There's no easy or short answer. Thing's are always changing, which has the deer always shifting. Most shifts are on a micro scale if viewed from week to week or even month to month...but can appear to be on a macro scale when viewed quarterly or annually. The better the access, the more sustainable the core will be and less shifting will occur. Some shifts are predictable and even make the buck more predictable...other shifts, not so much. Short list, a wet year vs. drought...not only does it affect the location of water. It effects cover, density of cover, availability of browse, amounts and location of browse. Other factors could be crop rotation. Bumper mast or none at all. A nearby property could have a new food plot or corn feeder. Coyote could have put a den in the wrong spot. I've seen logging cause major shifts (something I continually deal with on some of my public grounds) and then cause long term shifts as the logged area slowly becomes prime habitat. Bucks die, get old and the pecking order is always challenged. And then there's a ripple effect in every situation...for instance, a one hundred acre clear cut will cause huge waves at ground zero...and although much smaller, can still be felt from two, three miles away. Cause and effect. What I'm keying in on is access to consistent sustainability within a handful of key environmental factors. I also want these factors to be connected, well defined, absolute and preferably compounded.
I haven't really touched much on diversity...but it's significant enough that I'll give it it's on post, lol. I've know it was important for several years, but at times it seemed as if it didn't really matter....the reason? There can actually be to much of a good thing. I'm just now actually grasping it's magnitude in the grand scheme of things. For instance...say you have one hundred acres of hardwoods and right in the middle, you have one acre of pine. Deer, but more specifically, mature bucks will gravitate to the one acre of pine. And in reverse, one hundred acres of pine with one acre of hardwood, and mature bucks will gravitate to that one acre of hardwood. Now, take ten, five acre squares of pine and ten, five acre squares of hardwood...checkerboard them into one hundred acres...now there might be a mature buck using the property but the diversity is diluted to the point that it's no longer a draw, and something else will need to be focused on. In a sea of change, something that's a little different often goes unnoticed. But in a sea of monotony, something that's a little different stands out.
I am the first to believe well done science vs anecdotal evidence. A data set from the South like done there in Oklahoma or many other studies you can read from Mississippi or Texas has little correlation with deer up North IMO. A cold front in Minnesota or Michigan is a whole other ballgame than down South. Deer up here have to eat to survive the winter. Do the same experiment in Northern US or Canada and I'd like to see the results.
