Backyard Bucks

Close Quarters Call for Special Strategies

By Bill Winke

            Even though my family owns more land, the best hunting on our farm the past three seasons has occurred in the 40 acres around our house. It’s almost bizarre how many big deer we have seen and shot in that small area, even though we live in the house and have two young children who play in the yard almost every day during summer.

            The biggest shed from the farm, the largest deer I’ve ever seen from a stand and the biggest buck my high-school buddy Mike Sawyer has ever shot came from that 40-acre block. Unbelievably, I spent the better part of two seasons hunting that measly 40 acres and was there almost every day. It never went bad.

            I think there are four reasons why it has been so good.

Food, food and more food

          Because I spend so much time around the house, working from a home office,

I naturally see the most — and often the biggest — deer in this area. It’s because I am looking every day. I guess I tend to concentrate food in the places where I have been seeing big deer, so naturally, the cream-of-the-crop food plots end up in my back yard.

            When we moved into the house and bought the farm (so to speak), there was only a small two-acre plot in this 40-acre area. It was played out by early November — just enough to give deer some idea that they could occasionally find food there. The first thing I did was add another 21 acres of food. Every open field on the 40 acres had standing crop or Imperial Whitetail Clover planted the next fall. That really pulled the deer the first winter, and they definitely knew they had found something special. I knew that, too.

            One thing you quickly notice about deer when you start planting food plots is how much their lives are governed by habit. It is interesting how the same family groups use the same trails and feeding areas from one year to the next. You can put in a new plot, and they seem to miss it the first year, even though it’s only 100 yards from other plots they have used heavily in the past. But by the second year, you will notice they are hammering it just as hard as others.

            In most areas, it takes about a year for the deer to fully incorporate a new food plot into their daily movement patterns. But after they do, deer will flock to that area every year at certain times. I was talking with a friend about that recently when he smiled and said, “I used to feed the deer shelled corn on one of the properties I owned. I did it during the winter after the hunting season so they would be using the farm more during antler-dropping time. They would flock in there every December and stay through March. Then I stopped feeding them there. They still flocked in and stayed until March for two more years before they gradually stopped showing up.”

            I am getting to an important point: They will learn to come to your back yard gradually through a couple of seasons, but after that becomes a part of their routine, they will come as much out of habit as for the food. You can create a captive audience of deer simply by making your back yard the center of their universe. You do that largely with food.

            When I increased the acres of food in that area, it fully ingrained this pattern. Even after I started to plant food on other parts of the farm, deer still used the area around the house consistently.

            I’m going to come back to what I think you should plant and where you should plant it in a bit. First, let’s discuss the other two reasons why I think the back yard is so good.

Sanctuary

            Two blocks of timber straddle our house. We rarely hunt these, so they serve as mini-sanctuaries within the 40 acres. Although they don’t hold very many deer, they hold a few, and they produce security for other deer that come and go. I’m not sure why. Maybe they like to keep an eye on us, but the biggest bucks often show up very close to homes. Possibly that’s just a matter of common sense. People usually don’t like to have gun-hunting near their homes, so these blocks of timber go almost unhunted and undisturbed.

            We try to use the property, but the children have been young enough until now that they didn’t roam the woods much during summer, so the deer had those areas to themselves. I have even seen bobcats when hunting the edges of those sanctuaries, so they are like little pockets of wilderness within an otherwise tame world. As the children get older, I expect these woodland pockets to be infiltrated by pirates, cowboys and bank robbers. Then, the hunting will suffer, but that’s fine, too.

            I’ve done a lot of timber-stand improvement in the areas around our house.

I figured that if the deer were lying there looking at us every day (and us looking at them), they wouldn’t hang around for very long. So I hired a small crew, and we cut down all the junk trees in those woods near the house. That was four years ago. Now, those areas have the thickest cover on the farm — and some very productive oak trees. That provides much improved security for nearby deer.

            The back yard is also good because we don’t have a roaming dog. In fact, we don’t have a dog at all. If we get one — and our son is asking for a puppy — it will not be the roaming variety. We might use underground fencing to keep it confined to certain areas, but it will not roam the woods. That would be a surefire way to keep deer out.

Better Hunting Strategy

            When you only have a small area on which to focus, you tend to hunt it smarter. If you don’t, you soon see nothing. When we bought the house, we had a limited amount of acres, and I learned to hunt them very well. I spent dozens of hours during the off-season trying to figure out the best places for my stands and the best entry and exit routes so I could get in and out of that small area consistently without spooking deer.

            I used ditches, tree lines, the levee of the pond below the house, the children’s swing set — you name it — to cover my comings and goings. I remember telling my friend how to find one of my stands, and he started laughing. It went something like, “You sneak around the end of my shop, get down low and keep the LP tank between you and the corner of the yard ... .”

You get the picture. It is much easier to come up with the ultimate hunting strategy when you’re focusing on a small area.

            In other words, if you want to have great hunting in your back yard, you must hunt it very carefully and spend the time needed to devise a foolproof plan. They are still wild whitetails, and they still react to intrusion by changing their behavior. As long as they are moving naturally, you have a great chance of shooting one, but after they become defensive, the jig is up, and deer become nocturnal.

            Most hunters know how to play the wind when hunting a stand, but many make the mistake of not paying nearly enough attention to the route and method they use to get in and out of that stand. When hunting a small area, the entry and exit is much more important than the stand location. You must learn to hunt the stand so as few deer as possible — zero is best — ever realize you’re hunting them.

