Recreating a Deer Woods

That pic does make him look a lot bigger. I thought he was 2.5 before but not in this pic. The amount of info you are processing is off the charts. Is it possible the number of older deer, bucks and does you have, that yearling bucks just can’t find a spot. I am sure the older does don’t want them hanging around in the spring and summer. I have noticed at my place I don’t get yearlings showing up until September/October. That is when your older bucks will have an issue with them showing up. I always thought when you have the best place within miles younger deer have to wait their turn to enter. Unless you are a doe fawn staying with the family unit you won’t be welcome. I think this is what guys experience when they say they shoot an old doe and 3 new ones show up or they take out the dominant buck and new ones take over. No scientific evidence but think your lack of yearlings dispersing in will be replaced by older bucks dispersing in. You can only hold so many bucks, why would an older buck allow a yearling to have a better home? I would bet your neighbors are covered up in yearlings hoping for admittance into your property.

Side note, my 72 acres is on the market. Ordered the sign yesterday. I am willing to finance the sale so hopefully I will get some interest.

Jeremy, I think you have it pegged. The yearling disbursing deer coming by probably do not see all of these older bucks as an inviting deal at least in the fall. And even some of the 2 1/2 year olds are having trouble staking their claim. We had at least two, maybe three deer with broken antlers this year(some are hard to tell apart). I don't ever remember seeing any in past years. Oddly enough the only real fight that got caught on cam was of two yearlings; and they were not sparring but really pushing each other around. I'm absolutely convinced we are maxed out on the number of bucks and does that will live here and actually there are more than the property can support. I can't imagine this guy being a very cordial welcoming committee.

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It is unimaginable that a few short winters ago an entire year class was wiped out.
On the older deer dispersing in it is generally accepted that the older deer are not dispersing like the yearlings do. They will however move into a prime spot from a neighboring property when a prime spot becomes open; I'm counting on it.

Good luck on selling the 72 acre piece. I think it is a very valuable property to serious snowmobilers, even more than deer hunters. And with the snowmobile traffic that goes by it a sign there should work. A table with a sign and free hot coffee on a couple of Saturday mornings might be worth a swing also. If I was still snowmobiling I'd snap it up before anyone else found it. It's location is a snowmobilers' dream spot,right on the trail with enough land to park your entire graduating class and still shoot a deer or two now and then to feed everybody. Wish I was younger! A property like that just does not come up for sale period!
 
That deer has a dagger for a brow tine. Bitter sweet to sell because I think it has a lot of potential. I certainly won’t give it away. Things are just so busy with the kids right now and I don’t see that slowing down for the next 8 years. By then I will be able to add on to the property at camp which will be easier all the way around. It just isn’t getting enough use to justify keeping it.
 
That deer has a dagger for a brow tine. Bitter sweet to sell because I think it has a lot of potential. I certainly won’t give it away. Things are just so busy with the kids right now and I don’t see that slowing down for the next 8 years. By then I will be able to add on to the property at camp which will be easier all the way around. It just isn’t getting enough use to justify keeping it.

You are right Jeremy, With those brow tine daggers that buck doesn't fit the description of a smiling member from the welcome wagon. On your second property, your timing was simply off to expand. Luckily you didn't get over attached to the property and there should be good demand for it. Hopefully the deal of a lifetime will come in a property bordering your main camp property at just or close to the right time in your life;that would be an ultimate property expansion option. Your family comes first as they should and I admire you for that. And if DMAP will give me a few more tags I can always use a proven one shot kill man to control the herd growth here. I'm setting the stage with DMAP to do just that.
 
You are right Jeremy, With those brow tine daggers that buck doesn't fit the description of a smiling member from the welcome wagon. On your second property, your timing was simply off to expand. Luckily you didn't get over attached to the property and there should be good demand for it. Hopefully the deal of a lifetime will come in a property bordering your main camp property at just or close to the right time in your life;that would be an ultimate property expansion option. Your family comes first as they should and I admire you for that. And if DMAP will give me a few more tags I can always use a proven one shot kill man to control the herd growth here. I'm setting the stage with DMAP to do just that.
I better get some more bullets!
 
