00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyon. This is episode number two hundred and ten, and today we are joined by white Tail Habitat consultant and author Jeff Sturgis, and we're diving deep into his strategic, detail oriented perspective on improving white tail habitat for deer and deer hunting. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by Sick of Gear, and today on the show we're talking whitetail habitat improvements. And joining me to discuss this is Jeff Sturgis. Now, hopefully you're already familiar with the Jeff. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. Is back towards the beginning, but if you're not familiar. He's the author of three white tail hunting and habitat related books, those being white Tail Success by Design, Food Plot Success by Design, and Mature Buck Success by Design. He's also the man behind the white Tail Habitat Solutions website and YouTube channel, and a Traveling white Tail Habitat consultant, and of all the people out there talking about food plots and improving habitat and work in the land and stuff like that, Jeff, I think, is without a doubt, probably been one of the most influential people on me. And I think that's because he has this very unique and strategic way of thinking about habitat work that really intrigues me. I guess nothing he does is by chance, nothing's random. Everything's done with this larger picture in mind. Everything kind of fits together like an individual piece part of a larger puzzle. And that's fascinating me. I love the the amount of care and mindfulness he puts into the work he does on a property. A big part of why white tail hunting is so fascinating and exciting to me is this puzzle. It's it's putting all these pieces together, and when you put the habitat part of it into the equation, it just makes things even more interesting. So that is what we're gonna talk about with Jeff today, the strategic, kind of tactical way to go about thinking and making habitat improvements on your hunting property. I think you're really gonna enjoy it. I really enjoyed this one. But before we get into that, rather than doing our usual pregame show, since Dan can't join us, we're not going to do that. But I wanted to kind of address a question I got last weekend. UM. I was on another podcast. I was on the Meat Either podcast, and I was asked if I thought baiting and food plots essentially equate to the same thing. And I gave an answer kind of off the cuff, and looking back on that now, I sort of blacked out. I'm not exactly sure what I said, but I do know I don't feel I didn't feel good about my final answer. I didn't feel like it really made sense. UM. So I've been thinking about that since then, like how do our bathing and food plots different, or like what do I really think? Um? And I wanted to somehow be able to communicate that better. So I thought I'd take a stab at sharing with you guys some of my thoughts on this, and I'll say we're off the get go. I'm not saying that one or the other is is good or bad. UM. I personally don't bait. I've chosen not to use bait simply because that doesn't fit into what I'm looking for out of my hunting experience. But I'm not gonna hate on anyone who does bait in an area where it's legal, um, and where they've you know, shown there's if there's not going to be any disease concerns or anything. If it's legal and you want to do it, more power to you. I have family members who do, and I'm not gonna judge them at all, um, but it's not for me. So when I was asked this question, I said, no, I don't think that food plots and baiting are the same thing. And I think first off, you can just look at the practical differences. So number one, Um, you don't have the same disease concerns with food plots as you do have with baiting. So when baiting, you've got a pile of corn, maybe dumped in a two ft by two ft square area, you get a lot of noses touching yell asks alive in the same area. There are increased risks of transferring disease. That something's been talked about for a long time. It seems to be there's there's pretty widespread consensus that that is something that if there's disease in the area. Congregating deer unnaturally can potentially increase the spread. So that's one kind of practical difference. Number two, I think this kind of common sense is that you know, food plots can benefit wildlife in a much wider way, in a much longer standing way than bait can. When you have a food plot that you know produces food for seasons long or an entire year, that's very different than what a pile of corn can do. Not only is it a length, but it's also the quality of food. It's also the diversity of species that can benefit from a food plot versus bait. Um. The impact you see from a one acre clover plot are are night and day compared to what you might see from a pile of corn or pilot sugar bates or whatever it is. When you look at how deer and turkeys and rabbits and and pollinators and all these other animals and and critters out there can can enjoy and take advantage of that nutrition and that habitat. So those are a couple of practical differences. They're kind of um I think relatively common sense you can see those are difference. But I think probably the biggest difference from me isn't so much a practical manners more of um. It's more of like a a deeper philosophical difference. Maybe in the act of planning a food plot or