Editor’s Note: Today many Mossy Oak Properties’ folks have discovered the wisdom of planting fruit and nut trees for wildlife and humans. To have more game on your property, you can plant green fields and wildlife openings that will feed deer, turkey and other game for a season or two. Too, you can plant fruit and nut trees that will continue to feed wildlife for a lifetime.

Although landowners recognize the expense involved with managing deer, you can manage deer inexpensively. Some wildlife researchers for Mossy Oak's BioLogic, a well-known wildlife planting, developed a deer-management plan for $30 or less. They suggested that landowners spend:

• $10 for gas and oil for a chainsaw and create wildlife openings. You'd be surprised at how many openings you could create with that amount of gas.
• $5 for matches and fuel oil and burn 1/4 of the property each year.
• $5 to buy bullets to use to reduce the number of unantlered deer on the land.
• $10 to buy a bag of fertilizer to use on naturally-occurring plants like blackberries, Japanese honeysuckle and nut- and fruit-producing trees.

A $30 wildlife-management plan can and will drastically increase the amount of food on your lands for deer. If your area is overpopulated with deer, you need to reduce the number of deer consuming that food. If you grow pine timber on your property and want to increase the amount of wildlife in those pine stands, consider planting green strips through the pine plantation after the first thinning. Timber harvesters generally will remove every third row when they thin a pine plantation. Many of the new available green-field plantings can grow and produce food for wildlife when they only receive diffused sunlight like that found in a third-row thinning. Planting those third rows where timbermen have harvested pine trees will increase the amount of available food for wildlife drastically and won't disrupt your timber-management plan. With these wildlife strips planted in those vacant rows where pine trees once have grown, deer, turkey and other wildlife have an abundance of food in an area that also offers cover. More wildlife managers use this third-row wildlife strip planting as a part of their wildlife-management programs to grow the amount of wildlife on a property while increasing the value of those lands.

To see more wildlife on your property, use feeding stations like stationary feeders that contain some type of small grain that deer, turkey and other wildlife will eat. Today many landowners opt to use spin feeders. Usually suspended off the ground, spin feeders have automatic timers. When these timers go off, the feeder will sling corn, soybeans or a mixture of corn and soybeans out on the ground for the wildlife to eat. If you enjoy watching wildlife before you leave for work, set your spin feeder to go off while you're having your morning cup of coffee. To see wildlife in the afternoon, adjust the spin feeder to start then, and plan to sit in a place where you can watch the game come out to eat. More and more landowners have begun to use spin feeders to observe wildlife at times convenient for them. How many deer do you have on your property? Do you know the number of bucks and does on your lands? When and where do those deer move? Do you know the size of the bucks on your land? Do bucks only move across your property during the rut? You can inventory deer, turkey and other wildlife on your lands with motion-sensor cameras that you set up along game trails. These cameras will take pictures by day and by night of the game utilizing those trails. You can watch individual deer grow from year to year, you can see young bucks put on their first sets of antlers, and over several years' time, you can observe these young bucks growing to maturity. Too, you can record the growth of their antlers year after year with the photographs that you take and keep from these trail cameras. Also many landowners have found that using trail cameras in combination with spin feeders aid them in inventorying the game on their properties quickly and easily. The spin feeders will attract deer, turkey and other wildlife to a specific place at a certain time, and the motion-sensor cameras will photograph the wildlife that comes to those feeders.

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