I don't like baiting because baiting + pressure = nocturnal deer. They learn that they can wait til after dark and easily fill their bellies. I'd rather not add to the problem your neighbors are causing. I talk to a lot of guys who run cameras on their baits up north and seldom do they ever get a daytime photo of a good buck.
I'm not sure if you ever see peakrut anymore.. but you're more than welcome to have the issue of "Quality Whitetails" I have on Oak trees. I can hand it over to him.. so he can give it to you. I'd also suggest a subsription Greg to this magazine.. which is by the QDMA. Although I don't own land yet or belong to a co-op.. I've been getting it for a few years now for free with my insurance I get through them.. and its got a lot of great stuff in there for land owners. Just food for thought.. whichever path you choose.
Magic is right. Baiting + pressure is bad. The guys here who are good at it ....don't shoot does in their bait. They don't over-hunt their baited stands. They actually don't hunt right over their bait, either. In other words, they're really smart and selective. That doesn't sound so foreign......does it Greg?
I own my land and use bait in the early part of the year to take inventory and to let the wife and the kids hunt on it to see more deer. Late season with snow is a great time to bait for the lack of available food. As for make the land a little more deer friendly a little logging goes a long way. First the deer will feed on the tree tops right after the cut. Then the next year when the new growth comes up the deer will love all the new growth. As it grows up over the next couple of years it will be thick and good for bedding. Also you can plant some pines and create your own little bedding area. If you have food and cover the deer will stick around until they find a better food source.
I would be thinking thick bedding (clear cut, cedar trees, etc) and oaks in the form dwarf chinkapins depending on soil type. You'll have acorns in a matter of a few years. Legal or not, baiting isnt something I would fall back on
My friend that i hunt with up here is a heavy baiter. This year alone they killed 2 bucks that'll push 135". They bait to hunt, but they also bait to keep deer from getting killed as 1.5-2.5 year old deer. He's probably got access to close to 500 acres and he's got prob 20 of it in food plots. He/we see alot more deer heading to corn/apples than in the plots. Up here every bodies got a bait pile, so he makes his more attractive. He'll go through 3000lb of corn and 5 bens of apples in a season. It's nothing for him to see 8 different bucks in one sitting all 110" or better. They've been doing it for years and the deer are acclimated to it, he'll pull up in the same truck he's had for 15 years and the deer want even flinch (I've seen him do it several times).
Greg, I personally don't enjoy hunting baited sites for deer as much as actually trying to figure them out. With that said, you could bait sites and not hunt them, but simply use them to keep the deer on your property.
Greg, do you have any aspen/cedar on your land? For bedding results in less than two years, that is where I begin some clearcutting.
I'm going to enjoy this thread as it develops...some good insight here Greg, I have a piece of property in Colorado. Deer are not the concern, but rather Bighorn sheep. For me, it's all about water and a sense of safety. I'm tryng hard to provide both. My sheep have food everywhere (they're worse than goats)...the trick is providing them with everything they need in a "one stop shop!" I'm guessing you'll be better off if you try to do the same. Best of luck.
I don't doubt you saw more deer. We used to bait late season and film the hunts. The first hunts were great but the deer got smart real quick. We never saw a good buck though. I think it all comes down to how much you pressure the deer.
Fire? I don't hunt whitetails at the moment. Oregon has a very small population of eastern whitetails in the NE section of the state and all of my attempts to get access to fields where they reside has been futile. That being said I lived in Scott County Tennessee for a winter and all of the people there would do very low intensity PX burns on there land so turkeys could find acorns and other seeds that had fallen from the tree's much easier with out having to root around in the fallen leaves. I have no Idea if this would work with deer and I'm interested to hear the response. This do's come with some inherit risk, i.e. getting the fire to hot and killing the trees, or in worst case scenario, having it get out of hand altogether! I'm a wildland fire fighter and I've seen the response Deer and Elk have to fires out west. Which is basically when the flames are out, they come running to take advantage of the grass and other fresh foliage that will sprout up after the fire. Most study's show that younger plants provide more nutrients. Any thoughts?