improving habitat um. And I think one of those big things that you get when at least that I get. And maybe this is just me, so take it for whatever it's worth. But for me, when I am working in the habitat, when I am planning a food plot, I get this connection to the land, the connection to the animal that you simply can't get, I think when you just pour something out into the ground. Um. When I'm when I'm working the dirt, I am thinking about the land and the elements and the habitat in a deep, deep way. I need to understand soil and water and rain and sun. I get pulled into this natural cycle and I become a part of it, similar to why I find hunting so compelling, because you become part of this food cycle, you become part of kind of the circle of life. I guess that also happens when you start improving and working and understanding habitat too. You're pulled into this this other piece of the puzzle. Um. I mean, just you never learned to appreciate rain so much and and think about whether so much as when you start planning food. Lass. That's just one interesting example. But all these things that are going on in the natural world all of a sudden become part of like your daily life in a new profound way that that again connects me, It pulls me into this world. Um. And I find that really compelling. You know. Another thing for me is is the difference in work. The sweat equity that has to be put into the effort that has to go into making a habitat improvement changes it for me to UM. I think I've mentioned this example before, but it's something that resonates with me a lot. And you know, there's this mountain in New Hampshires called Mount Washington, and my wife and I on our honeymoon, we decide we're gonna climb to the top of Mount Washington. We're gonna hike all the way to the top. It was I can't remember, four thousand feet of elevation gain or something. It's a serious hike. It was like an all day hike. The weather on top of Mount Washington is some of the most uh, severe and dangerous in the entire country. Um so it's kind of it was pretty cool little venture we were going on for the day. And I mean we worked our tails off. It was raining and sleeping and climbing up and over bowlders and all this kind of stuff. Really the kind of stuff that I'm sure my wife was hoping to enjoy on her big post wedding celebration. And we get all the way top and me we worked our tails off. We get to the summit and we see a parking lot and we see dozens and dozens and dozens of people getting off of buses and walking around up on top of the mountain. And they were looking out at the scene and they were looking off into the distance. And I realized then that we were experiencing the same thing. We were both on top of this mountain, but we were processing it or seeing it through a completely different filter. Are idea of what was happening. Our experience on top of the mountain was night and day between what my wife and I were feeling and seeing and experiencing versus those who had rode a bus or a train or a car up to the top. Because because I had to do not with actually getting to that, and destination had to do with the journey to get there. The experience was really about that journey getting up on the top of the mountain. And I think it's the same thing applies to making habitat improvements or food plots. For me, at least, this is just me. But I feel like when I plant a food plot, yes, part of my goal is to enhance my hunting opportunities. That might lead to me killing a deer. That's the same end goal. Maybe that someone, or maybe that if I was using bait, that would probably the same end goal if I was baiting um. But that journey is completely different, and for me, that journey is is the most compelling part of it. Again, it goes back to what I just talked about, that connection you get to the land when you're working it. So that's the second deeper way I think it's different. And finally I think it's you know, of course, the way you get to watch the wildlife benefiting from these improvements, the way you can engage with it afterwards. It's it's really fulfilling to see animals, wildlife, turkeys, deer, birds, rabbits, groundhogs, whatever it might be feeding in a clover plot that you worked on all spring and summer, or coming out of a betting area that you improved, or using some kind of new feature that you put in place that you thought might you know, help this property hold more dear or or transition more dear. And seeing animals actually use it and benefit from that. That's an incredibly um I don't know, it's it's a powerful feeling. I still get excited about it and enjoyment out of it. Now, many many years since I've started doing this stuff, It's still is like a new novel thing every time I see it. And Elder Leopold wrote in a Sand County Almanac something that I think kind of sums us up really really nicely for me. He said this quote, acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how to plant a pine. For example, one need be neither god nor poet. One need only own a good shovel. So acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, he said, But we with a shovel or a tractor or rake a handful of seed. Maybe I saw we can make our own acts of creation. We can enjoy those things ourselves as habitat managers. Um, it's habitat improvers. It's it's a unique and a really cool way to engage in the natural world. I personally