Planting The Perfect Deer Property

By Kent Boucher

I recently had a conversation with Justin Synan (of Whitetail Addictions and The Run’n and Gun’n Podcast) about what the Iowa landscape is like for deer hunting. We discussed how most of the state is in row cropped acres, and doesn’t really offer much in the way of whitetail habitat throughout the vast majority of the state, and if a landowner/manager puts in some effort to improve the habitat value on their hunting property they can really make their farm stand out as a destination spot for deer. The starting point for making these habitat enhancements is defining what type of hunting property you have.

Timbered Draws and Small Timber Patches Surrounded by Ag Fields

I’m not sure how many of our 99 counties I have been in, but I know it is the majority, and I’ve certainly spent significant time in all four corners of our state and most places in the middle. As an avid shed hunter and bow hunter I have visited these counties with an eye open for what they have to offer in the way of deer habitat and while some counties present much more deer habitat than others, the overwhelming majority of the state consists of ag fields with small woodlots, and timbered draws standing on the unfarmable acres. This type of habitat has produced solid hunting opportunities for Iowa hunters through the decades, but such small amounts of habitat is subject to significant fluctuations in deer presence from year to year, and the only way to improve its predictability is by expanding the available habitat. The obvious improvement is adding trees, but there’s a reason there aren’t many trees on these farms, they have a lot of tillable acres, and before farming came around, they were probably prairie acres. 

Convincing a landowner, or even yourself to forest such acres may be too much to ask for, but planting prairie around the existing timber can greatly elevate the deer habitat available without making such a permanent commitment to a new form of cover for the farm. Start by visiting with your county NRCS agents to determine if your acres are able to be enrolled into CRP (conservation reserve program), CSP (conservation stewardship program), or EQIP (environmental quality incentives program) to provide cost sharing, or even annual payouts for establishing new prairie. Keep in mind that your added prairie acres will need to be at least as many as the habitat acres you already have in order to see a significant uptick in the number of deer regularly living on your farm. 

It’s also important to use a native seed mix that includes a lot of species diversity to receive the maximum amount of bedding and feeding benefits for your deer herd. The primary benefits of planting all of this prairie would be a healthier ecosystem for birds (both ground nesting and song birds), pollinating insects and other mammals. The additional prairie would also improve water quality, sequester carbon, and retain soil on the most erodible acres all while increasing population carrying capacity for the deer.

Overgrown Pasture

The next most common deer habitat I’ve seen around Iowa are farms with young forests and old livestock pastures. These farms are typically dominated by cedar trees, honey locusts, cottonwoods, and nonnative cool season grasses. They also typically have some rather large blocks of forest around creek and river bottoms that have historically been forested and unsuitable for crop production. From my experience hunting and shed hunting these farms, they can offer an all or nothing experience. Oftentimes these types of farms are so fragmented that deer, especially bucks, won’t frequent them because the habitat doesn’t flow well with other larger forests or prairies which I personally think causes deer to feel unsure about making a clean escape when they feel threatened.

The best way to improve this type of habitat is by improving the grass acres. Nearly all pastures in Iowa are dominated cool season grasses, which offer very little habitat value. The first step for improving this type of habitat is to remove the existing nonnative cool season pasture grasses. This is the toughest part of the process because it requires herbicide usage, fire, and time. In this habitat type there are often existing remnant prairie species that are being suppressed by the nonnative grasses and once the competition is removed, the native plants can finally thrive.

Begin transforming the old pasture into prairie habitat by applying glyphosate to the existing pasture grasses in mid-April (make sure there won’t be any temps lower than 40 degrees in the forecast for 3-4 days, including overnight temps). After the herbicide burn down is complete, use prescribed fire to burn off the dead vegetation. Now that the burning is completed, wait for the remainder of the summer to see what plants come back. If it’s mostly the seedstock from the nonnative cool season grasses, go ahead and apply another round of glyphosate in the late summer/early fall when the grasses are still green and prior to producing seed. But if the regrowth after the first herbicide treatment is mostly native forbs and grasses use a spot treatment of glyphosate on the areas that are nonnative plants. Both outcomes after the second round of herbicide treatment will require some interseeding into the bare soil. Wait until December when soil temps are too cold for germinating seed and plant a diverse native prairie mix. The additional seed will help transform the uninhabitable prairie into a haven for deer, turkeys, pheasants and pollinating insects and songbirds. The transformation will also improve fawn recruitment, increase doe bedding frequency for hunting the rut, and bring in more shedding bucks in the late winter.

Vast Timber

The least common deer habitat type in Iowa are vast blocks of timber. As uncommon as these are throughout the majority of the state, deer hunters in the Northeastern, Southeastern, and South-central portions of the state know well how productive these areas are for deer populations. If you are fortunate enough to manage properties with this type of habitat your management plans should center mostly around eliminating invasive species, creating edge, and keeping the understory productive.

You probably have recognized a theme here in this article: always start habitat improvement work with removing invasive plants. That doesn’t change in this case. The most common invasive species that have invaded the timbers of Iowa are multiflora rose, bush honeysuckle, and buckthorn. All of these plants can spread through the timber like a sickness that chokes out the ground level productivity of native shrubs, forbs and young native trees. Spending some time in early spring removing them will do wonders for the long-term health of the timber, and the deer carrying capacity. Unfortunately, this is a chore that will always have to be part of the management plan for the forest as invasives will always be trying to weasel their way back into the understory. 

Once the invasives have been removed it’s time to begin selecting low value (both logging value and ecological value) trees to harvest from the timber. Of course, all native trees play an important role in the ecosystem, but only if they are kept in the correct quantities in the timber. An overabundance of hackberry, maple, locust, and redbud can crowd out more valuable trees in the forest such as oak, hickory, cherry, and walnut. Thinning (but not eliminating) some of the lower value trees will help release the higher value trees to thrive within the forest. The thinning of the tree canopy will also help ground level cover to regenerate that’s crucial for deer habitat, especially fawning habitat that keeps them out of sight of predators. 

Clearcutting is a habitat management strategy that should be used sparingly to create powerful results, and the only time I personally would recommend it is if the property is primarily forest. Deer need forest, but they are true creatures of the edge and prefer to travel where forest transitions into prairie, ag fields, or food plots. Yesterday I saw this play out when I visited a 52-acre property my brother just purchased which is almost entirely forested. The property was logged within the past two. The variance in the habitat created the edge where deer felt most comfortable moving. My brother and I are already formulating plans for incorporating prairie into the large openings, and clover plantings for stabilizing the logging roads. Of course, we will need to take soil samples to identify nutrient and pH needs before planting prairie and clover into forest soils. Once the new plantings are installed, I look forward to seeing how my brother finds success hunting these new transitional areas of his property, and I look forward to seeing the ecological response from adding diversity to his landscape.

Land management is a rewarding evolution for many deer hunters. Matching the right land management decisions to the type of existing habitat is critical. Making changes to the habitat that elevates the entire ecosystem is also an important guideline to follow when making the changes in order to promote the healthiest living conditions for Iowa’s favorite critter, and the rest of the biotic community.