money and at worst, harm the ability for plants to uptake nutrients in the correct amount.

Any land grant university (agricultural University) will have a soil testing lab.  You can purchase test kits that will have a little ziplock bag and some paperwork to fill out.

On the paper, you should put the name of the field if you do multiple fields (don’t get them confused)  the crops you will be planting, what the field was in the year prior and the soil classification name.  There is also a place to put your crop yield goal.  This is more for farmers than food plotters.  I just use 3 tons for perennials and 40 bushels for grains per acre.

The reason for the yield goal is that your fertilizer recommendations are the amounts needed to most likely produce your yield goal and applying more of that nutrient will not likely produce an increase in yield.  This is how you avoid wasting money and causing pollution by putting too much fertilizer on.

Fertilizer also messes with your pH and causes other problems in soil so enough is OK, too much is bad.  We will talk more about how to avoid and eliminate the need for fertilizer in another post.

Know What and When to Plant Spring Food

The timing of major nutritional needs of deer coincides with spring green-up.  In April, plants start to emerge and the new growth is highly palatable and nutritious.

A doe’s fetus grows very slowly in the winter when food is scarce and starts to grow like crazy the last month of gestation.  Then the doe needs to make enough milk to feed the fawns as it quadruples its weight over the next four months.

Bucks go into winter in bad shape after the rut so they have to catch up and start to grow a set of antlers in April.  Another need that you may not think about is that deer will shed their hair and grow a new coat for summer.  All this takes a lot of protein.

What seeds to plant in spring and when to plant them are interdependent.  If you will start a food plot from scratch – in other words, you did not put in a fall planting of cool season plants – then you will want to plant some cool season plants.

These include oats and other cereal grains, winter peas, brassicas, vetch and clovers.  These plants will germinate with soil temperatures down around 50 and start to grow rapidly as the sun warms the soil.

After the hot weather begins to show up in May – air temps reaching up to 80 and the soil temps are about 60 under the surface, it is time to plant summer warm season plants.  These include soybeans, cowpeas, sunflowers, brassicas, sun hemp, millet and buckwheat.

These can be drilled into the cool season plot and get your food plot producing through the hot summer months after which you can drill in your fall planting again in September.  Rotating your crops this way will ensure that you never clean the plate and deer will have a year-round food supply in the same place.

This is critical for maintaining consistent travel patterns and keep deer nearby so you can protect and influence the herd.

Create Fawning Cover

With the increase in coyote populations all over the Whitetail’s range, and bear populations high in big woods areas, fawn recruitment rates can suffer as these predators are very intelligent and key in on the flush of easy prey.  There are two things that protect fawns from predation- good sex ratios (so does are all bred in a short time period) and good fawning cover.

Prescribed burning makes great ground cover.  Running a fire through an area will generate new growth of grasses and forbs – low cover where a fawn can hide.  I have seen brand new fawns that were dropped in the open in the middle of wide open timber.  Not only are they open to the weather they are easy prey to a passing predator.

Fawns do not have much odor.  The mother keeps them very clean and they can reduce their metabolism to an extremely low level when danger is detected so they don’t put out much breath.  As long as they are in thick cover where they cannot be seen, it is very difficult for a predator to detect them.

So any kind of widespread cover that is not linear is good.  Thinning hardwoods, burning, discing, warm season grass planting are all good practices on your land to provide places for does to hide their young.

The MSU deer lab video on the Basketball Technique can give you a good idea of how thick your cover needs to be.

Both quality and distribution of fawning cover are important.  Does will disperse in spring out of their family groups to giver birth so they need lots of spots to place their fawn.

Once the fawn is born, it will stay put for a couple of weeks until it has the strength to follow its mother.  Its a good practice to have plenty of thick low ground cover for fawns.  Any increase of early successional forest growth is a good thing.

Here is a good video by QDMA about early successional fawning cover.  And here is Kip Adams  QDMA deer biologist talking about good fawning cover.

Make Mineral Stumps

All the rage lately is the concept of the “Mineral Stump”.  One of the deer’s favorite foods is the stump sprout of a tree after it has been cut off and the tree sprouts back.

What happens is that when a tree is cut off, preferable in the dormant season, like very early spring, it has a huge root to shoot ratio.  In other words, the large root system  that supported an entire tree is now putting resources into a very small bunch of stems at the stump.

Trees have in their cambium layer under the outer bark “adventitious buds”.  these buds will grow a new shoot under stress conditions to put out leaves and collect solar energy quickly.  These fast-growing new shoots are highly palatable and preferred by deer.

Some timber species such as the oaks, maples, basswood, black gum and tulip poplar are the favorite food of deer.  So much so that a cut oak stand has a hard time re-growing as deer nip off the new growth faster than it can grow.  Cherry and birch are less preferred but are also eaten by deer when newly sprouted.

To create these, simply conduct a timber sale during the late winter or do some TSI (timber stand improvement) cutting on your own.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is plenty of work to do in the early spring through to late spring to create and maintain great habitat.  Cutting timber or TSI, burning, discing old fields, maintaining food plots and planting new ones are all great activities that will reap benefits in the fall hunting season.

Related Questions

• How active are deer in the Spring? Deer come out of their winter habitat very hungry and looking to fill their rumen with any palatable plants they can find as soon as the soil temperatures warm enough to grow cool season plants the deer will flock to these locations. Does will break up their winter family groups and start to set up their fawning territory and yearling bucks disperse several miles, increasing movement and activity.

• What is the best thing to plant for deer in the spring? If you did not plant fall or winter cover crops, then plant spring oats, clover, & hybrid brassica once soils reach temps above 50. Plant summer covers such as beans, cowpeas, sunflowers and brassicas together in a mix when soil temperatures are above 60 2 inches underground.  Cover crop mixes are great for soil health and forage productivity.