think, um, and I'm fortunate. I don't own land yet, but I do have a piece of property where I'm allowed to make these improvements. I know not everyone has that situation, but I think it is a pretty cool opportunity if you do. I understand why some people that aren't in this kind of world some people see it, they don't get it, or they find it um, they find it to be a turn off, like we're farming for wildlife in the view that negatively, or we're trying to manipulate two things too many things, we're not taking advantage of, and we're not understanding the natural movements. But being a part of this system an active creation, getting to, I don't know, insert ourselves into this bigger picture of this natural world. It's a pretty neat opportunity that I've come to really appreciate. And today's discussion, we're gonna hear all about how Jeff does this with a very strategic point of view that I think is really interesting too if you're approaching this from a hunting perspective. So that is it from my rant today. I don't know if I answer the question any better. I'm sure you guys have some opinions on that too. I'd love to hear it. And I guess now I will stop my rambling. We're in a pause. We're going to hear from our white Tail Property segment right now, and then we will get Jeff Sturgis on the line this week with white Tail Properties. We are joined by Tom James, a land specialist out of Central Indiana, and Tom is going to be telling us about what the very first habitat improvements should be for a land manager. Good question, Um. Some of the first key things the fundamentals, if you want to think about, is when you think in terms of what a deer requires, the food security, covering water and the q d m A has a great analogy of the thinking about the lowest hole on the bucket that you need to plug out to keep the water from leaking out. So what could be missing on your property that the surrounding land may have, and so you want to do a quick assessment. Maybe it's food, may be it's water maybe if you can maybe it's cover. If you can look through your woods and see two hundred yards, then you've got an issue with with too much shade, not enough sunlight creating new potential brows and cover for your deer. So maybe it's a timber, a timber either stand improvement or a harvest or a combination of two that's gonna allow some more new growth to come in and picking up your property. Maybe it's as simple as you're not leaving an area alone as a sanctuary. If you're trapesing all over forty acres and pushing deer off every time you go, then that's that's obviously an issue. So maybe just an adjustment in the way that you move around and hunt the property and approach things. Uh. If food is your lacking ingredient or your lowest hole in the bucket, then even in timber, it takes some work, but you can certainly clear out some openings and plant food. Um and I would suggest considering both perennial food and annual food stuff that you can leave in like clover and chicory as a perennial coming back every year. And do some fall planted cereal rains and brassicas for the fall time. So you've got a year round program going on, and typically it's not an issue in the Midwest. But if if water is of lacking ingredient, then maybe you can create a water hole or even some of the new systems like the banks water watering tanks that you can set up that are mobile and fill up and provide water sources for your deer so that they don't have to leave the property to water. Again, that's fairly rare, but that could be a consideration. If you'd like to learn more and to see the properties that Tom currently has listed for sale, visit whitetail properties dot com. Backslash James, that's j A. M. E. S all right with me. Now back on the show for the third time is Jeff Sturgis. Thanks for being here, Jeff, Oh, it's great to be with you. Marcus Is, this is great. I love love chatting with you, and I hope we have a good good talk today. I definitely, I definitely think we will. And I was just thinking back the very first time you were on the show was all the way back in the spring of two thousand fourteen, so four years ago, um, and that that's kind of crazy. Yeah yeah. And in that one we talked about food plots, and then we talked once more. I think two years ago we kind of talked about hunting and a lot of your different ideas revolving around actually taking action during the hunting season. But today what I wanted us to focus on was kind of habitat improvements three five, Like the entire spectrum of things that we can do on a habitat, because I know from reading all of your books and your many articles and watching all of your YouTube videos and all the things that you're doing these days, um, you have a lot of thoughts and philosophies and ideas and actual tactics on how to take a property and turn it into a a white tail paradise. I mean you you kind of have ideas that go across the whole spectrum, impacting everything from food to betting too transitions to how dear use a property to how you as a hunter can use the property. And I've alway is thought that of all the people out there talking about, you know, manipulating or working on dear related habitat, your way of thinking about things has always made the most sense to me, and it's like intrigued me the most because of how strategic you are with everything. Um. So this is just a long roundabout way of saying, I love