I know it's early to talk about this but I need to ask. What do you guys think about hinge cutting? Will deer use it as a bedding area? where do you do it? how big?
I'll post some of my past posts on my site (some have videos) at the end of this post but allow me to express why I feel hinging is the absolute #1 tool in the Whitetail Habitat Manipulation. Why is it so great? -It's cheap to do. Switchgrass, trees and other items cost tons of money to encourage better habitat for the deer we hope to attract with our blood and sweat...hinging can be done for free on your smaller trees with a good aggressive hand saw (I've hinged 6 inch wide trees before with one...however up it by filling just a small tank of gas on a chainsaw and you can start transforming woods in a heartbeat and on a larger scale. -Three things are always accomplished by hinging trees: -More sunlight is let down through the canopy as the tree is now horizontal and not vertical. This will encourage more growth! -Cover and sight blocking is immediately increased. A tree standing vertical only provides it's widths cover/sight line blocking. Put that same tree on its side and you more multiply the amount of cover/sight blocking that the one tree provides by so much it's not measurable even. Even once the leaves die each year and fall the branches will provide breakup/cover for the deer despite no longer holding leaves. -More food will be available for the deer. Deer love browse, just watch them if you haven't. I swear unless something else has their attention they almost always eat/nibble as they go seemingly everywhere. Fresh buds of trees, fresh green shoots and so on are high high high on deer's intake of food...that is exactly what the hinged trees will provide. Maple trees get hammered in our area when they get hinged...hard enough it's worth putting a camera on them. -Hinging provides not only cover in the form of just sheer sight blocking...it can and does provide bedding areas for deer in many forms. Undergrowth will grow up and provide bedding, the hinges themselves will provide overhead cover which many deer prefer at times. -Hinging also allows us to control or manipulate movement subtly or completely shut off traffic. Example of blockade hinging is what we did to our Northern border. We had poaching and trespassing issues with the neighbors to the north and got sick of it not getting better so we hinged HEAVILY along the border in a fashion that the hinges are so tangled and at a level that would discourage travel. Yes, if a deer wants to go somewhere you almost never can stop them but we made it more difficult to the degree they will never prefer that travel direction. This also makes the east/west edge of this hinge basically inside corners of activities for great stand locations. I have many examples of us doing hinging ourselves on our properties and every year bring more and hopefully better ones as it is the first thing we start doing in the off season. Few posts I'd guess may be the most beneficial looking at: Small Acre Hunting: Northern Hinge Cutting (video) Small Acre Hunting: Border Hinging...and the fall out... Small Acre Hunting: Hinging Many more but I got a church meeting to get to. Be sure to just check back around January and February and I can guarantee I'll have many posts/vids on it.
Thanks for the info. It's helped with how i'm gonna hinge parts of my property this coming winter. The videos were great .
Very dangerous practice. here's about 5 hours of reading on the subject. Hinging trees for bedding, browse & bottlenecks - QDMA Forums
As anything involved in cutting trees it can be...but honestly never even had a close call. If done properly absolutely next to nothing in the way of danger is present. Lots of good on hinging at QDMA as well. I honestly can't wait to do more as soon as the season is over..got many many many spots which I want to hit.
Hinging is awesome, I did quite a bit this past early spring and mid summer, I did two travel corridors and like Ty said let sun in for more growth and manipulated where the deer moved. I have had two cameras over each corridor and movement is amazing along trail. I also did about an acre bedding area where I hinged trees higher for deer to bed and have a cam near it and tons of activity coming in and out of it.
