Deer Habitat Improvement With onX Hunt and GrowingDeer.TV
How to Manage Your Land for Wildlife Habitat
When we need answers to questions about land management and the creation of wildlife habitat, we turn to the crew at GrowingDeer.TV. In the video below, Grant Woods gives a masterclass on how to use the onX Hunt App to plan and conduct the projects needed to grow more and bigger deer on your property.
Food
For a great guide on food plots, give this recent blog post a read. If you’ve always wondered what it takes to plant a food plot on your land, this is a solid place to start.
Water
Set Waypoints within the Hunt App or on Web Map to denote water sources around your property. This includes everything from ponds and marshes to perennial and seasonal creeks and springs. Knowing the locations of your water sources will provide clues about how deer are likely to move through the property and can inform the locations of other projects including food plots and various types of cover enhancement.
Cover
Deer require many different types of cover, and ensuring that big bucks don’t stray onto neighboring land means providing for all of their needs.
Thermal Cover: In the winter, deer require protection from wind, snow and cold temperatures, so a dense understory and canopy will provide great places for deer to find shelter from the elements. In the summer, when protection from the heat becomes a concern, deer require a dense canopy for shade and an open forest floor to allow breezes to provide relief.
Bedding Cover: If you want big bucks to hang around when it comes time to bed down, you need to provide the right type of cover. Typically, this means grasses that are still standing in the fall and winter when many other plants have been brought down by the cold.
Cover
Ground Cover: From clover to various types of grasses, providing a reliable source of food is key to keeping deer on your land. An added benefit of providing ground cover on which adult deer can forage is the bedding cover it provides for fawns.
Security Cover: These cover types are not mutually exclusive, and many of the covers discussed above provide a feeling of security for deer—this is essential for keeping deer around. Always remember that if a big buck feels exposed, no amount of food or bedding cover will be enough to keep him from striking out in search of new and better ground.