Lets hypothetically say we have one of these big 5000 acre plantations and it has too many deer on it……Forget about quail for a minute and lets say we plan to go in this fall and burn off the entire thing around Aug-Oct…….We’re gonna light it up from one side to the other….… Except for a few spots here and there 90% of the entire property is going to be open understory when we’re done……. What would happen to the deer?? Wouldn’t that solve our issue with too many deer on our 5000 acres for at least a year or two??.....

Dont get me wrong, I’m not saying this is ideal….. but none the less…… You wouldn’t have to worry about having too many deer anymore for a while, right?.....and if that’s true then “too many deer” is really just a function of there being an imbalance of cover and food, correct?

Is this parcel high fenced so that the deer can’t escape to unburned areas? If so then I’d imagine you’ll have a lot less deer within a month. If not then the problem will be exacerbated in the surrounding area for a while. Remember, people live in Perry county, and survive, even though they could go somewhere else and possibly thrive. And people have a concept of a larger world around them. Deer are like early explorers only discovering new opportunities when they walk over them.

Free range

Where do you come up with this horseshit?

This is a product of having too much time on your hands

I hunted a 1,500 acre tract that was burned September 19 and saw deer every time I went. Lots of forbs had sprouted and I think it attracted the deer.

As mild as our winters are it should be like one big food plot with the resprouting.....

What appears to be occurring with many of these “plantations” and other properties mimicking their management…. is that they tend to have the same burning routine that has repeated itself for I’m guessing decades now…..where they go in after deer season is over in Feb/March and burn whatever they’re going to burn and it’s the same burn timing year after year…….which has resulted in large areas of heavily grass dominated habitat……and NWSG’s are 100% cover and 0% food for deer……So basically you’ve tilted the balance way, way to one side where you have far more cover than you have food and you’re maxed out on the capacity curve …… and then they try to alleviate the issue by blasting huge doe quotas…..but still there’s not enough quality food…….

My thoughts are……Couldn’t you alleviate a lot of these issues and have all around healthier herd by managing the habitat a little differently to achieve a better food/cover balance?......Maybe a little more May/June burning?......Maybe a little more Aug-Oct burning??......Maybe a few more units with open understory in the winter??.....Maybe some larger food plots managed through minimal processes??.......There should be a theoretical sweet spot in there for a cover to open range ratio where there doesn’t have to be a bunch of doe quota blasting having to occur……

On the other end of this food/cover discussion are the areas where there is very little cover and large areas of “openness”…..fields, pastures, urban areas, etc……places where the balance is weighted more toward food than cover……. One of the things that I think makes some areas of the blackbelt really good is not just the soil…..Its that some areas have a really good balance of cover to open ground……Pasture grass doesn’t do anything for deer but all the weeds and hedgerow bushes associated with the open land does……..

Not trying to be offensive to anyone on here, but I think skinny can put you in contact….

Question one - Take a break in the pond.
Question two - Nope
Question three - No, if there were to many before there would be again a week after the first rain.
Question four - No, you can have no food in and area and still have to many deer. Though they would be starving, weak, and in poor overall health.

CNC in his natural Habitat.

I cant tell if he's being serious or if I'm being setup for a deeez nuts joke......

The hypothetical scenario of burning it all was just to try and illustrate the concept I was getting at…….but just for fun…… If we did do something like that and burn off the entire 5000 acres in the fall….. I think it would displace a lot of deer due to eliminating that much winter cover….maybe like 50% or more………I think a lot of them would start seeking out cover on the surrounding properties and ramping up social conflict in those areas and in turn ramping up movement and mortality rates etc….and the chit would kinda just keep flowing downhill for a little while until enough died that it worked itself out….I don’t know…It would be interesting to see how the deer would respond

In 2005 our timber company had about 500 acres of storm damage timber clear cut, raked, wind rowed, then poisoned then burned. It took 2 seasons before the deer came back, after there was a little cover. The turkey population hasn't come back yet.

What actually originally got me to thinking about this was a conversation I had with one of the caretakers back during deer season while we were tracking a deer …..We were talking about the deer sightings being down and such and he mentioned that the plantation next door hadn’t been burned in a long time……I got to pondering over whether you would want to start burning it in small chunks over a couple year period to leave some cover or just try and reset it all immediately with the plan on starting to stagger different blocks next year…….I thought doing it all immediately would probably be best but then I got to pondering over how that years hunting would be effected as a result…..it would probably still be better than before……and how would the plant community benefit from the browsing relief…..or would there be any…….

……..and here we are…….

I’m not sure that “cover” requirements are as particular as food. There will still be plenty of cover, absent other pressures, on 5000 acres of burned property. I’ve watched deer bed repeatedly in the middle of a clearcut if the specifics are to their liking.
Little River just north of Atmore burns every fall or every other and there are it doesn’t seem to affect the deer herd much other than I see them on the roadside A LOT for the first few weeks afterward.

There are more factors that play into what grows after a burn than just “time of year”. I’m not a professional at all, but I think the density of the pines, time of year, temp of fire, and fire frequency all play a part in if you get forbes or NWSGs. From my understanding, if you burn every 1-2 years you will get NWSGs, every 3-4 years for forbes. But as Matt would say… I think this is very site specific as well.

