Im new here,and needed advice.

[happycamper]

Ive been an outdoorsman all my life.Hunted turkey,quail,etc,but just started hunting whitetail last year and got hooked.My grandad has about 200 acres of land in Northeast ALA...1/3 timber,1/3 hardwoods,1/3 pasture/homestead.Had good success over the years with turkey,and have seen a good deal of deer also.I have been planting food plots(at the advice of some friends who are avid deer hunters).Is this wise or just a waste of time/money in regards to maintaining herd health,and drawing deer onto the property?Also is this amount of acreage capable of being "managed" for resonable deer hunting success?.Thirdly are feeders a good idea?Ive heard alot of arguments over this between friends and wanted to know if it is benificial or harmful to the deer?.....Thanks and happy hunting

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

Welcome Happycamper! Man, you asked some questions that should keep the group busy for about 10 pages or so. The answers are what we've been discussing for the past 10-12 years. You should have thrown in something about which rifle or bullet to use as well.

Stay tuned and be ready to take notes!

Alan

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

I guess I'll give it a go.



Ive been an outdoorsman all my life.Hunted turkey,quail,etc,but just started hunting whitetail last year and got hooked.My grandad has about 200 acres of land in Northeast ALA...1/3 timber,1/3 hardwoods,1/3 pasture/homestead.Had good success over the years with turkey,and have seen a good deal of deer also.

In my area, 200 acres per hunter is deemed about right for sound management purposes. We figure 200 acres will produce one mature buck per year assuming that all 200 acre plots are equal. Your area may do better than that.


I have been planting food plots(at the advice of some friends who are avid deer hunters).Is this wise or just a waste of time/money in regards to maintaining herd health,and drawing deer onto the property?

Any improvements and planting of food will benefit the deer and all wildlife. Only you can determine if your time, effort and money is well spent. Drawing deer can have multiple benefits. You get to see more deer, seeing more deer means you know more about the deer herd in the area. Knowing more about the deer herd in your area gives you a better handle on management. Better management means better hunting. Better hunting means more fun. More fun is why we do this.




Also is this amount of acreage capable of being "managed" for resonable deer hunting success?.

Not in and of itself, but in conjunction with surrounding landowners or managers you can certainly contribute to a significant degree to a management program.



Thirdly are feeders a good idea?Ive heard alot of arguments over this between friends and wanted to know if it is benificial or harmful to the deer?.....Thanks and happy hunting

Feeders are beneficial in that they do the same thing as food plots from a management and hunting standpoint. Depending on how much ching you want to drop you can keep them going year round and put up several locations. Certainly check on the legality of putting up feeders in your area.

Again, welcome.

Alan

[happycamper]

Thanks for the sound and prompt advice.I just want to get started on the "right foot",for me and my family.The acreage in question borders timber land,not sure who owns it(probably temple/inland).The other neighbors dont hunt.Last season i took a doe and a nice(in a new deer hunters opinion)8 pointer.My buddy determined that he was about 3/4 years old.If i am selective can i expect more of the same or larger?Or is this about all i can expect?I truly enjoy the sport for fun so i am not looking for a "record breaker",just a good chance of a nice buck every 3 or 4 years.But i would like to get some meat in the freezer yearly.Would harvesting does,say one or two be a bad idea?

[Altjaeger]

Welcome aboard. You will find lots of good people and more advice than you need here. :)

If things are as lightly hunted as you indicated around you then you should have good huntng a long time. Feed programs may increase your herd and improve their health if numbers are kept culled.

If you goal is to attract and maintain a herd on your place then many experts today are advising that sanctuary is more important than food. They say as little as 20 acres will do. you may want to select the 20 acres that is the most dense hell you can think of and set that as an inviolate sanctuary from hunters shooting or visiting.

Enjoy yourself.

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

It's really going to depend on your situation. Best to contact your wildlife officials/game wardens/game biologists and ask about densities and populations in your area. Killing does is most always a good move and a way to reduce and/or control herd numbers, put meat in the freezer and allow buck to grow but it's really going to depend on what you find out about your area.

