• The SH Membership has gone live. Only SH Members have access to post in the classifieds. All members can view the classifieds. Starting in 2020 only SH Members will be admitted to the annual hunting contest. Current members will need to follow these steps to upgrade: 1. Click on your username 2. Click on Account upgrades 3. Choose SH Member and purchase.
  • We've been working hard the past few weeks to come up with some big changes to our vendor policies to meet the changing needs of our community. Please see the new vendor rules here: Vendor Access Area Rules

Access to Quality Whitetail Habitat

Nutterbuster said:
...The first option people come to is public land. On public land, it's been my experience that you're paying in time instead of money to find the good property. You basically find the lowest-pressure spots on the best pieces of land, and accept that you're probably not going to have the success Dr. Sheppard has, but you'll impress the heck out of most of the other guys who are hunting public. This whole thread has mostly been about finding the best place to hunt on public. Once you find the best parcel, you find the lowest pressure spots, and then within those spots you find the right terrain/resource features, you figure out when they're being utilized the hardest, and then you hunt them at that time and hope nobody else is playing your game there. The more spots you devote time to finding, the better your chances of being successful.

...Knocking on doors to gain access to hunting property is, in my mind, for the birds. I sometimes wonder if Eberhart's advice on it isn't akin to my grandfather telling me I wasn't catching fish because I wasn't holding my mouth right, or telling me I could catch a bird if I put salt on its tail. Door-to-door is cold calling, and cold-call sales average a 1-3% success rate in the telemarketer world. People say they got turned down when they knocked on doors. No kidding! Did you knock on 33-100? Getting permission to hunt an area is easier when you're not going in cold. Have a social circle. Go to the family reunion. Go to church. Join a volunteer organization. Heck, go to one of the local saddle hunter getups! Cold calling has a 1-3% success rate, but a call after a referral or after the prospective customer sees and ad and requests a call has a 40% success rate. You tell me.

So, tldr, you need to either put in time, money, or societal value into one side of the equation before you can expect deer to pop out the other side. Figure out what you have the most of, and operate on that.
Click to expand...
@Nutterbuster - Thank you for the recommendations and thoughtful reply. Funny how "access to quality whitetail habitat" engenders a philosophical discussion on time, resource allocation, and social skills, but they are in fact essential to gaining that access.

I agree with your sentiments on cold-call door-knocking for permission. Expect to get rejected ... ALOT. Decades ago, in my first few years of hunting with my father, I learned the importance of having an "in" with farmers and other property owners who could grant hunting access to their private property. Usually just getting a mutual acquaintance to do an introduction was a huge help. We would often just request permission for a day's hunt for small game, not for an entire season. After the landowner got to know us, gaining permission again, and for longer time periods, and for deer hunting, was a hundred times easier. My father also taught me the importance of thanking the landowner, offering them some of the harvest, offering to help with the chores (especially when the landowners were farmers), and remembering them at the holidays with a thoughtful card and gift to thank them for the privilege of hunting on their property.

Seems I'm going to have to put those lessons to use again in the present day if I want to gain access to prime, unpressured whitetail habitat.

It's been many, many years since I hunted PRIVATE property that wasn't part of a fish & game club. I'm a member of several local clubs. My clubs don't have too many hunting rules or regulations beyond the state regs and in my experience, they have hunting pressure just as high as public land. Land prices and property taxes in my area are prohibitive ... no way can I afford to buy a piece of land large enough to make a good deer management parcel ... not in my state!

That's why I'm noodling the idea of getting in on some existing deer hunting leases, or offering to start new leases with landowners in my area. I'm also thinking that branching out to hunt midwest whitetails would be a good use of my limited funds, but it's always a trade-off between time and money.

The focus of my time and resources needs to shift if I want to markedly improve my success as a whitetail hunter.
 
Topdog said:
Good read, I agree with all of it, one more thing that people tend to forget and to me is super important, GENETICS, another reason why certain areas produce a cluster of booners quick and some are zero
Click to expand...
I worked with a veterinarian who helped manage several domestic deer herds that sold bucks to high fence operations and every producer said the same thing. Genetics is about 30-40% of antler growth and the rest is nutrition.

All of these farms artificially breed the does and use semen from very very expensive bucks that are giant. I’m talking like over 300” bucks that just look stupid. One thing I did not know about the high fence hunting industry is that deer like this are not the most desirable to hunt. The target range for a buck that people pay to hunt is between 150-190. Any bigger and they have a hard time lying to their golf buddies about killing it on public land I guess.

Anyways to get deer in this range they actually change the deers diet and limit the protein the bucks eat to slow their growth. If these bucks with these crazy genetics stood at a full trough all the time they would score 200 as a 3 and a half year old.
 
We grew up without a lot of money. If my dad had to pay over $300 for a club, he wasn't doing it. We eventually leased some property but they were budget friendly with lots of friends to spread the cost as well. We'd go full seasons of hunting with only seeing a couple of deer. My dad still has one of those places. It's a nice 50 acre spot, with tons of potential, but he hunts the mess out of it.

I knew that if I wanted something different, I needed access to different properties. So when I was in college, I ponied up and paid for access to a good club. I started killing deer consistently. I think got access to a large, mostly undeveloped, golf course neighborhood where my inlaws lived. I hunted it for 2 seasons before they sold their house and would see hundreds of deer. I killed my biggest buck to date there.

Fast forward to now, I live in an area of the state not known for big deer, but have lucked into some good spots. Buck opportunities aren't as frequent, but we have fun with plentiful deer.

You can't hunt what's not there. If you want to play the game, you've got to be in the stadium.
 
Yeah this def has me thinking about the areas I hunt. It also makes it make sense why so much effort in my area yields so little result...

It is the age old question: hunt less often, further away on better habitat - or hunt harder close by and grind it out? In a way, they probably even out in terms of effort and time at the end of it.
 
I think your post is great. My family has a thousand acre farm in Missouri with pond and a creek running through it. It’s a corn and soybean farm and has tons of deer. The only negative is that we only have small patches of hardwoods , kinda like islands or patches of standing timber and timber along the fence rows. Still see and harvest many deer. We are all about filling the freezer than killing a big buck. I grew up in Illinois until I joined the military at 18 and left, we knew a lot of people that owed farms and had permission to hunt. Harvesting a deer there was no problem every year either. Now I live in Ohio and have access to only public, still an awesome deer state but my numbers of getting a deer have dropped. Like the op said it’s all about what the land can provide for the game we pursue but we all should put our due time in and scout and have boots on the ground.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top