You would see no difference in deer #

Check out this video when you get a chance.....Its centered around turkeys but it goes into pretty good detail about all of that

The plant community depends on the amount of sunlight, the soil type, the amount of soil moisture, fire Intensity, fire frequency, and fire timing………

You could probably add “herbivory” to that list…….That’s like the impact a herd of buffalo would have

shut up Harold

That’s right. Disturbance of the seed bed.

Yeah…..it resets succession kinda like fire but with a little different nuances and probably somewhat different plant communities in the end ……It could actually be pretty substantial differences over time if you greatly improve soil conditions in comparison

I would bet someone's done a study out West, where it's not that uncommon to have fires sweep through 10s of thousands of acres, to see how fast game comes back. Not exactly parallel to the hypothetical presented, (different game densities to start with, different species than the SE) but would give you an idea of what would happen. I know the big quail plantations burn on a 3 year cycle, so about 1/3 of the place actually gets burned every year. They carefully checkerboard the place into relatively small squares (50-100 acres).

Back in the nineties I had a lease in TX and we had a natural burn (lightning). This was in August. Burned everything on the place. A month later it rained a lot. Best deer and turkey season we ever had.

Now this is what I'm talking about.......

Looks like SW Georgia.
I was down there last week quail hunting.
That’s some beautiful country.

i understand this is site specific but I'll take cover over food all day in our area . We do as much habitat work as possible on our property including burning , timber thinning , summer feeding trapping etc & it still doesnt hold a candle to my neighbor's property directly across the highway.. His place is majority timber co land with tons of bedding & very little food with no burning / thinning etc. His place is an absolute deer heaven..

Looks like throw and mow heaven to me.....

Apparently Ted Turner owns that first plantation I posted.....

Dern boy…you attit again

Check out a zoomed in look ……That’s some seriously intense management…….I’m assuming all of the circles are for fire breaks where they’re burning off small patches maybe?…..I wonder how many man hours it takes to pull that off across an area that big??

Yes exactly, called ring outs.

Billionaires have a full time staff on these places and an unlimited budget - “quail hunting paradise”

Not only man hours.

It takes truckloads of money. Management on that level would probably cost $150/ acre or more annually.

I was hoping someone would point out that they are disking all of those fields to manage them… ..Its kind of funny reading that article with it talking about how they are restoring the place back to being au naturel when what they’re doing is manipulating the landscape far beyond anything natural…..I figured someone like Ted Turner would be one to try the cattle management approach as the means to “natural management”

I’m just throwing this out there because I know other plantations look to really mimic what these places have success doing……That area appears to be in prime agricultural territory just going by the mass amount of pivot irrigation around them…..Prime ag soil can take being disked over and over and still support productive plant growth without soil organic matter being present…..That’s not true though when you move to the poorer sandier soils like we have here…..If you try and mimic the same thing they are doing in that ag soil somewhere like Midway for example where they literally mine sand….you probably wont get the same results…..Something that I know for sure occurs here in sandy land is that the plant community changes with the amount of SOM……0% tends to result in undesirable plant species and the better species grow when OM builds…..

I would really be interested to see what it would look like for someone to manage one of these places with one of the main goals being to build SOM levels to “climax” conditions over time across the whole property…..That should be a MAJOR root driver of productivity….especially in poor soil areas…..That disking technique whether they have this in mind or not when doing it is mimicking the seed bed disturbance effect of a herd of buffalo……But the buffalo herds simply stirred up the very top layer of soil while trampling down the vegetation on top of it…..They helped to BUILD up soil organic matter and promote rich diversity…..

At the places I see that are trying to mimic this will disking they are doing it will big heavy machinery and large disks that are really aggressive at turning soil and I bet they end up burning up the SOM as a result……I imagine most of these “fallow fields” that are getting turned over and over again are all void of SOM and are plant species limited as a result…..as well as overall productivity being limited…….The whole idea of managing one of these places with cattle is to set it up pretty close to how they have it but use the cattle to manage rather than the disks……Disturb the soil, trample the vegetation, and poop everywhere while consuming the grass……I bet a dollar to a doughnut that it would produce a more diverse and productive plant community…….The reason I was asking about man hours is at some point even though cattle would be some work…..I don’t think it would be nearly as much as what they are already putting into something like the pics above.....The method they are using seems like a huge amount of inputs going into it

These places are not trying to grow and hold deer. Though they often have plenty! They would rather not have them at all. They are 100% quail focused.

I bet they do!.. ..I’m with you on that……I’m considering quail too……I’m thinking about the plant response they’re trying to achieve in those “fallow fields” and the species that they want present and in the amount they want them in, etc……Those things will likely grow the way you want them to in good ag soil even with less than desirable soil management practices…….I don’t think you’re likely to get the same quality response in crappy soil regions though because many of those desirable plant species need better growing conditions that what sand can provide without the organic matter being present…..When you break a soil down to nothing but base sand then you tend to get stuff coming in that doesn’t have a whole lot of beneficial wildlife use….

A lot of our “plantations” here in my area sit on top of sand pits….I don’t see them in the spring though so all I really see are the plowed up fields in the winter…..It may be working exactly like they want…….I would still say to that…..Test it compared to a field with 5-6% organic matter and see if the productivity doesn’t significantly change…..It did in my sandy field…….Take all of that bite out of those big ass disks and just let them chop down the vegetation and disturb the soil……There’s no need to churn dirt a foot deep……

Something else you also lose in a field when you deplete the soil OM is soil life and the food web associated with it……