I opened up my dark ops yesterday and am anxious to get them started. They take two less batteries and have a one year warranty. Thanks for the lead.

G
 
You are welcome George. I hope they work out for you and you have a lot of fun with them.
It was cold, snowy and blowing quite hard the other day.
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So I decided to do a little bit of gardening. Planted 5,760 daylily seeds for the garden and twenty chestnut seeds for the deer. The seeds were planted in seed potting soil in used plastic water jugs, have done daylilies this way before but not chestnuts. A friend from Connecticut zone 5 gave me the chestnuts which came from a tree in his yard. We are mostly zone 4 so maybe it will be a match. We'll see.
Here are couple of pics of the milk jug planting deal.
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A cut is made around the jug from one side of the label to the other leaving the label section as a hinge. A few holes are then punched into the bottom with a knife for water drainage. The seed starter soil is then placed in the jug, then the seeds planted just as if they were being planted outside and then the soil is lightly watered. The jug is then folded back into position and the cut is then fully sealed with duct tape. The cap to the water jug is left off so nature can keep it watered.

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They are then placed outside open top up where here they will likely see temperatures of below zero to 45 degrees before spring arrives. Rocks are placed against the jugs to keep the wind from blowing the jugs over. Jugs were split into two locations to test out two different sun angles. Four orange juice containers were also used in in place of water jugs to see if they might work as well. And that's it; at the right time if all goes right they will germinate, self water and grow to wonderful hardy seedlings in time for transplant into the garden after the normal last frost in May. Until then they will be just fine just sitting on the ground outside.

Note; remember this my first time using this technique for chestnuts so the results for chestnuts are unknown. For daylilies it has worked just fine.
 
Dave, you may have told me before but where does your love for daylilies come from?
Grew up loving everything outdoors including gardening of all kinds. Sometime fifteen to twenty plus years ago we were looking for ways to make our long established rental cottages stand out from the many other rentals then springing up in the area. We chose two definite standouts; we would be the absolute cleanest cottages offered and our grounds would be the prettiest. We needed a plant with peak blooming through July and August to coincide with the peak rental summer period. We wanted the plant to be hardy to the area and easy to take care of that had a large variety of bloom styles, shapes and a full range of colors. After a year or so of searching flowers we determined daylilies fit the bill better than any other plant we could find. Thus we began our journey into the daylily world. Our neighbors thought us nuts for planting daylilies as "don't they grow in ditches everywhere alongside the roads?" Three years later with over 1,000 daylily varieties growing on the cottage grounds it presented a plethora of color that would take your breath away. And it still does today even to me who sees it all day long. The daylily beds were stunning and did exactly as we had hoped.

Today the daylily beds are mature and tired and we are in transition renewing, rebuilding and updating them as well as re-landscaping the cottage grounds. Reshaping the cottage grounds is likely a five year project this time around. This coming year will be year three so the project is well on its way. Many people shake their heads at time spent by me working habitat and hybridizing daylilies; I'm just thrilled that I have passions that keep me going as many retired people have not developed passions. It is hard for people like us on the forum to comprehend but some people have nothing to do! Check out the link below to a song written by Toby Keith for the movie "The Mule" . The song is titled "Don't let the Old Man In." And the Mule is a story about Leo Sharpe, a past daylily planter/hybridizer that was way up therein age, hit hard times and lead his life down the wrong path. I don't plan on going down any paths quite as wrong as old Leo did but do plan to keep on growing daylilies and deer as long as I am able.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=439576053243263
 
