Whitetails 365: The Dangers of Being Too Good

Whitetails 365: The Dangers of Being Too Good

By Tom Peplinski

I was watching a pretty well-known hunting show a few years back and the host of the show was talking about habitat improvements on his farm. Through the segment, he was explaining why he was creating the best habitat on every acre of his farm. The explanation was clear, that every acre not covered in great bedding cover or food was wasted land. Common sense, right? For most of my hunting life, I was riding this same wave of habitat perfection. Putting in hundreds of hours each year making my hunting grounds the best they could be, everywhere I could. Creating this great habitat and putting in food plots was fun and added to my overall hunting experience. But (and this is a big but), the concept is flawed.

I learned through my own errors that too much food in all the wrong places can lead to bad hunting. Too much bedding and security cover in all the wrong places can lead to deer that are very hard to pattern and easily pressured. Over time, I witnessed a more chronic problem that arises when there is too much food and cover resulting in farms over-populated in doe family groups pushing out available space for bucks. There are definitely negative consequences in being too good!

Too Much Food
There are two scenarios that having too much food can result in bad hunting. The first, creating food sources inside preferred bedding areas has the potential to hinder daytime huntable movement. When I establish bedding habitat and food plots, the whole goal is to make hunting easier. Today, I promote huntable bed to feed patterns with all my habitat improvements…food or cover. In years past, I learned that putting too much good food in and around bedding would actually subdue daytime movement. The reason…a deer’s most pronounced feeding pattern is in the late afternoon after a deer has bedded all day. If you supply deer an abundance of great food right inside their security cover, that need and desire to get up and travel at dusk is hindered. It makes sense too. If you provide deer (like I once did) with great food sources right where they bed, their hunger in the evening goes down. In fact, if you take this to the extreme, you can actually be promoting more nocturnal movement.

It makes perfect sense that the more a deer moves the easier it would be to capitalize on that movement and harvest them. By giving a deer too much good food in their bedrooms, they have no need to move outside those bedrooms and travel to a food source during that evening feeding cycle. This is not a good thing and it’s a phenomenon I helped to create (by accident) in years past by creating too much food in the wrong places. Bedding food sources should be no more attractive than woody browse and broadleaf weeds and grasses…just enough for a snack and no more. Avoid putting great food sources inside bedding areas if you are trying to create huntable patterns of bed to feed. Instead, locate smaller huntable food sources outside of bedding areas in the direction of main food sources you want the deer to head to during their evening feeding pattern.

The second, and I would argue more dangerous problem with creating too much food, is over population of does and their family groups. This is how it works…you plant a ton of great quality year-round forage and food plots on your farm. You also have great, thick cover throughout your farm. Add in some pockets of tall warm season grasses and you have a perfect scenario for does and their fawns. These doe family groups will take up residence on your farm, they won’t leave because the habitat is so great, and then they’ll start to grow in numbers. Great year-round food sources will promote this. What’s the problem you ask? Well, as these doe family groups multiply and grow, they begin to fill the available spots on your farm that deer can bed in…and if left unchecked can literally fill every available spot. When this happens, your farm will no longer be able to recruit displaced bucks from surrounding farms and you’ll be left with nothing but bald deer. The bucks that are born on your farm will displace themselves as research shows that male disbursement can be as high as 90%. Imagine a scenario where the bucks born on your farm are disbursing as they do on all farms, but because of a high population of doe family groups, you don’t have any room left allowing for bucks disbursing from neighboring farms the ability to establish their home ranges on your farm. Add in the very nature that bucks prefer solitude and space over high stress/high population acreage and you’re likely to encourage less bucks, not more!

This second problem can be mitigated by yearly and sustained does harvests. But many hunters and small groups don’t have the ability or will to shoot enough does in some cases. Miss a couple years of required doe harvests and you’re already behind the eight ball. Think this isn’t a real problem…you’d be wrong. But it’s hard to convince hunters that awesome year-round food could be anything but great for deer hunting. I’ve seen farms that people call rough produce great hunting and super bucks year after year only to get worse after well intentioned habitat and food plot strategies were implemented to improve things. The primary reason is doe family group over-population caused by great year-round food and habitat, combined with the inability to harvest enough does.

The hunter’s justification for creating a scenario with high doe numbers is the old saying that “well by having all these does it will be great when the rut kicks in, then we’ll have all the bucks. If you don’t have the does, you won’t have the bucks”. But this thinking is flawed because bucks will still seek out and find does within the ranges that they have been spending most of their time on. They very well might travel into a high population area but at no higher frequency than a more balanced area. Making matters worse, when the doe population is very high, the chances of a hot doe being present is much greater at any given point in time just because of sheer numbers. Again, this might sound good but if bucks don’t have to seek out a hot doe because there are so many in heat, rut activity that we love (like seeking and chasing) becomes suppressed. This can be hard to believe or even to understand in concept, but I’ve witnessed this phenomenon of high population doe farms on what was thought to be highly managed acreage. Hunting got worse. Buck age class went down, not up.

Doe harvests, some cases in massive amounts, can mitigate the problems associated with high population doe family group farms. But, if sustained doe harvests are not possible, another option that I would argue is probably better from the get go, would be to limit the amount of quality spring and summer forage on your farm to begin with. If doe families don’t have great stands of soybeans and alfalfa to graze on during spring and summer, they might just spend their time on your neighbor’s property during the summer months allowing bucks to set up their home ranges on your farm. This is not an all or nothing proposition. Reducing great summer food on your farm will not mean that you won’t have any does, it will however mean that you won’t be bundled with the problem of too many. This will result in more openings available for bucks, less stress on the herd, and better fall hunting.

Too much great food can be a problem. It can subdue deer movement if planted too close or inside bedding. It can cause more nocturnal movement. And, it can result in high population, high stress farms loaded up with too many does. The solutions and strategies in doing food correctly are actually pretty simple if you take a step back and observe the problems with getting it wrong. This is coming from a hunter/landowner that got it wrong in the past. I was able to adapt my strategies and learn from those experiences, and it was quite easy once I understood (and accepted) what was going on.
To wrap this all up, and bring this topic full circle so to speak, I’d like to at least touch on my summer strategies for food plots. I love soybeans and corn for late season hunting. Nothing can draw deer to your farm and bring them out of cover more than some cold weather and standing grain crops. Because I plant these grain crops for late season hunting, but don’t want my farms over populated with does, I have committed to doe harvests…sometimes massive doe harvests. Another strategy I’ve employed has been to put in an electric fence in my highly attractive summer plots (soybeans) so that they aren’t available for summer feeding. These two strategies allow me to grow phenomenal grain crops for late season hunting while maintaining a low stress environment that promotes buck recruitment and great season long hunting. When you have exceptional habitat, food and cover, and it is combined with a strategy to maintain a low stress and highly attractive environment to recruit and holds bucks, you will have great hunting. I would argue that habitat done correctly can transform any farm into a whitetail hunters paradise. I would also argue that doing it wrong can be worse than doing nothing at all.