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Deer Hunting Advice, Improve Habitat and Harvest

Question: “I have yet to see a whitetail buck on my game camera in a month, and have not seen a doe in a while on our deer hunting lease. I brought my friend out to my land the other day, and I apparently did not do a good job of showing him the property boundaries. Anyway, he end going off of the property. The interesting thing was that he said there were 14 deer feeding in an area just 150 yards from our fence line, both bucks and does.

I called the neighbor to find out what’s going on over there. He said they had planted some winter food plots for the deer. The guy said he planted about $3,500.00 worth of clover. This plot is just a stones throw from our place, and it really is holding the deer over there. Can you give me some deer hunting advice on how I can compete with his plot? Continue reading Deer Hunting Advice, Improve Habitat and Harvest

Tips for Deer Hunting Small Acreages

Question: “I have a 80 acre deer hunting lease in Zephyr, Texas. This town is located in Brown County. The place we hunt has two creek bottoms going through it and we have about 65 acres of brushy habitat. Even the grassland areas are still pretty tall since the property is not grazed. We want to improve the deer hunting on the lease, so we are looking for ideas. Based on our game camera photos, we have a good number of does and some big bucks in the area, but how would I go about getting them on my place and staying around there? Thanks.”

Response: First off, an 80 acre ranch would make up only a small part of a mature buck’s home range. In fact, the good news is that it could possibly overlap of several bucks. But in short, deer will be moving onto and off of your deer lease quite regularly. This will make management efforts difficult if you are trying to go that route, but there are some things you can do to ensure that you see more deer.

If you want deer to come to you, the property you hunt must have something they want, and even better, something greater than what the neighbor has to offer them. Whether it’s protein pellets, food plots, corn, water, or bales of alfalfa hay. These deer attractants, or baits, can really help. If you have a couple of good water sources, that would be a start too. But it will take more than just good food to keep deer visiting your parcel of Texas paradise. Continue reading Tips for Deer Hunting Small Acreages

Coyotes Kill Big Whitetail Buck

Most white-tailed deer hunters are always ready to place blame on the poor coyote. After all, the coyote is the one animals that kills all of the deer and keeps whitetail populations low, right? Well, no, not always. Though these photos show coyotes killing a buck, that is not really the take home message here. The fact is white-tailed deer do fairly well in predator-rich environments, but they must have good habitat.

Many deer hunters will opportunistically shoot a coyote during a hunt, and it’s often a a great bonus and an effort towards predator control for deer management. But coyotes are numerous, and I don’t think shooting coyotes has ever really lowered a coy dog population in an area unless used in combination with trapping, so don’t think for a minute that you’re saving the whitetail herd by killing a few coyotes. They are survivors. But so are whitetail deer. Continue reading Coyotes Kill Big Whitetail Buck

Deer Hunting: Shooting Does Early is the Best Plan

Question: “What are some of the deer attractants that you like for deer hunting? I’m confused if I should buy some special thing or just use corn. Other hunters on our deer lease said that I should not shoot does until December because the more does we have on our land during the rut, the more bucks that will show up. They say that if we start shooting does in November the other does will be pressured off the land onto other places. Then the bucks will follow them. Is this true?”

Response: I disagree with waiting to shoot does that late in the year. In fact, it’s best to shoot them as early as possible so that the remaining food sources can be saved for deer that you are not going to shoot. If you need to decrease the deer population, don’t let them eat for two additional months. That is valuable winter food they are using. For example, six does eating for two months is 12 months of food usage… the same amount a single deer would eat in a year! Continue reading Deer Hunting: Shooting Does Early is the Best Plan

Habitat Management for Better Deer Hunting

Question: “We have a small farm 60 acre in Pennsylvania that we use for deer hunting. We are interested in managing the place to attract and hold whitetail and to make it better for whitetail hunting. I know the place is small, but is there anything we can do to provide more for the deer and keep them hanging around? About 45 acres are wooded and the rest are fields.”

Response: There are things that any hunter can do to develop better deer hunting, even those restrained to small acreage deer management. You are not the only one in this situation because most land owners do not have thousands upon thousands of acres. Most land holdings are less than 100 acres. With only 60 acres there is very little you can do to hold deer on your place for very long. However, you can provide foods for them to eat and attract them. Continue reading Habitat Management for Better Deer Hunting

Deer Hunting Lease in East Texas – WORTH IT!

The deer hunting season down in Texas is in full swing and bucks are chasing does hard right now. The cool front the state received earlier this week has caused the hunting to pick up big time. It had been tough with lots of natural foods, but the deer hunting in Central and East Texas is looking good. It’s definitely time to climb a tree or jump in a stand because the bucks are on the move. Here is a good hunting story from an East Texas deer lease”

“Around 5:30 yesterday evening as I was just about to give up on my hunt I noticed a neck and antlers eating the corn I had spread around Friday night. I immediately know there is a buck much bigger than the ones I’m used to seeing in my stand. My first instinct is to SHOOT! Then my senses come back to me, I put up my binoculars just as he turns his head towards me. Continue reading Deer Hunting Lease in East Texas – WORTH IT!

