Hunt 365 February 2019-Planning the 2019 Season
Last month, I tried to address a question concerning buying or leasing recreational land for hunting. The question came in October but I wasn’t able to get to my answer until the January issue. I bring this up because Linda, who asked the question, was already looking forward to 2019 back in October of 2018. While this may seem like looking a little too far ahead, I don’t think that’s the case at all. In fact, whitetail fanatics never stop looking ahead to improve. I think this is important because if you get complacent or lazy in your whitetail hunting you will fall behind and you won’t be prepared when the next season rolls around. This could be the single biggest mistake many whitetail hunters make each season…not planning and preparing for next season soon enough. This is especially true for the hunters who are also land managers. Winter time is arguably the best time to start planning for next season because for many hunters, the season has just ended and all the successes and failures should be fresh in our minds.
January kicked off Whitetails 365 with me finishing up a question I had promised to cover for Linda. In 2019, I want to once again focus more content on helping hunter/landowners develop great habitat and hunting scenarios on their properties. I’m starting this process off now in February with a seemingly boring topic of reviewing last year’s season so that you can start preparing for 2019. This review process is something I go through each and every season myself…my goal is to replicate or repeat things that work, and change or abandon things that don’t. If you follow along in 2019, I hope I can help you have a do-it-yourself approach to managing your properties for better hunting.
Any Food Left?
The best time to assess if you had enough food on your farm for hunting season is right after the season ends. For most of us, this means taking a look at how much food is left that was attracting deer so that we could hunt them. For me, this is all about exterior food sources like soybeans, winter rye, brassicas, and corn. I’m asking the question “did I have enough food sources that were attracting and holding deer on my property until the season was over?” For example, I am a huge fan of having standing soybeans and/or corn to hunt over during the late archery and muzzleloader seasons. Because of the drought in 2018, the last remaining soybeans I had were gone by mid-December. I had some pretty good stands of winter rye that remained and the standing corn I had was almost gone as of the writing of this article. For me, the answer would be a resounding NO!
In past years, I have always had more than enough food on my farms. 2018 was different for a couple reasons. First, the lack of rain in July and August really hurt my yields in my food plots. Lower yields meant less grain in the fall…less overall grain and they will get depleted earlier. The second reason is I tried an experiment with how I fertilized my corn. The largest plot I have on my farms is a two acre plot I rotate between beans and corn. This year, on that corn plot, I tried using nitrogen that was being fixed by clover I over-seeded last fall (fall of 2017). The clover never came in all that good but I tried using this method of nitrogen fixation as my entire nitrogen source. Well, corn is a huge nitrogen consumer and because of the poor quality of my clover stand, the corn never got enough nitrogen. That plot normally produces around 200 bushels/acre corn…this year it was maybe 40! I guess I picked a bad year to experiment?
If your farm didn’t have enough food left providing you good hunting through the entire season, start making plans now on how to fix the situation. Or, at the very least, acknowledge it. For me, it will be easy. But for many hunters running out of food on their hunting properties is an annual event. (In a future article I’ll cover some tactics on how to solve this problem).
Enough Stands?
I often get asked how many tree stands and blinds a hunter should have. The answer isn’t as easy really as how many you need per hunter for example. But I do have a method I use. First, I like to have multiple stands for every wind direction for both morning and evening sits. My evening hunting is usually around interior food sources or transition areas leading out to larger ag fields. I want to make sure I can hunt evenings in these areas with any wind direction…so sometimes I will actually have 2 or even 3 stands within 50-100 yards of each other making sure I can hunt an area no matter the wind direction. If a stand is situated in a location that I can get in and out without bumping deer, and deer aren’t busting me while on stand, then I know this stand location can be hunted many times without burning it out. My morning stands are typically located in areas closer to bedding, funnel areas, fence jumps, etc. The same goes for morning stands…I like to have multiple options for each wind direction. If there are multiple hunters using your farm during the same time period, then you need to take this into account as well. Looking back on 2018, were there enough stands for all wind directions? Did you find yourself with options each and every time you went out? Were you bumping deer going in and out—or while on stand? Were the stands you hunted close enough to get off a shot or did any need to be adjusted? These are the types of questions you should be asking yourself at the end of each season. I find that from year to year, many of my stands are in the same exact spots…but something as simple as a fallen tree can alter deer movement just enough to make a stand out of range for archery season. Or, if I notice a movement pattern I didn’t pick up before because something else changed (like a cattle fence being down) I want to make note of it and take care of it during the off season.
Here is an excerpt from my own tree stand to do list for 2019 that I generated based on my 2018 season. (the goofy names are stand location names):
- Remove Cul-de-sac east stand. (never used in last 5 years)
- Better shooting lanes for Cul-de-sac west.
- Fix fencing by Fence Jump stand.
- Better shooting lanes Cage Fight.
- Better shooting lanes Boot east stand.
- Explore getting stand into Candy Cane draw.
- Remove and relocate Boot north stand (bumping deer on evening exit)
My list is actually 22 items long. Some things like better shooting lanes or removing a stand I never use are pretty easy fixes…other items will require a greater level of investment in time and maybe even money.
Habitat assessment
February is a great time to do a complete assessment of the habitat on your farm. If your food plots or agriculture food sources have been completely depleted and the deer are also completely gone, then there’s a pretty good chance the habitat on your farm is not very good. Natural habitat should be able to sustain a local deer herd even absent any other food sources like food plots. Not all farms can carry a deer herd during the winter months, but those farms that have no food or natural cover will many times be completely void of deer during the winter months. This is a tell-tale sign that the timber is too mature and thermal cover is non-existent. Remember how I started this article, with a discussion of not having enough food…well even without standing crops for better hunt-ability, my farms still attract and hold deer throughout the year because I invest so heavily on providing the best habitat that I can. A deer’s metabolism slows during the late season and winter months, so having high energy food and food plots is not necessary, very helpful, but not required to keep deer on your farm. However, to keep deer on your farm absent those food plots, you need good habitat. A walk through your farm this time of year should show deer bedding and using the available cover. Look for deer browsing on things like briars, dogwood buds, and other young regenerating woody browse. There should be active trails. If there is a lot of natural food available you should find no shortage of deer droppings. This is just getting back to the basics of scouting only with an eye on the habitat. A good farm that can and will hold deer will show tons of current sign during the late winter months.
This sounds so boring and basic, but too many hunters end their seasons after their last tag is filled or the last day of the hunt ends. The best time to make honest assessments of the habitat on your hunting grounds is during this time frame…that’s why I’m writing about it now in February! The most successful hunters never have an end to their seasons.
I’ve picked food, stands, and habitat as the three main things all hunter/land owners should assess during this time of year. I would argue that they are probably among the most important and have the highest level of return. In the coming month’s issues, I will dive into how to make the most of your farm through better habitat, better stand locations, and food plot strategies for every hunter/landowner. While you wait, take the time to do some scouting, reminisce about your stands and their locations, and reflect back on how your food plots faired in 2018. I’ll be back next month to start walking you through some easy tactics to improve on all three.