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It definitely wasn’t spring the other day but there was some snow melt which made walking to check browse levels and maybe even working in the woods possible. Field south slopes had some open ground but in the woods snow was still at about a foot high and slow going. As stated our hunting observations and fall camera survey pointed to an outrageously high deer population. With it being just a few short years after pretty much an entire generation of deer was winter killed we were slightly unsure of our survey conclusions. Within a few minutes in the woods though it was obvious that the population was indeed as high as the camera survey had indicated. A field of five to six ft. tall red pine had been heavily browsed, junipers were eaten to the ground, red cedar was eaten to five feet high, sumac bark eating had already started and even spruce was heavily browsed. The red pines below only three weeks before were green all the way down to the ground.
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Only one button buck was found dead--probably had gotten himself hurt during the rut by one of the yearlings. The button bucks were very active in chasing/following all the action.
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Thousands of poplar sprouts were eaten but still thousands remained. Red Osier dogwood and willow regrowth were about 50% browsed which would be excellent in April but very heavy for now. Easy to reach blackberry was heavily browsed but just slightly out of the way still had lots of browsing left. Service berry and apple were hit hard but still had some browse left also. As normal, Multi-flora Rose and Prickly Ash looked untouched, while the nasty old buckthorn had some browse action, the deer were working on the remaining berries. It sounds bleak but the amount of nice browse left was huge as compared to before we had logged. Ie; 50% left of nothing equals nothing but 50% of trillions of plants is real money so to speak. The thirty plus acres of rye and winter wheat were showing very tiny green shoots on the wind swept knolls of the fields and the deer had recently been working them over. And this pic taken within the last few days of a very young doe with last years fawns shows them to be in OK condition.
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Still though it looked like it was time to hit the old browse bank so out came the chainsaw. Just over forty trees were marked for cutting on one day and the cutting was planned for the next. I like to be deliberate in planning out which trees to cut and in which order. The planning reduces some of the risks involved. Once the cut was marked and planned out a handful of trees were hinged until they dropped to jump start "new" browse availability.
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The rest were cut halfway thru and left standing. An ice storm was forecast for the coming evening and the added weight at the right time would likely "gently" lower the half cut poplars to the ground. At least that's the plan.
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In the pic. above you can see the cuts made on the poplars marked with tape. Cutting halfway thru, and accounting for the lean allows cutting dozens of trees without getting the blade/bar pinched sometimes. Getting the bar pinched is a big deal as the tractor and side by side are put away for the winter and working conditions are very frigid. When a bar is pinched the saw has to be removed from the stuck bar and the bar replaced with a spare and did I mention it is brutal weather for that kind of activity. Otherwise a second saw needs to be carried in to cut the tree in a second place. As you can see the cuts are not exactly perfectly flat--they are meant to be flat but I'm a little rusty this time of year. So home I went with a total of 39 trees hinge cut with just one small tank of fuel. A couple of marked trees were not cut as marked because other trees already cut would have made me too vulnerable to them if they fell with me under them. Not a big deal they can be cut after all trees have fallen if need be. The freezing rain started falling just as I left the woods. The next day I returned to see how the cut went.
Note; I am not recommending that others do it this way but am simply sharing how it is done here.
 
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A walk down to the hinge cut area the next day showed that things had gone very well. The deer had already found the freshly dropped trees and one deer watching me from forty yards away was very reluctant to leave. Most of the hinged trees had stayed hinged and fallen perfectly. It was not considered important they they stay hinged to keep the top alive but rather to act as cover and screening for some of the poplar re-sprouts that will likely result from this hinge cut. For those trees that fell off the stump unattached, come spring the tree butts will be lifted up and placed on the stumps with the tractor where space allows. Some fell perfectly.
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Some fell a bit high.
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Some fell a bit low.
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on these three, one fell high, one low and one broke off.
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But still most of them fell just right.
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Trail cams were setup to watch how this newly available browse gets used and how many days it lasts. Past experience has been that at least twenty deer will feed here regularly until the branches are eaten down to pencil size. Notice the tree with the tape on the last picture above. It shows a tree that has been cut that needs a different wind (north wind) to bring it down. It is important to keep them marked of course until they do come down.

While this type of cutting looks easy and took only just over an hour for the actual cutting for the 39 trees hinged it is not as simple as it seems and is not recommended until one has both received sufficient chain saw training AND years of practical hands on chainsaw experience. Most chainsaw work has fairly predictable results and risks but as you can see by the variations in how the poplar trees react to the cuts, the only predictable thing about them is that they are UNPREDICTABLE.
 