Alan

[BILL K]

Mineral supplemets are another thing worth looking into. If there is a deficiency in your area they'll draw deer, but before you establish a mineral lick check into the legalities and find a good homemade recipe.

On the lighter side, here's how you plant a food plot.
1. Spend $600.00 on a rototiller.
2. Spend $60.00 on lime and fertilizer.
3. Spend $4.95 on enough sweetcorn seed to plant a 30' row.
4. Spend $11.00 at the dollar store for a pot to cook your sweetcorn in.
5. Spend $3.99 for a set of little holders that go in the ends of the corn.
6. Spend $2.99 for a pound of real butter.
Now, till the soil, prepare the soil, plant the seed, water it, hoe the weeds, repeat, repeat, repeat, nurture it as if it were a premature baby, and the day will come when you'll fill that big shiny new pot with water and put it on the stove to boil. You'll put your plates on the table, with the little corn on the cob holders next to them and as the water begins to boil you'll drool like a bull mastiff. And, when you go out to pick your wonderful garden fresh sweetcorn you'll find that just last night the deer have discovered your foodplot. Ta Da! :D

[Alan R McDaniel Jr]

Bill, you sure make it sound easy!

Alan

[Bushman]

I hope for your sake that AL. is different than WI., but in regards to trespassing, probably not. At one time dad owned 180 acres in NE WI. where we hunted deer. We had all the fun of planting it and paying the property taxes and lots of the neighbors with the 50' lots helped us hunt it. They were always "lost" when they were confronted. People like land owners are easier to pattern than the deer are. Bow and arrows don't make much noise and other than the weekends, it was open season for the locals during the week. We sold it and I hunt the big county, state and federal land now.

[GF.]

If you've got 200 acres to yourself and don't have much in the way of plans to bring other people in to hunt it, then food plots or feeders would be a bad mistake.

Pasture land makes a plenty good enough 'food plot', so there's no sense at all (IMO) in spending a bunch of cash increasing the forage base on an area that's already producing more deer than you can probably stand to take in a year. So if you artificially increase the carrying capacity of that land, you'll soon be up to your eyeballs in whitetails (and you probably already are, anyway....).

So if it were me doing it... I'd be talking to a forester and/or a deer biologist about what the land there actually needs in order to support a full range of desirable wildlife. You might have a few areas with trees that could be thinned or where more could be planted. You might have a spot that's just right for putting in a pond of a couple acres or so.

Next thing you know, you could have good hunting for ducks, quail, squirrels, rabbits, furbearers or who knows what. Probably hogs, too, so you might look in to what kind of feed and cover does not attract those damn things. Don't get me wrong - I'd love to try hog hunting some time; I just wouldn't wish a hog problem on anybody, and if you've got hogs... you've got a hog problem.

Or..... you could spend a small fortune on food plots, build yourself a couple of shooting houses, then sit around watching a bunch of deer mill around like herefords while you pick out one to shoot. I don't know if my heart could stand that kind of excitement :rolleyes:

Just depends if you want to be able to shoot a lot of deer at a deer farm or manage it as a really good little spot to hunt.

I've been lucky enough to have access to about a half-section up here in southern New England, and I've seen what kind of herd a parcel that size can help support. Now, the herd is way over capacity here, so there are about 60-100 deer/sq. mile. I figure that puts a minimum of 30 deer on the property, and I have never had any trouble at all punching a couple of tags a year. Fortunately, the managers have opened up a little public land on the southern edge of the place to a controlled hunt, and the doe harvest has increased over the past 4-5 years. I don't see anywhere near as many deer per trip as I used to, but last year I saw more bucks than ever and I did shoot my biggest yet. And that's with plenty of hunting pressure in the area, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding a good buck every couple years if you're willing to let some little ones walk. If last year's buck had been symmetrical, he'd have been quite respectable in most guys' books, but being a 2X4 6-point, I don't suppose most people would be too terribly impressed.

Tasted fine ;) No free wall space around here anyway :D

So IMO, you can shoot all the does you can eat and probably take an entirely respectable buck every year or so without going into the deer farming business. And to my mind, that's much more of what hunting is all about in the first place. Not figuring out how to manipulate the area to bring a whole mess of 'em to me, but taking care of the land for a full range of wildlife and me figuring out how to go find one of them.