the stuff you talk about, Jeff, and I'm glad that you're here to talk about it with us. Well, I appreciate that market I know it's something. Um. I actually, as you can tell probably from the writings, videos, books, whatever, I have an extreme passion for it and and you know, and that's where all this started, was taking that love of hunting and working on habitat and then kind of just falling into a career opportunity and being able to put those ideas from all the hunting experience um into into the habitat and then helping people, whether it's writing, creating the videos, are actually going to clients visit. So UM yeah, it's it's I really love to hear when people appreciate it, and um keeping fired up and I if you can't tell, I love doing it. So I feel very very blessed to be able to do what I do. So, so, what is it about the habitat side of things that's so compelling for you? Especially maybe for someone listening who likes to hunt, but they haven't yet tried making changes to the places that they hunt um or manage. What is it for you that's that kind of gotten you by the heart strings? Well, I think, um, it's it's the entire picture of the white tail world. And and and honestly, I'm pretty boring because I don't um, I don't elk hunt. I do very little bird hunting, on grouse hunting, things like that, scroll hunting growing up. But I just I love white tails and and it all revolves back to hunting in the hunting days and growing up as a kid and trying to have it had we had to figure it out ourselves. We came from a non hunting family and so diving into it and always want to improve our hunt. And then I think it was line I met ed Spinezzola, I was introduced to the qt M a might even and from there just really begin to realize and I start planning food plats. So going back a little ways, it really wasn't a lot of information out there, But again going back to want to improve the hunt, found there were great ways to improve the herd and use habitat to improve the herd on small parcels and uh, and really it was the love of hunting, and that translated into kind of year round for shooting, passion um of all things whitetail, and that certainly includes the habitat. You know that even translates to public lands. Um, whether you're improving the habitat on private land, are trying to recognize those habitat features on public land? Um, it really revolves around white tails trying to figure out the daily lights and and having a passion for that. Yeah. I have really enjoyed how you relate a lot of the stuff back to how you can identify it in a setting public land. To that that I thought was pretty unn interesting. Um, because there's a lot of things, like you talk about, we're trying to create things. If you have a property where you can manage and and make habitat changes yourself, you can create these features. But if you don't have that ability at least understanding what types of features are the deer, what kind of features do relate to? If you know how to at least identify those that are already created, you can go out and find those on public land or pieces you already have permission on right, right right, and and to me, the concepts that you manage habitat are heard with um and and even hunting. Really there they can go between private land, public land, and then big parcels and small parcels and uh and really you just have to understand that balance of how to accurately apply that concept. And that's why there's no cookie cutter design. There's no cookie cutter bedding area, travel corridor, food plots. You know that you really have to match them to the specific habitat. And and then when I find you do that and you hit that rate un match for property to habitat improvement, then when you use some of the concepts, um that in the really concepts that you know, there's not a lot of concepts out there. We can just read a book and say this is. You know, I have things that you know, phrased depth to cover, parallel and habitat features, perpendicular access, and they're personal efficiency and there's all these different concepts, but they're really just things that I recognize out in the deer world, whether I'm scouting client parcels or in public land or my own hunting pursuits. Try to name it, see it over and over again. I think I've worked on seven parcels in twenty states now and and so I get to see these concepts played out from northern Michigan to Virginia, down in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Kansas, wherever it might be, and try to understand why deer doing something here? How does that relate to what they're doing over there? Um, maybe just a difference of balance of size or parcel or a number of deer. And then uh really actually try to apply that to every person you go to. Yeah, yeah, that that breadth of experience you have makes I think your perspective especially helpful. Um inst Like you said, you've worked on so many different people's properties and given them new ideas and consulted with them. When you walk a new property, what what what are you looking for? How do you decide what should be done? Can you walk us through your mindset when you when you step foot on that new piece. Yeah, it's it's kind of interesting because you know, a lot of people want to just jump right on the property right away. But I found over the years that it's really important to sit down and have a discussion in the