            Sometimes, you must be creative. I use ditches a lot to sneak in and out of my back-yard honey hole, and I use the nearby county road a lot because deer are used to some activity in that area and ignore it. By creative, I mean you must find ways to use normal human activity patterns — ones deer have come to accept as nonthreatening — to camouflage your travels. Deer get used to these disturbances and don’t pay them any mind.

            Though I hunted several areas of North America, including some great spots,

I saw the biggest buck of the 2003 season within 200 yards of our house. When he showed up, the children were fighting in the back-yard play area, and my wife, Pam, stepped out on the deck to yell at them. The buck never even looked that direction. I almost laughed. So much for the pristine hunting experience.

            Unfortunately, the buck’s movement that day didn’t bring him within bow range, but it was an important lesson. Deer ignore disturbances after they get used to them. I guess the children fight often enough in the back yard that the buck could ignore it. Hmm, maybe these deer know more about our children’s habits than we do.

            Here’s another example: Suppose a neighbor goes out every day at a certain time to cut firewood on the property bordering you. He might often mention seeing deer that trot away from his approach. No doubt, they drift back quickly after the chainsaw grinds to a stop and the truck or tractor pulls away. It’s routine, so why shouldn’t they? If you could ride with him when he goes to cut wood, there’s a great chance you could climb into a sensitive stand in a bedding area that you would otherwise never be able to hunt. Let him bump the deer out naturally, and when he leaves, you will be there to greet their return.

            Stuff like that is fun to devise, and it works amazingly well. Anything you can do to match normal human activity works great. After all, it is a back yard. Deer have patterned the people. Put that to good use.

            Also, consider exactly where you sit when hunting your food sources. Because everything is compressed, you don’t necessarily need to sit right on the food. In fact, it makes sense not to in most cases. Instead, set up on travel routes where deer will be past you and out of sight when it’s time to climb down. Otherwise, you must arrange for a diversion to move the deer off the field naturally so you can sneak away.

            You might be thinking that a diversion — such as someone driving up on an all-terrain vehicle — that nudges the deer off the food source so you can sneak out is the best strategy. It is, but only if used very sparingly. Deer might tolerate a little of that without changing their patterns, but you can’t get away with that every evening. They don’t like to be disturbed, and if it happens regularly, they will simply wait until after the ATV comes and goes before they step out to feed. It’s better to hunt the deer far enough from their food so you can get out of there quietly and undetected when it’s time to quit.

What to plant and where to plant it

            I could write a book about this if I were smart enough. It’s a vast subject. But I’m going to sidestep the blizzard of sophisticated options here and just focus on the basics. You need summer food and winter food. As long as you have both in good supply, you will turn your back yard into a feed trough. Again, keeping things simple, Imperial Whitetail Clover is an ideal summer food. Deer will flock to its tasty, high-protein leaves. When it comes to winter foods, a combination of Imperial Winter-Greens and basic agricultural crops — such as corn and soybeans — are great choices.

            Just a word of caution: Don’t plant corn unless your plot is big or your deer density low, because deer will wipe it out in midsummer, and you won’t get any winter food for your investment. By the way, Imperial Clover is way better for deer than corn during the critical summer antler-growing months.

            Now, let’s tackle the question of where to plant. The simple answer is any place you can. Your back yard is only great if there is food there. The standard equation is to plant up to 10 percent of your hunting area into food plots, but if you can plant more, you will be rewarded — especially during the late season, when neighborhood deer have few other options. I probably have about 20 percent of my back yard in food plots right now. Some years, it’s as much as 30 percent. When we bought the place, I put 50 percent of those 40 acres into deer food — every acre of open ground I could get. No wonder the place became a deer haven within one year.

            If you have limited acreage, the best way to overcome that disadvantage is to plant tons of food. Ideally, you will have something very attractive for deer to eat all year without a day when the grocery shelves are empty. I would plant a third of my acreage in summer food — such as Imperial Clover — and two-thirds with winter foods, such as a combination of Winter-Greens and other winter sources.

            If you have enough open acreage that you can choose where to plant, focus some of your most attractive food sources in hidden corners where deer feel safe coming out in daylight. Otherwise, just plant everything you can. It is a very good use of your deer-hunting budget.

Here’s the kicker

            The ideal whitetail world doesn’t have to be confined to your back yard.

You can create it anywhere. In fact, if you break your hunting property up into 40-acre units and then manage and hunt them in the focused method I’ve described, you will learn that every part of your property can be as good as your legendary back yard. In fact, you will soon have far more great stand sites to hunt than you have time to hunt, which is a good situation.

            Unfortunately, human nature suggests that we often take the easy way out when we think we can get away with it. We tend not to do this much work on a large scale. We might go to the ends of the earth to keep deer from detecting us when hunting 40 acres around our house, but we might walk to and from stands by the easiest route when we think we have the luxury of burning out that stand and moving to the next. That’s fatal thinking. It produces sloppy hunting and sloppy deer management. Sloppy hunting rarely results in trophies.

            Much of the reason that our back yard has been so good is all the food deer have learned to find there. It’s the neighborhood breadbasket. However, it has also been good simply because I have hunted it more carefully than other areas of the farm. That’s a lesson I will take to heart and apply everywhere I can. My back-yard success might be a good lesson for you, too.