Providing good nutrition is the key to keeping white-tailed deer healthy on any property. Good deer nutrition comes from high quality native foods and this comes from the landscape, habitat. However, an important part of any deer management program is harvest. Deer feeders are the easiest way to attract animals for harvest. They are not legal in every state for hunting purposes, but feeders are highly effective and necessary for reducing deer populations were numbers exceed the available habitat.
An important component of an effective feeder is a properly working motor. One of my deer feeder’s motors had a spinner plate that had come loose. Some feeders have a small screw than can be tightened with an Alan (hex) wrench while some have a nut with a coupling that holds the plate to the eighth-inch motor shaft. This one had the coupling style, but as I took it apart to see what the problem was, the coupling fell to the ground—never to be found again.
At this point I was frustrated because I knew exactly what the problem with the spinner plate was before taking it apart… it was loose and simply needed to be tightened. I thought about attempting to find another another coupling to get this deer feeder up an running, but ended up running into a replacement spinner plate before getting by the hardware store. While checking out some hunting gear at the store, I found a replacement spinner plate made my Wildgame Innovations. I bought it at a whopping $7.99.
I would have guess the product would have cost $5 or less, but what are you gonna do? The plate fit right on my 6-volt powered motor, but it took a little longer to put on than expected. This was because I could not find my Alan wrench set. It was at this point that I thought maybe the manufacturer of the replacement spinner plate could have easily included the little wrench necessary to attach the plate to the deer feeder motor. I bet it would cost just a few cents more.
In any case, the new and shiny spinner plate was installed and the deer feeder was promptly deployed. With the archery deer hunting season just around the corner, it’s time to start attracting some deer to my hunting area. It’s been a tough year due to the drought and the habitat is starting to decline, so I think shooting a few deer early in the hunting season will be the right thing to do.