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