morning so that um, I can start to get to know them, for one thing, their goals or resources, because that's a complexity in itself right there. And I guess it boils down to I love the puzzle, whether it's the puzzle of the habitat and the hunting and how everything fits together, but also the people that you work with. It's that they're part of the puzzle because everyone has different resources, goals, UM, and they come from different background as an experienced level. So that's what we're doing first thing, so that when we hit the property, UM already have a good idea of the deer numbers in the area, the hunting pressure in the area, and you can kind of figure that out regionally a little bit. UM. You have an idea of what deer going to relate to UM as far as what they like to bed in. For example, do they like real tight, constricted space like in northern Ohio or they want to are they used to a lot of space with low deer numbers and a lot of cover, say in northern Minnesota or even a Big Woods of Kentucky or Big Woods is Pennsylvania. And so when we hit the hit the woods, really have a little bit of a mindset of what you're going to relate to. And what I'm really looking for is, you know, you're starting to everything boils back down to food. Food is what defines daily movement for deer. And and so I'm looking if they're on board for food plots, are expanding their food plot programs, and we're really starting at food first. And if it makes sense of the food plots here, meaning that we can plant food there, we can get around it. We don't have to spook the deer that are that are feeding on that plot. Then how does that relate to a betting area, travel through that betting area? And most importantly, once you have those definitions in place of deer movement, then how does that relate to hunter access? And so I'm going around the property and I'm basically looking at all the habitat types. You for example, might have a forty acre tag alter swamp. We don't need to have a grid pattern and cross through that tag alter swamp and look at everything. But I need to really see how the edges of that tag Alter swamp relate to the edge of that hardwoods, which relates to that clear cut that they just put in, which relates to a food plot. And where all those positions on the property and how they can be used to basically move during deer during the daylight hours, to define their use. And then once that definition is made, then we can define how people hunt. And it's not just you know, it's a great stand location because it's a cruising funnel. It's this is a good stand location because it's reasonable to expect that this would be on the down winds out of a buck betting area. Something you could use in the morning. There's an intermediate stand where you can use for cruising for bucks that are going to food in the afternoon or coming from food in the morning. Um, this is a stand location closer to food that you can use in the evening. Might be able to target does easily at a spot like that and successfully without infringing that buck betting. And so it's you're putting this all these pieces together, and then that gives you an assemblage of stand locations that you can actually say, this is a reasonable to think this is a morning stand, as an afternoon stand, us, evening stand us and all days stand. So as we put these pieces together out of the property that day, I'm putting that together in my head and then we get back at the end of the night and draw out that plan and use the aerial photo and a fine point stylus and then draw out that plan, discuss all those stand locations, happitent features, water holes, mooscrapes, whatever might have been that fit for them and their personality that resources everything, and then and then go over those questions at the end of the night. So we're really trying to put the pieces together, um and tailoring it, uh too, on a very personal level to that that individual client. Yeah. So so now what if I'm just a regular guy or girl out there on my own, on my property, how how would you recommend someone You know, I've got thoughts on this, but how would you recommend someone determine what's needed? You know, how do I figure out where my week spots are in my property if I if I don't have someone like you who can go out there with some experience and tell me, um, what are the things I should be looking for or how do I know where to start? Kind of if I'm trying to figure out what's the how do I take in the big picture of my property and figure out where to go where Step one and two, Yeah, that's uh, that's a really good question mark because you know, part of it is I feel there are no secrets, and I think I have close to six d articles on my site and we talked about this and then YouTube videos and books. So when I I keep notes out on the client properties, I have about I don't know a hundred and fifty potential articles or videos, you know, topic. I'm always finding new information. But really what it boils down to is, yet we can have all those concepts I try to discuss until I can't discuss them anymore. I really try to give as much information out there, but it boils down to on a parcel, you can have too much food and you can have too much cover. There's a great balance of both. And once you have that balance, you're trying to make the property as attractive and in the movement of deer defined as much as possible in