I am not talking about drawing and holding deer during the summer months but rather during open archery season. It takes little acreage to hold summer deer. How many acres do you feel you need to draw deer to "your" land and have them spend at least 33% of their time on said land. What improvements, or practices (or none) do you feel you need to complete on this land to help maintain daily use of your property? Interested in your thoughts, on your specific properties.
A sanctuary is the most important part of any deers habitat.Deer can and will find food and water in just about any woods, but safe bedding area is what it takes to keep them in that area.
Yes, very important. But, how big of an area do you feel you need in your area to keep those deer on your land for 1/3 of their time?
During the fall on my piece in Virginia, I think a buck can spend a 3 third of his time on 100 acres. A sustainable food source is the most important factor when attempting to get deer to regularly visit your property, lack of human pressure is second. This can mean food plots, acorns, apple orchards, etc. Deer hunting isn't overly complex. If you have food you have deer. I say 100 acres because the majority of my property is open timber. Improved bedding area and decreasing human pressure would limit this number a bit.
Scott, to me the perfect scenario if acreage is limited is to have outstanding bedding coverage in the middle of other properties with food sources nearby. So, 200 acres with good cover and perhaps some small food plots in and around larger parcels with crops, corn and beans is a great honey spot, if there a good concentration of deer in the area. If you limit trampling around your place, the deer will use it and hang tight. Now, if you want to provide everything they need to stay put all year long, I think 300 + with limited pressure. But, that's just my opinion. Not scientific.
We own 475 acres and I can tell you its barely enough to hold deer for a significant amount of time. We have a 35 acre clear cut sanctuary that helps some. The most important in my opinion would be to have extremely thick cover, sufficient water, and some decent food. But the thick cover will trumph the rest IMO.
A lot of variables go into the answer to this question. How much pressure on your land? How much pressure on the neighboring properties? How big are the neighboring Properties? What do the neighboring properties offer to the deer? Forrested property or farm land? I'm sure there are more but you get the idea. Taking all of this into mind, I'd still say the #1 thing I would work on would be bedding areas. That's what I'll be doing the rest of the winter. Cutting trees to thicken up the underbrush in some of my woods. If you have the best bedding cover around and don't disturb the deer you can probably do it fairly well with 100 acres. But if the property is what the deer love to live in it will probably be hard to kill them on it as well. Because deer will live where they feel the safest most of the time. This is the problem I am having with my property. I have good bucks living there, but it is hard to kill them on it, because they have too many options when it comes to travel routes and they bed almost anywhere on my property.
While food is important, bedding is by far the most important. Deer spend the majority of their time bedded down so if you give them a place to bed safely... you'll keep deer. I also think that deer in different locations have different "requirements" the property that I hunted this weekend the deer travel over a mile to the nearest food source (no that's not an exaggeration).
I don't think you will keep deer on a specific property without having 500 to 1000 acres. With this much land you can make sanctuaries and plant food plots in areas to concentrate the deer. I can tell you that most of the areas I hunt are less then 30 acres. There are a lot of different bucks in the areas that pass through, some more than others. Aside from having a lot of acreage pressure if the number one key to keeping deer around.
Scott im not sure how to answer the question about how much acreage I feel is necessary to hold Deer during the archery season. The delima in answering that question is the large size my area is. I hunt very Big areas that are not broken down like some areas I have seen with smaller 100-200 acre blocks of timber with fence rows and crop feilds linking them together. I hunt 800 acres that have only 2 roads going through them seperating them and 2 crop fields on the outside borders. on the outside of the property is just more timber that butts up to ours that goes on and on and on. Hope you understand what im saying. Some of the things I do during the season to help hold them is not pressure certain areas, not hunt certain areas until I feel the timing is right in the season to hunt those areas. Food is so spread out where I hunt so that IMO is not the biggest factor in my area. Only a small percentage of the neighboring property has alot of pressure but that just helps mine most of the time because they filter to ours when the the orange army comes out. I personally dont do anything to the property. It has it all already, lots and lots of water, food is spread all over the acreage, and there are areas thats just almost unjustivable to even try to enter and that just gives the Deer more space. Ill keep doing what I do, hunt the edges of certain terrain, hunt the bottle necks that I have come to know so well, hunt edges of bedding when necessary and most importaintly IMO, scout in the off season through shed hunting, and get to know every bit of the property that I possably can to help me link it all together when the seasons in. throwin up the horns for ya bucko :D
I am specifically asking about your area. The area we all hunt. I know the answer can and will be different from one place to another. So I am wanting to hear the answers for your specific land.
