Background...
My uncle bought this place in 1972. Where my west neighbor lives was another fellow and his family and they were hardcore poachers. My uncle didn’t live here so the folks in that house wore this property out. My uncle was constantly tearing down tree stands and getting into altercations with this guy. The only deer my uncle killed here was a small 6 pointer and he finally just wrote it off for deer hunting because since he was here so seldom the neighbor kept it shot out. The best thing my uncle was able to do was finally stop the gent and his family from using a road through the property to get to their home by digging a big trench across the driveway with a backhoe and using threats to get him to build a driveway on his own side. In those days a man and his wife owned around 360 acres that joined it on the east side and there were no real close neighbors past that. I think the entire road only had 3 houses on it. I could have hunted it for years if I had wanted after he passed but all I could think of was how much heck he had here. I never really paid a lot of attention to it and once or twice a year I would drive up and just make sure nobody was dumping on it or cutting wood off of it. My aunt did not care what I did here and at 1 time I even let a 21 year old kid hunt here because he was just learning and wanted a place to go. He never got anything here but he did see some deer.
I never did realize when the gent that lived next door lost his place to foreclosure back several years ago. 1 year I drove up and noticed a new road dozed in along the property to the east. I drove down the road and every little bit I would see a driveway and a camper or cabin. That was the time I learned that the owner of the east side had broken off 160 acres and sold it in 16 10 acre parcels. Most bought it for hunting and some are just subsistence, off the grid types. I figured this place would never be any good for anything after that but it did have some great white oak trees and terrain features. My wife and I came up 1 day to check on it in December 2013 and I saw a for sale sign on the side of the road our home now sits. My wife and I walked into the property along an old logging road I still use now and we jumped some deer. On that trip I noticed a lot of rubs on the pines that are throughout the property. When we got done I called my aunt and told her I didn’t know the place was for sale and she told me it wasn’t. Seems a realtor got a little liberal with where they thought a property down the road came to. She said she would sell it to me if I wanted and we came to an agreement. Before we closed I had set up some trail cameras and other than lots of dog pictures I got some really nice buck pictures. I started getting really excited about that time...I saw trails that neighbors were using to come into the property so I knew the first thing we were doing was fencing. We surveyed, fenced, and dozed in a small plot and waterhole. There is not a lot of water or open ground in our area and the deer took to the water and plot immediately. That first spring I found a decent shed and had 3 bucks running together that were all mature and I saw them several times while turkey hunting that first spring. They liked bedding on the points of the many hollows and finger ridges we have. There are small thickets all throughout the place so it’s not all open woods. These thickets are all pretty small but I have increased them over time and it is a continuing process. That first fall we had 5 mature bucks using the property and my wife killed 1 and I killed 2 and the other 2 I assume were killed by the neighbors as we never saw them again after the first 3 weeks in October. With all the mature bucks gone but several 2.5 and 3.5 year old bucks left we hoped maybe something would move in and it happens every year so far. If we kill the most mature buck on the place they are replaced within a couple weeks. Our place has more food, military crest, acorns, and water than most all the properties around us. I am working on cover as we go and I feel that is our only weak point. As far as hunting pressure I am pretty sure I hunt our place harder than any of my neighbors do and even if I blow the deer out they come right back. I think my neighbors are not good at deer hunting and I don’t think they are dedicated. For a 2 year period there was a young guy renting a house from our north neighbor that worked construction and took all fall off and he got a couple of the top deer using our place but he has been been gone a couple years. I caught him poaching with a rifle in bow season the last year he was out here and the warden paid him a visit.The few does in our area love our place but ever since we have been here we have had as many as 2 bucks per doe and right now are at about 1.5 bucks per doe.
The main thing I think we have is that the terrain makes mature bucks want to be here and the replacement factor. These are all deep woods deer and we have miles and miles of forest to draw the most mature deer in these woods to our place I guess because they just like it so much. I am working on getting persimmons to grow and I am continuously using my chainsaw in different pockets on the place. I am getting ready to purchase a dozer to supplement my brushhogging business and I will be using it here on the place as well and looking at logging about 30 acres of it near our west neighbor area to create some super thick and nasty bedding areas for the does and for cash flow.