the person so that you can still get on and off the parcel without spooking the deer within that parcel. So really, first you're looking at that balance. Um. You know, you could, for example, clear cut your property create a lot of brows um, but brows in itself doesn't define daily movement unless it's in the wilderness area where there's really not that that becomes or maybe on public land down the Ohioway I hunted, or up in the upm Michigan where that clear cut becomes corn field in the area, and so that defines that daily movement. And so I'm looking at how can you define daily movement which with a food plot, iful plant it with the neighbors agg field, but the egg fields are poor because they're always rotating. Um. They could be plowed under, they could be picked one year not the other could be beans when you're corn the next. So really I'm looking at if you have a lot of great cover, we need to complement that with food. And then I was on a property yesterday for example, they had forty acres of food plots on acres um and they really I'd like to them to cut that down to probably twenty five acres of food, provide more screening and cover a auldmost food sources, and actually work on the quality of the cover that they have. They had a lot of cover, but it needs to be a higher level of quality cover, and then that will help define where do your betting on a daily basis and know whether they're feeding. So really you're looking at that balance of food and cover and making sure that you're not improving so much. Because you can imagine, just did a new video today, just shot at where talked about daytime properties and nighttime properties. There's a lot of nighttime properties, and some of the biggest nighttime properties, meaning that's where the deer go after dark, which is what you don't want to have, are some of the most improved. Because imagine you attract all the deer in the neighborhood because you have great native grass plantings, you have really high quality food plots that you've completed to a team, you've perfected. You have water holes, maybe even mocked scrapes, travel corridors, acorns, orchard whatever you might have. You have a lot of attractions in your personal but you don't manage that level of attraction. And so because you don't manage it, um you're you constantly set yourself up for spooking deer. All the deer you've invited in the neighborhood from a mile away, then you go in and spook them in your Your property quickly becomes nocturnal. So you're really trying to not only assess that bounce of cover and food, But how can you position that and define that movement on daily basis you can actually hold those deer and keep from spooking them every time you go out hunt, because ultimately the lowest hole in the bucket is hunting pressure. How much hunting pressure you apply on your property, and there's no amount of quality habitat that can overcome that. In fact, a lot of times, the higher the quality habitat, the more risk you have of not being able to manage that attraction on your personal and creating that nocturnal herd. Can you elaborate on what's causing that nocturnal herd? Because you talked about spooking deer, but can you I've heard you talk in the past about the attract repel conundrum. Um, can you can you talk a little bit more about that specifically? So? I think what you're getting at is that you're saying you've made all these great improvements, like a food plot or something, but you haven't been strategic about where it is or what your access is, and then you're walking past or doing something like that. Can you can you elaborate or expand on that? Sure? Sure, there's um. And there's a lot to elaborate on that because um, for example, it's not just the amount of food, it could be the position of food. Uh And and obviously if you have a giant food plot behind a cabin and every time you go out in the morning, every time you come back in the evening, you're spooking deer, then you're educating deer. Um and and so food plot is a part of that. You know, is that food plot on your on your access trail going in and out of the land. And because of that attraction of the food, which which a food plot really uh per square inch is probably the highest level of attraction that you can have on your property. You know, some of the dry parcels. I'm sitting here looking at four foot bluffs around my house in the valley where I'm at and um and up there a little water hole that's yell and think can be a huge level of attraction. But a food plot is where they come, they stay, and pretty easy to spook them off. So um, if your food plots are setting yourself up for uh spook and deer, then then they can really be doing a lot more harm than good. But that can be said for native grass plannings, betting areas UM. And and then another thing is if you're creating betting areas and food source UM, that that set yourself up to actually spook deer that are on the way to and from those areas. UM, then you can hurt yourself. Or you're creating random movements, meaning that you have cover on the inside, you're bringing them deer to food on the outside, and then you're quickly sending those deer right through over to your neighbors. UM. Your neighbor could have a stand on the fence line that's actually spooking dear on your property too because you have that food plot on the edge. UM. And then andally in other things you have, you