For my main area, its food. If the acorns are there, they will bed there far more regularly. If there are no acorns, they can find other bedding areas closer to the food.
I don't feel the size is as important as the location, as prevailing winds play a huge part in where a buck beds,th only thing size affords is escape routes, and they are a must, the most secure place in the world won't hold a buck if he can't smell you coming, his sight and ears are the tools he utilizes when his nose is hindered. You can fool his eyes, ears and................never his nose. Plan a sanctuary as you would a fort,impenetrable with out giving yourself away and you will have a place that will hold a buck.
Some of you guys just are not understanding. I am asking about the specific land you hunt, not a make believe piece of ground.
For 1/3 of their time as the origional posts asks? I have two acres of oak trees in my front yard that holds deer at night.
Buckeye, I will chime in here as I think I have quite a bit of experience with this and a very interesting situation. Our property is almost 600 acres. We're surrounded on 3 sides by prison property that permits hunting only one or maybe two days a year during the firearms season for a select number of permit holders. The 4th side is a major road with a concrete barrier that game can not cross. So, we're pretty much in a perfect situation in terms of where our land is located. For 20 + years, we've been practicing QDM here. We plant a substantial number of food plots on the property with a variety of foods to take the deer throughout the year. We setup a refuge area, of about 100 acres that we do not hunt. We'll hunt the fringes, and maybe the last day or two of a season, we'll dive in there, but otherwise its off limits. We have a 8pt, ear width rule here for all of the adults who hunt. If kids are hunting, they can shoot whatever they want, they're kids, we want them hunting. Any given season, there are about 4 guys that bow hunt, me religiously, and about 8-10 guys who come to camp for rifle season. We all tag does. In our situation, we've found that our summer herds are high, but come fall, they disperse and frequent the prison ground quite a bit as well. This, even though the food options are much better on our property than the prison ground. It seems as though the deer still feel just as secure on the prison as they do our ground. It may be different if the surrounding property was open to hunting. But then again, if it was, we'd have less deer. We've seen bucks, big bucks in our fields all summer, only to have them basically disappear or become ghosts during the rut. Or, we'll catch them a mile away in an area that we're fairly sure isn't his stomping grounds. It's a crap shoot during the rut for us. They have so much "secure" property to roam, that they can and will be almost anywhere. They're not being pressured at all. We do have deer, including some bucks that seem to stay on our property all year, rarely leaving it for long. Even with all of the things we do to hold deer, we almost always hear of a buck being taken by a hunter several miles away that we have pictures of from the summer on our ground. I think it really depends on the surrounding property. Do the deer feel secure enough to venture over there? Are there other food sources there that they will take advantage of, especially in the fall?
I have no reason to think otherwise. S border is a crop field. N Border is a pasture W Border is 8-10 yr cutover E Border is a farmhouse and a road Interior has a pond, mast-producing hardwoods; sporadic pines and about 1 acre of thicket. So yeah.....I can easily see them spending 1/3 of their time in there. I went back and read your orig. question....and you said "deer". That's how I'm answering it.
My land is rectangular the long side runs east, west with a deep drainage ditch that runs from ten feet deep at the start and ending over 60 feet deep. On the north portion of my land across this drainage is their sanctuary 25-30 acres. I enter this area only once per year and that is early spring shed hunting. I feel at this time of year I do the least damage as far as disturbing them. Some of the beds in this area will have 30 or more rubs on every available tree, its an amazing area.
