When the Work is the Reward

By Scott Bestul

 Seeing the giant 8-pointer was heady enough. But when my neighbor and hunting buddy Dave Olson watched the monster buck stroll within 40 yards and settle in for a nap, a huge smile spread across my friend’s face. Of all the places the old warrior could have selected for a bed, he chose to sidle up to the top of a downed elm tree. The buck pressed his butt up against the tree limbs, folded his legs beneath him and took a snooze.

Dave was grinning because that elm was one of many trees we’d hinge-cut just a few months before. On that summer day, I’d joined Dave and two other deer nuts, all of us armed with chainsaws, to transform a wooded ridge into a bedding area. Though the ridge was heavily timbered, almost all of those trees were low-value species: elm, box elder, and young and stunted hickory and maple. Even worse, the competing trees had formed a sun-blocking canopy that wouldn’t let young trees and brush — the stuff deer love —grow, much less flour­ish.

 So, we made a mess of the place in a few hours, hinge-cutting trees at varying heights and forming a crosshatched tangle of treetops. When the afternoon ended, we’d taken a ridge with a 150-yard view and transformed it into rabbit cover where you could barely see 60 feet. Area deer responded almost immediately, visiting the ridge to browse on tender browse and, of course, bed in the security cover we’d created.

Though Dave didn’t get a crack at that monstrous 8-pointer, he en­joyed a just-as-good experience, watching the old warrior nap for al­most four hours in habitat we’d created. My neighbor has killed some great bucks (three whitetails 4-1/2 years or older in each of the past three seasons), but he has long since left the part of his hunting career where the only satisfaction is tagging a deer. Making things better for deer — and seeing results from that work — has become a reward in itself. Here’s a look at some off-season projects that have brought my hunting buddies and me such great satisfaction.

 Start Up a Saw

Dave’s encounter with that tremendous buck was exciting, but time has proven it no fluke. Since we’ve started manipulating habitat with chainsaws, we’ve made our hunting grounds exponentially better. Here are three examples:

 Clear-cuts: Let’s face it. When you’re trying to grow young trees and brush, the more sunlight they receive, the better. And nothing puts more sunlight on a forest floor than a clear-cut. But as I tell any­one who’ll listen, seek professional help if you’re a rookie logger. Some tree species benefit from clear-cutting, but it’s disastrous for others. If you’re not sure what these species are in your area, ask an expert before you start.

A clear-cut creates whitetail habitat deer will use for many years. The drawback is that it will take a while to start (most clear-cuts will produce good cover and browse within a year), and the area will not look very pretty for a few seasons — unless you’re a deer hunter.

 Hinge-cutting: As the opening story illustrates, hinge-cutting cre­ates immediate cover that whitetails quickly adopt. I liken it to throw­ing a brush pile in a bass lake. Every fish in the area will zip over, check it out and not spend a second wondering why a Christmas tree is suddenly a part of their world. They immediately dial it in to their list of safe spaces and move on with their lives. Deer are the same.

The trick with hinge-cutting, of course, is to pick on only low-value tree species. If you have a ridge top full of white oaks, leave those valu­able, acorn-producing trees alone. But if you have a wasteland of worthlessness, consider the saw. One trick we’ve learned is to layer our cuts, sawing trees at varying heights to create cover with more depth and structure. Typically, we start hinge-cutting larger trees first, and those cuts are lower (2 to 4 feet high). Then we drop lighter, smaller trees on top of them, using higher cuts. If you cut the little trees first, the big ones just push them down, and you’ve lost much of the height that makes a hinge-cut effective. Generally, I don’t like deer to be able to see over the cut. I think this makes deer feel more secure, and it also forces them to look for other deer that they hear or smell in the cut. And a searching buck is an active buck — always a good thing!

 Screen and block: A final application of the chainsaw is to create screens that force deer to move in specific directions or to block trails you don’t want them to use. I consider this a hunting technique, not a habitat improvement, but it’s worth mentioning.

Set the Table

As any reader of this magazine recognizes, deer nutrition is a huge component in the plans of any whitetail hunter/manager. My gang spends a monstrous amount of time planting and tending food plots each year, and those rituals have become such a part of the annual hunt that I can no longer imagine doing without them. But I believe we approach food plots differently than most.

