Sunlight

Sunlight

The Key to Natures Food plot and the main ingredient to your lands holding capacity.

Congratulation, you finally landed your first great hunting lease or purchased your first well deserved slice of heaven. You have been dreaming about the day when you could finally sit in your blind overlooking a beautiful, well-manicured food plot and watch the deer flood in an hour before dark. So, you located the perfect two acre already open field on your new property and got to work. As you administered a soil test and got your results, you then went to getting the lime on the plot to fix the PH, worked the ground and sprayed glyphosate to get that weed free plot ready to go. Next you grabbed your favorite “big buck on a bag” food plot mix and spread it on your beautiful seed bed. A few rolls with your nice shiny cultipacker and you were off to pray for a bit of rain. Surely you will have your choice of which buck you want to shoot come opening day in your great new plot.

As you grab your bow and head to your stand for opening day, you are envisioning where you are going to take pictures of your trophy that you are going to harvest that night. I mean, surely you will be sitting behind a trophy soon. You built the perfect food plot, and the deer will come right? As the evening wore on and the shadows got long you were thinking that the deer would start flooding in at any moment. You could see looking down at the plot that it had heavy browse pressure and there were numerous rubs and scrapes along the open woods, so the bucks had to show up at any moment. Your excitement quickly faded at last light as all that appeared was a doe and her yearlings. As you got back to your truck, all you could think about was maybe it was just a bad night. Maybe it was the moon phase or something right? There had to be some reason you did not tag your trophy. Just to be sure, the next day you hung a couple of cameras over the plot just to see what you were missing. Well come to find out what you were missing was deer actually making it to your plot before the cover of darkness. There were many great bucks hitting your plot, but most 30 minutes to an hour after dark. Well, now what?

What to do now is take a step back and digest what went wrong. One of the most import factors when it comes to a food plot location is to have sufficient bedding within proximity to the food source. This closest bedding will typically house a doe family group and then we can dive deeper into the timber to find more layers of bedding to house more does and eventually bucks. The issue with the plot described above is that there was basically a large two-acre open food plot bordered by a large mature open canopy woods. When standing on the edge of the food plot looking back in the woods, you could easily see a couple hundred yards through the park like setting. Although in this situation, you may be able to get some does to bed closer to the food by simply creating some cover along the edge of the woods by adding some screening of grasses and hinged trees. That would still leave a large void of no cover going back into the timber. Breaks in that cover will surely slow down the deer from getting to your food source before dark. What we will discuss today is how to further open that canopy and a few simple options to look at when trying to create more cover along with daytime browse.

Evaluate your timber - First thing to do before firing up the chainsaw and dropping trees in every direction would be to evaluate if any of your standing timber might have some timber value. Depending on the type of timber and how mature it is will determine on if you have some standing value in that open park like setting. For example, my personal property has about 14 acres of woods and after walking it with a couple timber buyers, it became apparent that I had 100+ marketable trees that turned into thousands of dollars in my pocket. Well, that will come in handy for some future habitat improvements or a tractor or tree stands or bow, well you get the point. I would recommend getting ahold of a local forester in your area and have him come walk your property with you. You can discuss your goals for the parcel and then with that in mind he will shop around for the best method to get your timber sold for as much profit as possible. Keep in mind that there are other things that you can write into the agreement on the timber harvest, such as possible openings to be created for food plots and what you would prefer to see for a final product when it comes to how the woods looks like when the logger leaves. Timber sales tips and tricks can be an entire other blog, so we will leave that right there.

What’s next? – The logging trucks have rolled off the property with the marketable timber and the check has been cashed, now what? Well first, let us assume that you already had a property plan in place and the areas of the timber that have been harvested are now areas that you want to enhance the cover for bedding and daytime browse on your property. The next thing to look at is to see how much of the canopy in these areas have been opened up. We are really looking to achieve 40-70% open canopy, in other words, sun hitting the forest floor. If there are areas that this has not been achieved by the harvest, you can simply drop a large canopy tree every thirty yards or so and this should do the trick. To take a slight step back, I would recommend that you leave all the tops from the timber harvest. I would not be afraid to cut up some of the bigger logs for firewood or whatever, but the more cover on the ground the better. Even if you did not have timber value trees on your property, just simply dropping some of the large canopy trees and leaving them lay will go a long way towards your bedding cover goals. You can also always go through the tangled mess of treetops and open back up main deer travel corridors that you want to maintain.

Enhancing the cover – So all the large trees that were either of value or needed to be dropped to get sunlight to the forest floor have been removed. A couple of things that we can do to further enhance the bedding and browse in these areas include some select hinge cutting of some of the remaining smaller diameter trees and possibly adding in some other diversity to the more open areas since we now have the sunlight to get things growing. Hinge cutting is kind of a highly debated topic between foresters and habitat guys, but the bottom line is, there is a time for any of these tactics when it comes to habitat improvement. I will discuss hinge cutting more in a separate blog, but bottom line is, do not be afraid to do your research on this method but be fully aware that it is a nonstandard way of felling a tree and can be extremely dangerous if not done properly. Back to diversity, if you have large open areas that are now getting great sunlight, it is a wonderful time to add some conifers into the open areas. Depending on your area of the country will determine which type is best for your situation. My personal favorite for mid-Michigan would be a mixture of white and Norway spruce. Use the white spruce in partial shade and the Norway in full sun situations. Plant these in small 3-5 tree pockets to create that diversity. Red cedar is also another good option.

Success? - So now that your park like setting looks more like something that just had an tornado go through, did you achieve your goal? Well to begin with, typically if you want deer to stay on your property during the day, your property is going to be downright ugly and nasty. The immediate side cover from all the treetops, additional dropped trees, hinge cuts and added conifers will be immediate cover for the first year. That first full growing season will blow your mind with the explosion of new forages and forbs that have just been waiting to raise from that forest floor. The hardwood regeneration will also begin to grow and will really explode in the next couple of years. You have now created an area that deer not only can bed in but will seek out because they have the high-quality browse that they need to support a couple of daytime feeding before heading to your lush green destination food source. This movement pattern can now be easily defined, and you can add in sweeteners such as water holes, mock scrapes, small hunting plots or corridors and pinch points to direct deer past your ambush locations. You will find that you will now want to spend more time hunting the travel corridors between all of that enhanced bedding and the food. You can still hunt your food plot if desired but keep in mind that if you start spooking deer off that plot then you are slowly destroying the very huntable pattern that you have created between bedding and food. Spooking deer off the improvements that you built to lure them in is a perfect way to make your deer move solely under the cover of darkness.

Bottom line – Do not settle for open canopy park like wood lots. They are nice to access stands through since you know deer will not be in them very often, but other than that they are only good for lazy walks and squirrels. The power of daytime bedding and browse is essential to keep deer on your property. You want to draw the daytime attention of your local deer; we do not really care where they head after dark. Get ahold of that forester, fire up that chainsaw and let’s make an immediate improvement to our properties before we get busy with other things come spring.

-Better Habitat, Better Hunting!

Brian Gasper – Whitetail Habitat Plans LLC