You've been writing to one that cares. I try to cover every aspect of what a landowner wants. I don't always recommend harvesting timber, if don't fit what they want. Since I don't know how to do that, apparently, I was wanting to learn.

N2TRKYS, if you want to take a drive to Jackson Co. I can show you some work I've done. Lot of the same stuff BSK is talkin' about. I formulated a plan but it's still a work in progress. When our district Forester saw it , he was impressed, wanted to know how I knew to do that without a professional consultant. I take great pride in what I've done with such a small budget. He want's to have a tour /demonstration at our place.
Our timber was cut in a "jigsaw patteren" with the topography to create edges, funnels and pinch points. I burn some of the hardwood cut over. Largest food plot is near the center of the property with plots getting smaller toward the property edges.
Really it's not hard, if you think like a deer.
Won't cost you anything, I'll buy yer lunch.

Pm sent.

2dogs, how big is your property you are working on?

And I want to tag along and buy both of your lunches!

there goes the neighborhood! Maybe I better start charging!
Now ya gotta know ya'll will be blind folded upon leaving the city limits and there's a couple of simple legal documents to sign. Hopefully, I won't have to impose sharia law. That gouging out eyes and cutting out tongues is such nasty business.

Almost forgot, hope ya'll are OK with a search by a butch TSA agent with PMS , can't let those GPS thingys get through.

N2TRKYS,

My apologies for any of my replies that came across as flippant. I often post on this site forgetting that not everyone knows my history (I have met or corresponded with many on this site for years and was one of the first users to ever post on the site when it was first created). I've published at least 20 articles in popular hunting magazines on this topic, and given more presentations at hunting and management seminars on this topic than I can count.

I'm only hesitant to post about my research and habitat management philosophies because it is such a massive topic. I've spent 20 years studying deer movement as it pertains to habitat and terrain, as well as trying to devise new ways of studying this behavior. The amount of data generated is truly overwhelming, and a full report on it would require a book-length response.

But to give a very brief synopsis, through a decade-long research project into where bucks make their rubs, I was able to determine that bucks prefer specific terrain features for their movement patterns (why they do so would be pure speculation on my part). In addition, these studies also highlighted that bucks prefer to use transitions between habitat types (habitat "edges") for the same purpose, with some types of habitat edges being preferred over others. I also discovered that use of these preferred terrain types and edges--if they happened to occur in the same location--didn't just produce an additive effect, but almost an exponential effect. Where preferred terrain happened to coincide with preferred edge types, buck usage of these areas for rubbing increased more than five-fold.

Later research involving not only trail-camera placement but also analysis of hunter results by stand placement confirmed these locations could be purposefully created to produce high-odds hunting locations.

Unrelated research into individual stand location hunting results by localized habitat diversity values and proximity to sanctuary cover helped flesh out my ideas on creating highly customized habitat patterns to aid hunter success.

In addition, long-term study of localized buck populations on individual properties (through the photo-census process) has taught me that, IN A LARGE-SCALE HARDWOOD ENVIRONMENT, sanctuary cover is the #1 factor in determining the population of bucks that will use a given property during the hunting season. I specify "in a large-scale hardwood environment" because production agriculture (highly available, high-quality food sources) can be a huge draw to deer. When production agriculture is NOT present in the area, sanctuary cover is the #1 draw. In fact, it is such a draw that the population of bucks using a given property will rise and fall from year to year directly in correlation with the percent of the property in sanctuary cover from year to year.

I've also found that large, centrally located sanctuaries appear to work best for drawing and holding hunter-wary older bucks. HOWEVER, these large sanctuaries reduce hunter success at seeing these bucks (too much sanctuary for bucks to hide in). From purely a hunting standpoint, small, scattered sanctuaries produce higher older buck harvest rates. That's why 2Dogs talks about cutting timber and creating thick cover in a jigsaw or "patchwork quilt" type of design. The real trick is, first, designing that patchwork quilt of sanctuary cover so that all of them are interconnected by favored terrain features that act as high-odds hunting locations as bucks use these "web" of travel corridors to move from sanctuary to sanctuary. In addition, habitat edges can be created along these travel webs to increase buck usage. In essence, what the entire system creates is a false sense of security--just enough sanctuary to give hunter-wary bucks some protection, but preplanned and custom designed "weaknesses" in the system that hunters can exploit.

The second challenge is planning these systems far into the future. As you well know, areas where hardwood timber has been removed successionally regenerate through a predictable sequence of stages. Some of these stages produce considerable deer food, some produce exceptional cover habitat, and some see very little deer usage. Much thought and planning has to go into designing a long-term timber harvest plan so that the same percentage of the property is always in the same amount of food and cover production, even if that means WHERE the food and cover are located changes over time. This can be accomplished either by regenerating the desired habitat with mechanical or chemical means, or simply cutting new areas of timber every few years and letting the successional regrowth process take its course naturally. But all of these regrowth processes, and the different habitat types they generate, must be accounted for in the over-all hunting dimension of the property; i.e. maintaining existing or creating new high-odds hunting locations as the timber management process continues far into the future.

Do you find this to be true in flat land terrain, as well as mountainous hardwoods?

In big hardwood environments, yes.

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I personally believe improving/providing good sanctuary cover can greatly increase area fidelity for older bucks. What ya think ?

Can't really prove that one, but we certainly see less bucks leaving the area after summer bachelor groups break up (if the bucks in the area do a lot of seasonal range-shifting--and that isn't always the case in large expanses of hardwood timber).

I found on our property that they produce every other year.