Venison Roast Slow Cooker Recipe

PHOTO HERE

Fall is the perfect time for rich, delicious slow cooking. And what better way to enjoy the season that with a perfectly seasoned venison roast? One of my favorites is venison roast that is slow cooked with onion, creamy mushroom soup and a few additional, simple spiced. This roast is a simple but tasty way to enjoy venison.

Ingredients

3 pounds boneless venison roast
1 (10.75 ounce) can cream of mushroom soup
1 (1 ounce) package dry onion soup mix
1 large onion,chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

Directions

First, placed your trimmed venison roast into the slow cooker and cover with chopped onions and celery. Sprinkle venison with Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, garlic powder, salt and pepper. In a bowl, combine the cream of mushroom soup with the dry onion soup mix. Mix these together and then pour over the roast. Finish by cooking the venison roast on Low setting for 6 hours. Serve with the sides of your choosing and enjoy!

Deer Hunting in South Texas – Shooting Spike Bucks

Hunters love to discuss deer hunting and deer management. It’s just something that we do, whether it’s after checking out our latest batch of game camera photos or around the campfire after an evening hunt. The longest-standing debate going is the argument over whether or not spike bucks are actually genetically inferior bucks. One study, centered on the white-tailed deer hunting lands of South Texas, aimed to find out if shooting spike bucks really is justified.

Although a spike antlered buck rarely remains a spike after its first set of antlers, many hunters still believe the mantra of “once a spike, always a spike.” Now, the majority of hunters know that this is not true, but will spike bucks produce less on top of their heads in future years than their multi-pointed (yearling) brothers? Past research has only confounded the issue with different studies resulting in conflicting conclusions. Could there be a study that answers this age old question for the deer hunting community once and for all?

A new, ten-year, landmark study done in South Texas on free-ranging whitetail deer by Dr. James C. Kroll and Ben H. Koerth of the Institute for White-tailed Deer Management and Research at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches may provide us deer hunters with an answer. “Because past spike buck studies were conducted on penned animals, the effects of social pressure could not be measured,” Dr. Kroll says. “And social pressure has been shown in other deer species to have a significant impact on antler growth.”

Furthermore, the previous studies never really examined genetics in the classical sense. So about ten years ago Kroll and Koerth decided to add a field of study to their program that would examine the issue and try to answer a very basic question that went beyond genetics: “Can we look at a yearling buck and predict what he will score at maturity?”

Because of geographic conditions and the fact that Dr. Kroll and Ben Koerth had worked with many South Texas ranch owners in the area on previous projects, it was decided to conduct the landmark spike buck study in the Brush Country of South Texas. “Our research methodology was simple,” says Dr. Kroll. “First, we decided to capture only buck fawns and yearlings. Because so much controversy exists about aging deer by tooth wear, we wanted to make sure we knew the age of the bucks we were capturing.

The researcher’s plan was to capture as many buck fawns and yearling bucks as they could each year, and then attempt to recapture them over the next eight or nine years so that they would have a large enough sample size for statistical analysis. Whitetail deer hunting in South Texas is a big deal, but so has been the debate over shooting spike bucks. Read the rest of this article on whitetail deer management and hunting: Shooting spike bucks for deer management.

Good Duck Hunting Reports in Texas

The Texas duck hunting season is going full speed ahead despite low rainfall and little surface water. The duck hunting season for the High Plains Mallard Management Unit runs October 29-30 and from November 4-January 29, 2012. The North and South zones run November 5-27 and December 10-January 29, 2012. The daily bag limit shall be 6 ducks, to include no more than the following: 5 mallards (only 2 of which may be hens), 3 wood ducks, 2 scaup (lesser scaup and greater scaup in the aggregate), 2 redheads, 2 pintails, 1 canvasback, 1 dusky duck (mottled duck, Mexican-like duck, black duck and their hybrids are closed the first five days of the season in each zone). All other species: 6.

South Zone Duck Hunting: Duck hunting remains stellar along the coastal prairies of Eagle Lake, Wharton, El Campo, Garwood, East Bernard, Hungerford, Lissie and Louise. Teal, gadwall, wigeon, shovelers and pintail have made up the brunt of the bag. Inland ponds around adjacent to the coast have seen loads of ducks leaving the bay daily for freshwater. Bay hunters enjoyed an influx of new birds last week as redheads and scaup found shoalgrass in East Matagorda, West Matagorda, Espiritu Santo, San Antonio and Aransas bays.

Good numbers of wigeons, pintails and redheads have produced limit shoots in Rockport. Port Mansfield and Port Isabel hunters have seen solid shoots. The East Galveston Bay marsh has been good, though salinity levels are high. More snow geese showed last week with the cold front and full moon, though few hunters are setting spreads Specklebellies have readily decoyed over rag spreads. Prospects are good right now.