And, the less the neighbors think that you've created some kind of Trophy Hunting Bonanza, the fewer problems you'll have with poachers and tresspassers.

[alan]

Just want to welcome you to a great forum. Sorry I can't answer your questions; I just hunt & will settle for any legal deer.

[Herne]

Not meaning to be at all unkind, but any talk of shooting, or not shooting this or that depends very much on how many deer you have to start with.

So you need to come up with a stab at the size of the local population (on and off your boundary) that your hunting (in a low hunting pressure area) is going to influence, and then you can come up with a plan.

I must admit, we never worked on an area of 200 acres per mature buck. Mind you we tended to shoot them older than many in the US would consider normal, but 1 - 500 would be wiser. Except that 200 acres won't cover the range of a population however small or unhassled - so you will have to take account of what gos on over the boundary. For which reason I always like 1000 acres in a contiguous block, and preferably 2-2500 acres. With the territorial deer you can manage whole populations on blocks of that size.

Still what you got is what you got, and you have to make do with that and adjust according.

[happycamper]

By pasture land i mean green field for cattle.Is that a sufficient food source?There are alot of fruit trees/blackberry patches scattered throughout.We plant about a five acre garden every year and i leave up a couple rows of corn and turnips.Like i said i planted the food plots last year at the advice of some friends.I have the equipment but that seed is not cheap and its alot of extra work.I'm just wanting to improve the habitat for hunting in general.thanks

[Twanger]

Ive been an outdoorsman all my life.Hunted turkey,quail,etc,but just started hunting whitetail last year and got hooked.My grandad has about 200 acres of land in Northeast ALA...1/3 timber,1/3 hardwoods,1/3 pasture/homestead.Had good success over the years with turkey,and have seen a good deal of deer also.I have been planting food plots(at the advice of some friends who are avid deer hunters).Is this wise or just a waste of time/money in regards to maintaining herd health,and drawing deer onto the property?Also is this amount of acreage capable of being "managed" for resonable deer hunting success?.Thirdly are feeders a good idea?Ive heard alot of arguments over this between friends and wanted to know if it is benificial or harmful to the deer?.....Thanks and happy hunting

I just heard from a friend that said their sightings of big bucks more than tripled after they put in food plots.

I'd say take the slow approach unless you just really want to go after it. Scout the place and see what the deer look like. How many, what condition, buck to doe ratio, etc. If you have only a few scrawny deer then food plots will help. If you have a lot of scrawny deer then you need to whack does, and then re-assess, but adding more food into the equation doesn't hurt.

My $0.02

[ncboman]

I'm no expert but as posted above, you've got to look at what you have and perhaps more importantly, look at what the deer have ... and don't have.

I'd say with only 200 acres, you probably want to draw deer from outside your land to your land. One of the best ways to do this is plant crops deer like but don't have available in the local area.

A field of white clover where there are no other clover fields around will be visited by deer from all around but if clover fields are common, something else can be tried. What I like is something or a combination of attractive somethings unique to my property.

Thick cover and good food plots are sure to always hold deer and make it attractive to deer from neighboring properties.

I dislike feeders or baiting as it tends to make the deer more nocturnal than normal as hunting pressure increases. Late season as cold weather approaches you want the deer to have to move to eat. For some reason feeders and bait tend to help the deer 'hole up' during daylight hours whereas I've not seen this when food plots alone are used.

Clover and/or oats are proven fall/winter food plot crops for me. :)

[Twanger]

We see deer bed right by the feeder if it's a gravity feeder and they can eat all they want. If you kill a lot of deer over that feeder they will still bed there but will bounce off when you approach and then not return until after dark. Maybe killable with a gun, but not with a bow. Generally the big bucks do not hit the feeders until after dark, but they do screw up once in a while. I killed a 144-inch (gross) 11 pointer last year that was nosing around a feeder just a few minutes after it was light enough to shoot, but it was the rut. It was also clearly the exception, not the rule. We get hundreds of pictures of big bucks on feeders at 2am and only a handful during daylight.