Areas of thick cover serve four purposes to the deer hunter and all of them are important. First, the foliage provides browse to hold and feed deer. Second, the cover keeps you out of sight when going to and from your stands. Third, it provides a sense of security that deer will seek when pressured in other areas. Fourth, when the cover is thick, the deer aren’t in visual contact as often and many experts feel this allows a higher carrying capacity of mature bucks.
In this article, I’ll offer more detail on each of these reasons why you need thick cover as well as offering a few tips on how to make your cover thicker.
MORE BROWSE
Deer can only reach about five feet up without standing on their hind legs, so you have to look at what is available to them in this lower band of habitat. Many times, you will see that a presumably dense thicket of small trees has nothing useful to offer a deer. While a thick stand of small trees may serve some goals that I’ll get to later, it doesn’t achieve the goal of increasing browse.
The kind of thick cover we are after will produce a wide variety of native woody browse and weeds. This is known as early succession — the first species to repopulate open ground. The ideal mix, in my mind, contains a scattering of small trees that produce and hold leaves well, such as many species of oak and cedars, along with a variety of natural re-growth. Such areas are virtual spring and early summer food banks as tender new shoots begin to grow. By midsummer and fall, these once browse-rich areas are not as attractive and the deer make for the agricultural fields and food plots.
If you have a high deer population, they can literally stunt the growth of your woodland regeneration to the point where you begin to wonder if anything is actually growing. Just as an exclusion cage will show what is happening in your food plots, a large exclusion cage in the timber would reveal how much damage these browsing deer are really doing. They really are heavy browsers at certain times of the year.
Browse will never replace food plots in a well-balanced deer management plan, but there is no reason why it can’t be the fringe benefit of a habitat improvement program.
IMPROVED HUNTABILITY
Even if making my cover thicker didn’t do anything to improve the environment for deer, I would still do it just to improve my hunting success. Let me give you an example and you will grasp my point immediately. For nine years, I hunted a farm that was loaded with mature trees. You could literally see for 200 yards through the timber in any direction. That made it easy to see the deer coming from a long distance away. Unfortunately, the opposite was also true. They could see me coming from at least 200 yards in every direction, too. If I approached an afternoon stand in the timber or exited a morning stand back on a ridge, I was literally educating deer in a quarter-mile wide swath where I walked. Granted, I used the terrain to my advantage as much as possible and not all the deer were looking my way when I passed in the distance, but you get the idea. It was not good.
Many times I saw white tails flashing way off in the distance as I crept to my stands. It was very frustrating because I knew how much damage my entry and exit were having on that day’s hunt and any future hunts from the same stand. Fortunately, it was a big farm because I burned out my stands very quickly. Before I get into my contrasting example, let me offer up a few words about owning land with several partners. The farm I just talked about was a large partnership of which I was one of the owners. It was awesome that a simple outdoor writer could enjoy access to quality hunting by combining his finances with a number of others.
But, that leverage came at a cost. It was very difficult to make any significant changes to that place because no one seemed to agree on anything. It was like trying to push a new healthcare bill through Congress, but without the benefit of poor, dumb taxpayers to foot the bill. In other words, it was very hard to get the mutual nod to cut trees that needed to be cut, plant food plots in new areas, etc. I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy land with partners, just be forewarned that progress moves very slowly in those settings.
Now contrast those hunts with experiences I’ve had on my own farm. Shortly after I bought it, I began a timber stand improvement (TSI) program. That is a fancy way of saying that we cut out all the junk trees to achieve two goals: increase light to the forest floor for re-growth and improve the opportunity for existing quality trees like walnut, oak and cherry to flourish. Each time we set out to cut a new patch of timber, we were more aggressive. It is interesting to see the changes that have occurred in the seven years since we first started. The most recent effort took place just this past winter. So I have a reference of what aggressive TSI looks like after zero years, one year, two years, etc. — all the way up to seven years later.
Anyway, having this reference gave me confidence about the outcome and we became increasingly aggressive in removing junk tree species. However, be sure to discuss your goals with an actual forestry consultant before you start cutting or deadening trees, because my approach may not work for you.
Now for the good news. In areas where the sunlight hit the forest floor, the ground story produced exceptional amounts of new growth. Because of this thick ground cover, the farm hunts much, much larger. I almost have to step on a deer to alarm it in the thickest areas. Again, by using the terrain to keep out of sight, I feel that the farm hunts at least twice as big as it did before I made the cover thicker. In other words, my stands don’t burn out nearly as fast and I don’t have to jump around as much to maintain the all-important element of surprise.
In hindsight, I would never put a single one of those trees back that we cut down. In fact, because of rapid re-growth, I am certain that we will have to start planning a return trip to the areas we cut first. My sense is that the farm will end up on a tenyear cycle. Every ten years we will revisit each TSI site in the order we cut it, making sure that the area is still accomplishing the required goals: producing ground cover, promoting the growth of desirable trees and offering browse.