North Zone Duck Hunting: Gadwall, wigeon and teal have been taken in the shallow coves of area lakes and reservoirs. Canvasbacks have been reported on Lake Fork, Toledo Bend, Sam Rayburn and Lake O’Pines. Caddo Lake has seen gadwalls, divers and ringed-necks on the big waters. Sloughs, backwaters and bayous are dry and dusty, so most ducks have taken refuge on the lakes or have continued south to the coast. Duck hunting has been good on the coastal prairies along the southern boundaries of the North Zone. Brookshire, Winnie, China, Devers, Sealy and Columbus have all enjoyed steady shoots for teal, gadwall, wigeon, pintail and shoveler. Prospects are fair at best in North Texas and good along the coastal boundaries.

High Plains Mallard Management Duck Hunting Unit: Duck hunting has fair at best for mallards, wigeons, gadwalls and teal. Feed lots have provided the best hunts. Diver ducks have been hitting deeper playas and reservoirs. Some lakes have been pumped with water to help wildlife sustain drought conditions. Canada geese are best over wheat and corn. More Canadas showed on Lake Etter this week. Sandhill crane numbers are good. Specklebellies have been reliable as well. Prospects look fair at this point in the duck season.

Will Shooting Spike Bucks Improve Deer Hunting?

Dr. James C. Kroll and Ben H. Koerth of the Institute for White-tailed Deer Management and Research at Stephen F. Austin State University set out to determine if yearling (1.5 years old) spike and three point bucks are actually are inferior to other bucks with four or more antler points. The results could impact deer hunting on private lands across Texas, as well as the rest of the US. So how did these researchers go about getting the data they needed?

They turned to ranch owners in South Texas. One of the first questions the researchers attempted to answer was: “How many spikes and 3-point yearlings are out there and do their numbers change over a period of time?” As of 2006, they captured, marked and released a total of 884 whitetail buck fawns and 1,132 yearlings. Numbered, color-coded ear tags were placed in the ears of each buck along with tattoos in the event the ear tags were lost.

The study began in 1997 and took place on twelve different South Texas ranches over a five-county area. During the following years attempts were made to recapture as many of the previously tagged bucks as possible. Antler measurement data was taken from all of the recaptured bucks as well as the newly captured buck fawns and yearlings each year, and the results were quite dramatic.

Data gathered over an eight year period showed that the number of spikes and 3 point bucks changed significantly from year to year on the same properties. If spike antlers were caused by poor genetics, would these yearly changes have occurred in such short periods of time? “Absolutely not,” Dr. Kroll says. “The overall genetics of a deer herd simply cannot change that fast.”

However, the real meat of this landmark spike buck study goes well beyond the question of how many spikes and 3-pointers are in the herd. “We divided all of the yearling bucks we captured into two categories,” Dr. Kroll continues. “Yearlings that had only spikes or 3-point antlers were in one category, and yearlings with four or more antler points on their first set were in the other. We did this because we reasoned that these two classes of yearling bucks are easy for hunters to identify. We got some very interesting results on the 21⁄2- and 31⁄2-year-old bucks that were recaptured, but the age of 41⁄2 is where the results were the most dramatic.

“Studies repeatedly have shown that whitetail bucks do not reach maturity until four years of age, and by the time the bucks in our study had reached 4 1⁄2, there was no significant difference in any of the antler measurements, no matter what the buck started out with his first year. The antlers were just as wide, just as heavy and had just as many points. Furthermore, there was no significant difference in gross Boone and Crockett (B&C) score for the bucks,” he says.

Many of the bucks that had been yearling spikes had grown 130-inch racks by age 4 1⁄2. Ironically, the average B&C score of all bucks killed across Texas each year is about 131 inches. “It appears from our data that the spikes and 3 point bucks are genetically equal at birth to multi-point yearlings for antler growth potential,” Dr. Kroll concludes. “It just seems to take some deer a little longer to show their capability. The trick is, you have to let them grow up before it becomes obvious. Genetics certainly is an interesting aspect of whitetail management, and fun to debate around the campfire, but genetics is the least important of all the factors leading to the production of quality bucks.”

So should spikes, or, for that matter, any bucks, ever be culled from the herd? According to Dr. Kroll, perhaps in some cases. It seems to be a very complicated issue, and it depends on the deer management goals of each ranch. “In our opinion, instead of trying to cull bucks, landowners and hunters are far better off focusing their attention on things they can do something about, such as deer nutrition.

Today the question of shooting more does is the only issue that generates as much controversy as that of what to do about spike bucks, and that’s a no-brainer for most hunters. We should all do our part in trying to shoot more does. It’s essential for the well being of the deer herd.” Fewer deer on the landscape means more food for the remaining animals and well-fed deer equates to improved whitetail deer hunting for the property owners. Habitat management is one of the most important—but often overlooked—aspects of growing better deer.