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So now the report ten days after the poplars fell--From our sun room we can see one end of the hinged poplar trees areas. From that end one morning we watched a line of eighteen deer making their way to the hinged poplars. There were five "clumps" of hinged poplars thinking that they could accommodate five different deer groups at a time. And that is exactly how it worked out. Each picture of the two thousand plus pics taken over the ten days showed only two to six deer on anyone poplar hinge cut at a time. The four cameras were pulled today ten days after the cut poplars fell. While deer were feeding on the poplars at each of the four camera locations as I arrived today the food had about run out. It was hard to find a bud that had not been eaten and I would guesstimate that over 99% of the edible parts of the dropped poplars were gone. What we know for sure is that up to eighteen deer visited the area and within ten days of feeding the browse from 39 dropped poplars was virtually gone. The eighteen deer we witnessed making their way to the cut poplar stands was one of three major trails that entered and exited the area.Thus an assumption that up to three times eighteen deer COULD have been using the area. The conclusion is that the 39 dropped poplars and the immediate areas' browse pretty well fed from eighteen to fifty-four deer for ten days. Considering the size of the total property(605 acres) and the number of deer using the property(30 bucks 1 1/2 and up, 60 does 1 1/2 and up and 84 fawns aged 5 to 7 months old), another three or four five area poplar hinge cuts (an additional 156 poplars) would have been optimum to get the deer here thru the last ten days. We do have the poplars but had no idea on how many we had needed to cut until now. And of course it is a moving target every year depending on the number of deer using the property, the severity of the winter, the condition of the reachable browse and whether other landowners are kicking in to the effort or not.

The deer, starting yesterday are also feeding heavily on the south slopes of the winter wheat/rye fields where the snow and ice has melted. So while the browse is near done it was decided not to drop any more poplar at this time figuring that the thirty- five acres of winter wheat/rye will likely take over feeding the deer now barring any major snowstorms over the next month( a high of 46 degrees tomorrow is expected to open up the rest of the winter wheat/rye fields completely).

More poplar areas should have been hinge cut to carry the deer over the last ten days. We are still learning and hope to recruit other landowners to pinch in towards keeping the deer fed thru February in the future. In this first picture deer from two different groups met and were not very cordial.
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On the other hand deer in their own family group don't seem to act territorial for the food as "strangers" do.

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Great update Dave. Finding the right balance between numbers and habitat is extraordinary difficult in the north country. With your numbers, you’re going to need to kill a lot more does. Your logging will encourage high numbers....but absent extraordinary efforts, ongoing logging or extensive browse/hinge cuts will be necessary to sustain the efforts as the successional growth grows too high. While you could put in many acres of corn to help in the winter months, it is a real hassle to clean up all the stalks. I guess a heavy enough no-till could cut through some...but it would require effort and coin that would be hard to justify just to help sustain high numbers. I’m interested in seeing how it plays out. Hoping you find a solution. While not on your scale, I face a similar challenge.
 
Chainsaw,

Great pictorial essay on effective use of hinged poplar. I wonder if some of those hinged areas will now be bedrooms with food. How were those areas used prior by the deer?

Thanks for sharing.
 
Great update Dave. Finding the right balance between numbers and habitat is extraordinary difficult in the north country. With your numbers, you’re going to need to kill a lot more does. Your logging will encourage high numbers....but absent extraordinary efforts, ongoing logging or extensive browse/hinge cuts will be necessary to sustain the efforts as the successional growth grows too high. While you could put in many acres of corn to help in the winter months, it is a real hassle to clean up all the stalks. I guess a heavy enough no-till could cut through some...but it would require effort and coin that would be hard to justify just to help sustain high numbers. I’m interested in seeing how it plays out. Hoping you find a solution. While not on your scale, I face a similar challenge.