INCREASED SECURITY
Increased security, though tangible, is hard to measure. You can see the snipped off branches and know that browsing took place and you can watch for deer running from your approach, but it is hard to know whether you are holding more deer, or more bucks, or more mature bucks, or whatever, as a result of the thick cover. You end up with a much more subjective measuring stick. So, with that in mind, I am not going to spend a lot of time in this section.
It just makes sense that when deer are pressured, they head toward places within their ranges where they can hide. Actual telemetry studies have proven this many times. The deer don’t pack a bag and head for the hills, but they do hole up in the thickest, most secluded portions of their range.
A deer doesn’t know anything about the areas outside of its range. It is like Columbus sailing off toward the horizon with the very real fear of falling right off the earth. As far the deer knows, they will drop of the world if they leave their known range. They can’t call their grandma 100 miles away or watch television to see how other deer live. They know about the places they have visited, and nothing more. So they adjust to the pressure as best they can within their known range. That is why they just hide rather than completely pulling out.
They may jump the fence and hide on your farm if they are pressured hard by the neighbors. In fact, they probably will if your farm offers safety and thick hiding cover. That is why it makes sense to have the thickest security cover in your neighborhood. The local deer know about this secure area and will head for your farm when the guns start booming.
It is good to have balanced habitat — areas with both thick and more open cover. The deer prefer this transitional edge when bedding. They like to be able to see things, but they also like to have thick cover close by to jump into when they perceive a threat.
INCREASING THE DENSITY OF MATURE BUCKS
In some areas where the hunting pressure is moderate, the density of mature bucks is dictated by buck dominance behavior rather than by hunting pressure. Mature bucks have a pecking order that they have fought hard to establish. They also have a piece of turf where these dominance battles have taken place. So by default, the winner stays and the loser leaves. It is a bummer when the loser is a dandy buck that has to go live on your neighbor’s farm because some old brute kicked him off your ground.
If there is a way to maintain a higher density of mature bucks on our hunting areas, we need to know about it. Thick cover seems to promise this benefit. Again, I’ll start with an intuitive presentation and then back it up with some anecdotal experiences and a bit of biology. Think about it this way. During courtship times, you hate other males your age and don’t want them messing around in your core area. In other words, you are a typical mature buck during the rut. Now if you are lying on one ridge and you look across at the next ridge only to see another equally mature and potentially dominant male, you are eventually going to get sick of it. You will get up and go over there to see who owns the turf.
Now if you can’t see him lying over there, you may not even realize that another mature male is in the area. It is hard to stress out over something of which you are not aware. I wasn’t the originator of this theory. Actually, a friend of mine, named Al Collins, noted this phenomenon when I talked with him about his super-thick Indiana farms. He feels that he is holding a very high density of mature bucks — as tightly packed as one per 40 acres — on these farms simply because they are dog-hair thick. The home ranges of the deer have shrunk down due to the density of the cover and thus the bucks simply aren’t running into each other as often. Without this regular contact, they don’t have as many opportunities to get steamed and are not as likely to run the other guy out of the area. So naturally, the density of mature bucks can be higher.
I have seen good growth in the density of mature bucks on my farm over the years. During the past three years of hunting, I have averaged seeing at least one mature buck per day. They haven’t always been big. In fact, they are not usually big. But they are 4-1/2 years old, or older — lots of them. I am not sure if that is the result of not shooting the younger deer or the result of the thicker cover we have produced over the years. It is probably tied to both.
I have hunted farms where we didn’t shoot a lot of young bucks and yet we never had densities of mature bucks as high as I have seen recently. But these were also farms with very open timber. I have run this theory by a number of experienced biologists and they seem to agree with this notion, again based on anecdotal evidence only — no hard science. It is a theory, one that I am entirely willing to take to the bank, but a theory nonetheless.
CREATING THICK COVER
I could write an entire article about creating thick cover, but it would boil down to a pair of main themes. First, you can cut the timber back and let nature produce a jungle inside the timber or you can plant the jungle in open areas. I have done both, but have focused the majority of my efforts on creating thickets within my timber by aggressive TSI (as I already
mentioned).
Options for creating thick cover in open areas include planting switchgrass, planting non-invasive shrubbery, direct nut seeding and even planting some annuals such as PowerPlant.
CONCLUSION
OK, those are my four reasons for wanting thick cover. I have heard arguments from people stating that bucks like open cover because they can see, and I have heard grumblings from foresters that I am “ruining” my timber. But the bottom line is this: I believe strongly enough in the value of thick cover that I don’t worry about grumbling and outside opinions. Give it to me thick and I’m happy — and so are the many bucks that
run on my farm.
