Quality Deer Management

Sylvan Springs, Alabama

I had the privilege of managing a small hunting property back in 2009. It was a small property near highway 269 which is close the home where I was raised. This property was owned by a local land owner, R. B. Stevens, and an old family relationship granted my best friend and myself the opportunity to manage the property. We started managing the property by scouting, photographing the deer herd and building food plots. This small, 40 acre plot of land was under tremendous hunting pressure as you can see from the aerial photo. There were four neighboring food plots that were all within a half mile of our land.

October 1, 2011

Jonathan, and I planted two fields to attract deer to our land. We decided to plant one of the fields this year with BioLogic's Full Draw. The purpose of the Full Draw product was to attract deer from the nearby over-hunted lease property. The Full Draw product is a blend of New Zealand brassicas, clover, wheat and special grains. This seed blend is designed to attract deer in the early season and provide nourishment for deer in the late winter months. We thought if we could establish an early season pattern that it would pay off with deer activity all season.

The small, concealed food plots along with the attractiveness of the Full Draw brought deer to our property throughout deer season. We had consistent sightings of several doe, a big 6 and a mature 4-point. The second picture summarizes what would eventually be the reason that we quit managing the property. This deer herd showed very little movement during the day and our food plots turned out to be the perfect spot for the majority of their late night activity. We used several different trail cameras over the years and we were never able to beat the affordability and performance of the Stealth Cam. 

Both the big 6 and the mature 4-point made it through the 2009-2010 season and we were able to track some of the antler development into the next season. One observation that we made in the 2009-2010 season was that the deer activity slowed down when the food plots became overgrown. 

In 2011, we were not able to get any good pictures of the bucks we saw in previous years. We observed that the bucks preferred the back field due to the cover it provided. The front field provided less cover and we were only able to get pictures of the more trusting doe herd. I compiled all of the pictures that we collected from the Stealth Cam and analyzed the deer activity. We found that 77% of our deer activity was occurring at night. This was due to the tremendous hunting pressure that was on this deer population. Of the 47 camera events, we were only able to capture 1 picture of a buck during daytime hours. This shows the importance of quality deer management and what hunting pressure can do to your deer activity. We stopped managing the property after the 2011 season.