Thanks Tom. There is no happy medium here; we are either one extreme or the other in deer population. We have been here before so we know what to expect and how to avoid adding to the population "problem". Growing corn to provide increased winter food is definitely not an option. It is too expensive, too time consuming and therefore not sustainable. And worse than that it draws winter deer way too much. example; a hillside of sloppily harvested corn about ten miles from here has been having three to four hundred deer in it at a time starting last week; Can you imagine what that will do to the browse levels on that property? This is not to say I won't grow corn but if I do it will only be enough to make it until the end of deer season. The turnips on the other hand fed our deer well yet didn't cause the out of control influx of deer like the corn is doing in that nearby area.

The plan is to shoot as many does as we legally can and as we can in a low impact manner. Currently that is only around fifteen does but it will help a lot. For now coyotes will get a pass again unless they start putting too much pressure on us during the rut. We'll continue to use poplar hinge cutting as needed during late January and early February and plan to plant turnips and rutabagas for winter food as you have had luck with. Also releasing apple trees will continue which keeps setting the succession clock back creating more browse as a side benefit. The deer are currently keeping the succession growth down to well out of danger of being out of reach. Time will regularly be spent fighting invasive plants. And there is another 100 acres or so yet to be logged off. If necessary there is the option of reducing our recruitment rate by switching to row crops from rye/winter wheat fields. So things are not so bleak. Barring any killer winters we are looking at a few years of continuation of the best deer hunting of our lives coming up. Like you said, sustaining high numbers is hard to justify especially because with only four of us hunting we simply don't need such high numbers.

Good stuff Dave.
Thanks George. All of these extra efforts differentiate us on the forum from "normal" deer hunters.

Chainsaw,

Great pictorial essay on effective use of hinged poplar. I wonder if some of those hinged areas will now be bedrooms with food. How were those areas used prior by the deer?

Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Will. One of those areas was first hinged two or three years ago. Prior to the hinging it had deer bedding here once in a while. Since the first hinging it has given us some great hunts as a group of seven does regularly bedded in it. Took out two of them. Wife Anne shot cruising a buck there a year or two ago and our big ten buck got his picture taken several times in daylight within fifty yards of there last season. The hinged poplars about always die as far as I can remember but the structure creates cover ad the root sprouts provide significant fall cover as well as summer and winter food.

Dave, that hinge work looks great....
Thanks Steve. I actually learned to just cut them halfway from Dipper from the old forum. He had done it and posted about it. Since then I have been hinging poplar annually that way and each year more and more hold to the stump. As mentioned the above ground hinged poplar trees all die but the hinged tree acts as structure and some what protects some of the hundreds of resulting poplar root sprouts.
 
Dave as I’ve reflected on our 24 acres of hinge cuts, I’ve drawn a few conclusions. As you saw, in some areas, particularly some of the south facing slopes, some regeneration has been phenomenal. Some of it is so thick after 41/2 years, you can’t walk through it. Other areas show a small fraction of regeneration, even with good southern exposure. Obviously, nutients/soil are very different, even with plenty of sunlight. Perhaps at year 8 or 10, they will catch up to where prime areas are today. As long as it does fill in, taking twice as long could stagger how soon these areas need to be cut back again. I was told by our consultant that depending on fertility/light, my hinge cuts will need to be re-cut in 8-15 years to maintain the browse level/cover. The point is, on my mountain, a couple hundred yard distance had markedly different results browse/cover wise. In the end, best made plans are full of surprises and disappointments...which is both a challenge and a motivator for experimentation.
 
I returned from the Caribbean but the warmth refused to return with me. I start getting nervous when March looks like January. Hopefully this weeks cold and snow doesn’t last much longer. Cool to see the deer target those popples. I am hoping to make it up to camp in the next couple weeks for some scion wood. I have an area I want to clear as well but I will probably wait until the snow is gone, it is mostly brush. Spring is close!
 
Dave - Great update and pics of the recent hinging you completed. As I've said so many times before, I'm always amazed at how different it is to manage for deer in colder climates, particularly those that receive substantial snow fall. Our only stress period down here is late summer in years when it turns dry. You guys deal with what looks to me like very adverse conditions at the end of winter with so much snow. Your pics definitely show the advantages of hinging to drop winter browse to deer level. We're already seeing the Jap honeysuckle and briars putting on new green growth down here and the grains are starting to pop in a huge way.
 
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