I conduct seminars across the country each year, and food plotting is among the most-discussed topics during the question-and-answer sessions that follow my talks. I usually tell folks I have a love/hate re­lationship with food plots, mostly because people ask what to plant so they can kill more deer. I consider the main mission of our food plots is to feed deer. There’s a difference, and I think it’s important.

 We plant acres of food for deer each year, and those food plots are a part of our hunting plan only a few times each fall. We hunt them sparingly, mostly because we want deer to feel safe eating there and keep returning regardless of the time of year. We have a 100-day bow season in Minnesota, and the most we’ve sat any food plot stand dur­ing a season is six hunts. There’s been a lot said and written about creating sanctuaries — places where deer feel safe — and it’s an ex­cellent tactic. We like our food plots to fit into the sanctuary mentality. When deer decide to eat there, they’re not looking over their shoulders every bite, wondering when they’re going to get shot.

The results have been pretty amazing. Although we hunt our plots less than ever, our odds have soared. Neighbor Dave killed his two best bucks on the same food plot in consecutive years, and I’m con­vinced he did so because he rarely sits that spot. And there have been other benefits. Deer pile into our plots in winter (which boosts herd health in the neighborhood and also puts our properties on the mental map of bucks that might relocate to find does during the rut), and we also find more shed antlers now than we did before.

I realize I might be splitting hairs, but in my head, there’s a differ­ence between planting food plots simply to kill bucks and planting them as part of an overall habitat/whitetail management plan. I prefer the latter.

 Roll in the Grass

One of the most satisfying things you can do as a manager is take ground that offers nothing to deer and create killer habitat. And any time I need an example of my coolest effort, all I need to do is look out my bedroom window. From there, I can see the northern end of a switchgrass field that taught me how much deer will use tall native prairie grass for bedding and security cover.

Just seven years ago, that patch of switchgrass was an abandoned cattle pasture that was a virtual wasteland for whitetails. Although there’d been no cows there for many years, the stuff that grew in after the livestock left would barely hold a pheasant, much less a buck. There were tufts of wispy brome grass, clumps of foxtail, small patches of berry brush and the odd box elder clone. For years, I’d watched deer walk through that patch and barely pause. It was a patch of nothing, connecting places that deer wanted to reach.

 Then we decided to convert that old pasture into a switchgrass sanc­tuary, and it changed everything. On a May day after he’d finished planting all the corn and soybeans for the season, my neighbor Alan hauled his equipment to this pathetic pasture and went to work. First, he tilled up every inch, and then smoothed out the humps and divots with a drag. And then we loaded a drill with switchgrass and other native prairie grass seed, and Alan planted the six acres in less than a half-hour.

 I’ll confess this up front; I grew up in Wisconsin, and for many years operated under the delusion that you needed trees to hold deer. Then, after several years of hunting Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas — places where if a deer needed trees to feel safe, he’d be psychotic since he wore spots — I learned that grassy cover can make whitetails feel just as secure as any plant that grows bark. Establishing that cover in my little slice of southern Minnesota turned out to be one of the smartest habitat moves we’d ever make.

 If you pay attention to whitetail science (I do), you know that as a buck ages, his territory typically shrinks. Our switchgrass planting has confirmed that for us. Though it’s only been a half-dozen years since we established that cover, I know of at least three mature bucks that have made that habitat an important part of their core area — pretty heady stuff when you remember that this slice of native prairie is only six acres, and the adjacent timber is a 5-acre chunk of hinge-cut nastiness. Any time I can make 11 acres an important part of a mature buck’s life, I feel like I’ve done something good.

 Conclusion

I know there was a time — many years, actually — when I’d have done none of this hard labor without some expectation of a reward — in other words, my deer tag affixed to the leg of a dandy buck. But these days, posing behind a buck for a grip-and-grin is far less impor­tant than just knowing that a mature buck is living in a place I helped create. If I see him someday, fine. If I get a shot, even better. But if all I do is help make the place where an old whitetail feels comfortable, well, I’m just fine with that, too. Sometimes, just doing the work is reward enough.