Home on the Range #046: Creating a Deer Management Plan

Summer is always thought of as a time for fun in the bright summer sun, but it can also be the perfect time to create a deer management plan for your property. This doesn’t have to involve investing in expensive food plots (but that can definitely help). What it does require is a bit of surveillance with your trail cameras to get a better and more complete picture of all of the animals frequenting your area. This can be everything from how big the bucks are, how many does you have, if there are any predators like coyotes in certain areas, and even keeping an eye on neighbors who “forget exactly where the property line is.” The more information and knowledge you have at your disposal, the more informed decision you can make when hunting in the fall. Let’s go through a few simple tips, tricks, and thoughts to most effectively create a deer management plan for your property. Let’s dive in!

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Welcome to our reoccurring series of “Home on the Range.” Here, we would like to share all of our experiences for those who may be homesteading, living off the land, hunting, farming, ranching, and truly investing in nature and the great outdoors. The ability to provide for yourself and your family can be tremendously rewarding and simultaneously difficult at times. So, in “Home on the Range” we want to share our different exploits so you can learn and hopefully we can receive your feedback along the way as well.

Deer Management Plan – Assessing your Herd

One of the most exciting things about using trail cameras is getting to see your photos. Whether you use cellular trail cameras, or traditional ones where you retrieve the photos yourself, it can always get you amped for deer hunting season to see a big buck on your camera. Yet, there is a lot more information that can be gleaned from your photos than just seeing big deer.

One of the things that I always look for are my ladies – the does. Do they have a little fawn with them? How does the health of the fawn look? I often want to pass on a doe when you know it is nursing or raising a fawn. This improves the odds of growth for your herd. Also, you know that a particular doe is healthy and of a mating or reproducing age. If you happen to see a doe with no fawn, you are not hurting the odds of a fawn’s survival (because one isn’t present). Moreover, if you see a fawn-less doe, it could be at an old, mature age where that doe isn’t breeding anymore. So, it is safer to harvest that doe when you think about the greater picture – the future growth – of your herd.

Other deer that might be worth harvesting or acknowledging in your deer management plan are what I call “genetically imperfect” or injured deer. This could be a deer that was struck by a car and it is injured. Or, it could have abnormalities in their horn structure, and if you’re a trophy hunter, you might not want that deer to reproduce so you harvest it out of the gene pool.

While it is not glamorous to assess the inventory of animals on your property like does and disfigured deer, it is important. What most people intuitively do, and is important as well, is check out how many bucks are on their property as well as what size are they. You don’t want to shoot a basket 6-pointer when you have an aloof yet massive wall-hanger walking around the woods. All of the bucks on your property are a “data point” – something to consider and factor into your hunt. So, if you have a mess of small deer, don’t fret. This could change your tactics of using grunt calls, rattlin’ antlers, baits, and attractants.

Deer Management Plan – Baits, Attractants, and Rush Hour

While an important part of any deer management plan is to be able to see what deer you have to manage, sometimes you need to make concerted efforts to hold deer on your property. In order to do this, you might need to look at things like baits, attractants, and food plots. These are all very similar, but it is important to distinguish between them because some of these tactics might be illegal in your given state while others are legal. Attractants typically refers to licks, mineral salts, and non-edible items. In the photo above, I have a stump in a woods with some mineral salt on top which is legal in my home state of Minnesota as it is categorized as an attractant.

Food plots are also legal in my home state of Minnesota as it is viewed as a “crop” and not “bait.” Baiting whitetail deer is illegal (for example) in Minnesota. We have seen consecutive years of droughts in Minnesota so I have not bothered to do a food plot in some time. Baiting can be legal in some states, but it is very few. Baiting typically refers to edible food openly poured on the ground. This could be a pile of apples, corn, or other food sources deer might enjoy. Be sure to consult your local game and fish department to know whether or not baits, attractants, and food plots are legal where you live. All 3 can be valuable in keeping deer on your property (as opposed to your neighbor’s) so you can not only survey them in the summer, but also harvest them in the fall.

Another important reason to deploy trail cameras is to identify when high traffic times are out in the woods. When is rush hour? If all of your deer are only active during a specific window of time during the day, that tells you exactly when you should be in your treestand or hunting blind. While it is virtuous to be that guy or gal who is in their treestand from before the sun rises and until after it sets, it can be unnecessary. If you know when your animals are active, you know when they’re active. This past fall I harvested a MN black bear – after legally baiting and setting up trail cameras – and I only was in my stand for 30 minutes. I had narrowed down to a near science when that bear would come lumbering through the woods to my bait. Deer hunting can be the same way.

A final consideration are predators. If you have foxes and coyotes appearing on your trail camera photos, that can be your universal sign to go predator hunting. They can wreak havoc on fawns and really hurt your deer population. Moreover, they will drive deer off of your property further hampering your odds of success in filling a tag in the fall. Even if you don’t predator hunt, this can be a glaring sign to maybe hunt elsewhere on your property (knowing those predators will likely discourage deer from being in that area).

With all of these things mentioned, they are simply food for thought. Whether you are a trophy hunter looking for a big buck, are managing your herd for the future, are baiting, and many other factors, make sure that you have an actual deer management plan heading into fall. This starts right now. As always, let us know all of your thoughts in the Comments below! We always appreciate your feedback.

Adam Scepaniak