I like the premise and purpose of it but I hate the practice of it and the long term results. I have a landlord that had a bunch of edge feathering done by a forrestry guy with a bobcat and a saw/clipper and you talk about a flipping mess. I curse that mess every time I start to do anything around that farm with a bulldozer now because there are all these $#%^ hinged trees and stumps to deal with....I f&%#$! hate it. If it had been well planned out and kept to a minimum it wouldn't have been so bad but the guy just went all over the place willy nilly in total chaos. Appearently he didn't have a flipping clue WTH he was doing, I suspect he was just burning time with his machine running up the bill. The point is this: Yes it could be useful but don't overdo it and plan it out carefully. What I do is use a bulldozer to lay the brush over, the rootwad works better than a stump all the way around and the tree is still laying on it's side. The downside is not everyone has three bulldozers at their disposal like I do....equipment companies around here rent them pretty cheap though and it doesn't take a very big one and it's a lot safer.
Hinging just like anything can be dangerous...but honestly I don't get the scare for it by people. It's a perfectly safe act as long as you don't drink beer, don't plan or don't think of where the tree will fall towards. I like the bulldozer idea and know of it, but a lot of us like you said don't have it at our disposal or want to pay the high rental fees. I don't envy inheriting a property that was hinged in a way you don't want, due to like you said all the stumps everywhere but hinging shouldn't just leave stumps it should have the tree still attached and providing cover right? I will forever be a huge fan of it because of it our property transformed faster than anything we could have done otherwise in a short time without high expensive rental fees. I mean you used to be able to stand on one corner of our ten acres and with a scope you could have seen all the way across it easily...now good luck seeing let a lone shooting greater than 50 yards save down two track lanes. I am curious though...what is the difference between pushing the bushes/trees over with bulldozer, making them horizontal and still alive hopefully and cutting them with a hinge style cut; tree still alive hopefully and laying horizontal? The root ball halfway out of the ground I can see as a benefit cover wise but other than that I don't understand the difference really?
You would see the difference if you ever ran a dozer trying to do custom work. A standing tree pushes easier because of the leverage of the attached trunk whereas a stump with no top is a PITA and a very big tree stump at all has to be dug out. But we have a bit of a misunderstanding here, the forrestry guy I'm talking about didn't just hinge cut...he cut them all the way off so the trees were instantly dead and the stumps are hard to find until your doing some other innocuous job and just start finding stumps with the blade. It's irritating and makes life difficult. My case was also specifically for quail habitat and not deer but it's the same principle. If done with a plan and purpose...(like I said before) I can see the benefit to it and agree it's a great practice. All I was saying is don't do it the way this dolt did it, the opposite of the right way...willy nilly, helter skelter without reason and just make a mess. Danger smanger...I don't care about a danger aspect...just be careful and you'll be fine is my motto. I don't worry about killing the tree, the stuff I do is junk brush and specifically placed for cover and generally several trees together at field edges to make barriers for bedding and sight obstruction. The extra browse I get is from sun reaching the new understory, I would expect hinge cut trees to not have a very long life expectancy anyway.
While some die, even with last year's drought we have hinges going on 4 years now. I can't imagine the mess you dealt with by what you described
Yeah it is a mess, most of the time on that farm it's not that big a deal but everytime I need to do a project of some sort with a dozer I inevitably start finding hidden stumps. The worst part of it is that it didn't do a darn thing for quail there...the owner doesn't understand that quail need food and cover (on that farm) isn't the problem. That farm has enough cover for a million quail but very little food. ANyway that's another issue, lol. There aren't many farms here like yours, we have brush so thick in most places that you can barely walk through it with a machete...russian olives, wild plum, dogwood, blackberry. Most of the time I'm doing the opposite action and clearing land for food plots rather than trying to make cover, lol. When I am making cover here it's piling brush for winter bedding wind breaks or screens from a road view or something.
I don't understand how anyone can call it dangerous practice. Just use some conman sense and you will be fine.
It's risky business with those climbers in the deep woods all by yourself, if the bottom falls out on you because you tapped it when bringing your bow up, you are stuck, and if for some ungodful reason your seat strap let's loose after that, now you are hanging for hours waiting for help; by the time it gets their your legs are blue and circulation is cut off. Amputation possibly. Save yourselves and dish out a little extra cash and get a Leverage speed Ladder stand. All the same benefits of a climber twice the safety!!