Greg, could you post up a map showing your neighbor's properties as well? I think Duke's idea of improving your oaks has some merit (I read the same article Duke). Also improving bedding would help, but it's pretty obvious that given the option of acorns or the bait (corn) they are preferring that. If you give them some bedding and put corn out on your property and don't hunt it at all, possibly on the opposite side of your property from your neighbors you can keep those deer on your land. If they have food they can eat unmolested and a secure place to rest before going there, why would they go to the neighbor's property where they might get shot?
Some good stuff here. One thing we have done on our farm that has helped our acorn crop is to use the time release fertilizer stakes around lots of our oaks. They are relatively inexpensive. We have been thinking about trying to get in there and open up the canopy around some of the smaller oak stands by some selective timbering to see if that will help as well. Another thing we found helpful was the deer bedded all summer near the water in shady, cooler areas but once the temps really started cooling off the best bedding areas were the ones in thickets/cutovers that had a thin canopy or no canopy. Apparently they like laying in the warm sun, so if you have anything like that or can create something like that it might put more deer on your piece. I will say this though when it gets cold it's hard to compete with corn/bait simply because it's like putting fire in their wood stoves(stomachs). That being said, in NC where I used to use some baiting I loved this stuff; http://www.antlermax.com/products/ECMD2-0017371.aspx It holds up way better than corn or horse feed(won't mold or mildew). One of the most effective ways I ever used it was to put it in an over the shoulder broadcast seeder and spread it through the oak bottoms as the acorns were starting to get low or if there just weren't many to begin with. I never used piles, I simply replaced the acorns with this stuff and the deer kept right on feeding in the area and it seemed to keep their guard down a little as opposed to standard bait piles. You can use it on the outskirts /edges of bedding cover the same way, they LOVED this stuff and if you shop it online you can get decent prices, not as cheap as corn but less waste. Good luck.
The more "groceries" you have the better off you'll be. I don't mean baiting either. I think the more variety you develop on your land the better you'll have to keep deer on your property. From the sounds of it, around November 4th, the food sources that kept the does in the area became scarce so developing food plots and planting fruit bearing trees would help. Duke hit it on the head by increasing bedding areas too.
I'm just going to throw my 2 cents into the pot. If I were fortunate to be in your shoes with a large chunk of land I'd be doing several things. As mentioned, I'd be making some bedding areas as well as putting in food plots. I'm not sure what kind of access you have to machinery, though. It'd be nice if you could clear out an area inside that chunk of woods (just a small area) and put a food ploy there. One often looked over plant that really, really attracts deer are Hostas. Yes, Hostas that many have planted around their homes. Hostas are easy to grow and require no maintenance. They do well in somewhat shaded places. Deer love them. I'd be putting several patches of hostas on your property as well as some apple and pear trees. Saw toothed oaks produce acorns in about 5 years. I'd be planting some of them in selected areas. With all this said, create some bedding areas, then clear an area to make a small food plot. If you could situate the bedding area and food plot in a way that the contours of the land could somehow make a natural funnel or pinch points would be awesome. Hard to explain but I think you get the picture of what I am saying. It would have to be thought out and planned acording to the lay of the land. In your food plot, I'd have different types of clover, rape, barracis, etc... but I'd also have some hostas and several fruit trees. You'd basically be making a deer smorgasboard. Anyway, as cartoonish as it all sounds, that is what I'd be doing.
Greg, I live in an agriculture rich environment like you and for years we have struggled to figure out how to keep the deer on our property. Obviously, you can't all the time, but what has made a huge difference for us is a combo of thick bedding areas that we DO NOT go in except to recover a deer or shed hunt and feeding the deer ALL YEAR LONG. We put out 50 pounds total of corn twice a week in 3 spots (does vary depending on time of year and how much they are eating). 2 are just for observation (cameras and from the house) but one is on what is an early season food plot of alfalfa that in the winter we put corn in. Like I said, this is on a farm but the constant source of food keeps the deer around all year. They don't eat much in the spring/summer/fall but knowing it is there has kept them on our property much more than they used to hang around. The does will come and eat at the corn for hours, but the older bucks just seem to hang around and maybe once in a while will actually eat at the corn. That is why we don't really hunt the corn as a bait station, but basically just use it to keep the deer fat and happy. I call it a concentrated food plot I also have an acre or so in turnips that the deer love in the winter. Problem is it did horribly this year due to lack of rain in the late summer. Anyway, long story short... continuous source of food + shelter = lots of happy deer
