Mature bucks are a different animal than your average doe or even young buck. Fully grown bucks with a few years experience are pickier and more wary than the rest, but it’s worth the effort to keep them on your land. After all, the best hunting opportunities are in the areas where bucks frequent and are already comfortable.
Fortunately, there’s more to do than simply wish upon a star and gather a few good luck charms. While bucks are picky, they’re not complicated, so there are some basic but extremely important habitat improvements that will help you attract and hold even the trophy specimens. Keep in mind that a few random improvements scattered here and there won’t be nearly as effective as a carefully planned and integrated selection of complementary features.
Safety
Never forget that safety is paramount for mature bucks. They must be able to bed down and travel safely to water and food areas. During rutting season, they need to be able to cruise comfortably between doe bedding areas without feeling threatened by obvious human activity.
Transition Corridors
Identify potential or existing travel routes between bedding and feeding areas and enhance them for greater appeal. Shrubs, tall annual grasses, and a few felled or hinge cut trees along the route will provide a dense, natural cover as well as opportunities for browsing.
Staging Areas
Mature bucks tend to be wary of abrupt transitions between open woods and cultivated fields or food plots. When the border doesn’t feel safe, bucks will usually refrain from entering until after dark, which isn’t the ideal hunting window. You can encourage daytime movement by establishing a more gradual transition with brush, vines, and felled trees that extend closer to the food plots. Well established cover will encourage mature bucks to enter these areas and even approach food plots in daylight.
A highly attractive staging area features more than a few felled or hinge-cut trees. Enhance yours by planting a few grape vines, honeysuckle, blackberries, and other brambles. Greenbriar is a highly favored browsing species and an outstanding nutrition source during the winter. Large thickets of these thorny, climbing plants not only provide tasty forage for deer but they make valuable winter cover and typically receive little human pressure since they’re virtually impenetrable to humans.
Sanctuaries
Deer, especially mature bucks, need an area carefully protected and absent of human pressure in order to feel safe enough to remain from year to year. Even if you have a small property, some part of it must be dedicated and off-limits to any human activity except retrieving a hit deer. Sanctuary areas should boast areas with dense cover, which may even include some bedding areas and thermal cover. Rough, thick, and steep terrain is ideal. Even if your property is relatively small, at least 10 acres or up to 50% of your parcel should be a designated sanctuary.
Health
Minerals
Just like humans, an array of vitamins and minerals are vital to our health. Deer who have access to a wide variety of natural (and cultivated) food sources are typically able to cover their vitamin needs without much trouble, but minerals can be a challenge, and they need more than plain old salt. To maximize body and antler growth, deer need a combination of macro minerals like calcium, sodium, and phosphorus, as well as trace minerals like iron, copper, and zinc. Adding mineral sources to your land will help support the health and growth of your deer population, making the area more attractive to bucks during rut season.
Water
Deer need safe access to reliable water sources, year-round, especially during warm months, dry seasons, and periods of drought. A water source can be as simple as a quiet natural brook running through a staging area or an artificial pond installed in a convenient location between bedding areas and food plots. Wherever it’s located, a water source needs to offer cover and travel corridors that don’t risk exposure. An exposed site probably won’t see daytime visitors, particularly those prized mature bucks.
Bedding
Deer will seek out bedding based on natural screening provided by the terrain and cover provided by vegetation. If your goal is to keep deer in residence all year round, the bedding material must remain standing, especially during the fall and winter months. After all, a bedding area provides not only basic cover from predators, but also shields animals from the worst of winter weather. Grasses, briars, shrubs and some varieties of conifers can all provide good cover, if they have good structure to keep them upright all year long.
For many wildlife managers, switchgrass is a favorite option, averaging about six feet tall and producing a visually impenetrable wall of leaves and stalks that still permits movement. Even more important, switchgrass remains standing even through extremely harsh winter weather. Combined with a variety of other structural cover plantings, switchgrass provides excellent bedding options for deer, as well as valuable food and nesting habitat for songbirds and game birds such as quail, turkeys, and pheasants.
The location of bedding areas is particularly important for the mature bucks who you want to keep on your property as permanent residents. Full grown bucks prefer to bed in the most isolated areas, ideally on the leeward side of a ridge or hill that stands somewhat higher than surrounding areas. The best configurations begin with well covered buck bedding in a remote area, transitioning to younger buck bedding and then to doe and family bedding. A well screened deer pond placed nearby, on the way to a wide staging area that provides a safe approach to a variety of food plots, encourages the deer to establish a highly predictable daily pattern of movement.
Thermal Refuges
Deer suffer from extremes of temperature and inclement weather just as humans do, except they don’t have cozy homes with a fireplace or AC to make even the worst weather tolerable.
Especially in climates that feature extreme temperatures, high winds, or various forms of precipitation, the availability of effective cover will reduce stress, increase survival rates, and promote the health of the herd. In a habitat where there are safe spots to wait out anything from blizzards to heat waves, deer will have little reason to move on to a new location.
Thermal refuges should include a variety of cover types for whatever weather extremes you are likely to see in your region. Keep in mind that seasons are getting more extreme as climate patterns continue to shift. If you’re already improving deer habitat on your parcel, it makes sense to offer cover for a range of weather possibilities even if they’re not usually a problem.
Summer Cover
In summertime, thermal cover should focus on shade and air movement. A forested area with a dense canopy of largely deciduous trees that keep the ground well shaded is ideal. In contrast to winter cover, a dense understory should be avoided because the goal is to have uninhibited air movement at ground level. Keep this type of refuge deep in remote parts of the deer habitat. Since there will necessarily be less screening cover, you want to avoid the risk of spooking deer and sending them to areas where they’ll be exposed to direct sunlight and extreme heat.
Winter Cover
In winter, deer seek naturally sheltered areas that temper the effects of wind, snow, and extreme cold while providing access to a food source that will last through the long, lean winter. Effective winter cover starts with a full canopy of evergreen conifers whose deep green foliage and dark branches absorb heat from the sun, raising the temperature at ground level. Picture your dense stands of red or white pine, hemlock, spruce, and even red oak trees, which hold onto their brown leaves through the winter, as natural heating blankets for your whitetail population.
In addition to the warm blanket effect of a dark canopy, an understory of dense conifers like arborvitae, cedars, and junipers make especially effective windbreaks. Windbreaks help reduce the energy deer require to maintain their body temperature even in extremely cold winters and mitigate the accumulation of drifted snow.