know, the food can really the attractions where they're located, piecing those attractions together, pushing deer into or out of your line of movement. You're you're hunting access. And then at the same time, the food plots that are poorly located to infringe on your depth of cover. And and what I mean by that is you can have a forty acre personal and you're putting a five acre food plot in the middle, and you can't go a hundred and fifty five yards in any direction before you're off your border, so you have to access your landing, you have to house box and does on your parcel if you want to try to hold them all in that dred fifty five yards of depth and you just run out of room where you can cut that parcel in half, create twenty acres running lengthlies is still four hundred and forty yards deep. Put that five acre parcel of food plot or five acre food plot right in the front of the parcel, and if you do the math, you still have over three yards of depth of cover behind that food plot where you can expect to house uh dose box and then you can actually create an assemblage of stands where you have backside of betting for bucks and then does evening stands up closer to the food. And because the food plot is positioned towards the front of a parcel and you're you're maximizing your depth, that twenty acres can be easier to manage your on and actually manage your hunt. And that that larger forty acres with the food poorly positioned in the middle, can you elaborate with a lot of stuff, but depth depth of cover can you elaborate on on what you mean by that and why that's important? Sure? Yeah, I see one thing that I firmly believe in is that as a buck ages um, he really likes a more remote setting for his daytime betting. And and I even find that as a box said, and I've been able to observe box around here at least up through eight years old. And what's incredible is about some of these older box is that their home range during the daylight hours seems to really shrink. And I'm just going by a camera observation where we had an eight year old buck that over the five years we had pictures of them, several hundred pictures. We had all but three or four of those pictures out of one camera location. And now the neighbors around us only saw that deer around that area and it ended up being shot two hundred yards from there. Um and so very defined. I look at as a as an older bock, as a grumpy old man, you know, the older he gets. And now I'm not saying my dad is a grumpy old man. He's eight years old. He's one of the kind of kind of men that I know in my life Um. He's an awesome person, but I do know as he's gotten older, he really enjoys as alone time. He was able to sit with my son Jake the last week UM in the house and spend time with Jake and it was just the two of them and everyone else is out of the house. And my dad loved his time on the couch right here just looking out at the hills, his quiet time. And he really um seems to be want to be left alone for the most part. He loves to be social with the family and everything, but he really loves to be left alone. He loves his Crossford puzzle time as nap time. And I look at a mature bucks that way. So if you have a parcel that you don't have a lot of depth on, meaning that a big food source is the highest amount of stress to a to a deer. Um as far as there'll only go into a lot of times the last hour of daylight hour and a half, that mature box only showing up at at right at dark, there's a lot of stress in and out of that food thought. With those and fawns hunters gravitate towards that food, so it creates a pretty stressful situation, and it seems like the more stress you have at that food source, so larger the food source, the more deer you have, then those box just pushed further and further into the resources recesses of the property. Now I also see like if you're down to northern Ohio and you don't have a lot of cover southern Michigan, northern Indiana, southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, then you can compact that movement where a buck doesn't have to go a half mile away to find a remote spot because a lot of times he doesn't have that amount of cover available, So he might go three yards off that food source at the most um and then you go to transition into mixed agg you know, cover and food, and you might find that buck goes back yards and that's an acceptable distance from that remote from that you know, high traffic food source. We're in the upm Michigan. I've shot mature box that were three cores a mile two mile back off of bait piles that are in the hardware, and guys are getting their pictures, the pictures of that buck at ten o'clock midnight, two in the morning, and then I'm shooting at ten thirty in the morning, three cores a mile away, back in his honey hoole, back in his betting area, so that that depth of cover required up in that big wilderness land where dear use a lot of spaces actually close for three coarters a mile. So if you're looking at a small parcel that's forty acres and you're putting food in the middle, and then you're allowing dose to bet around that food, which is they can tolerate a lot more stress than the herd heard mentality of those dos than a mature box, then you really run out of room for mature buck to potentially bet on the edge of your property or within your property boundaries. And even if you have a hundred acres or two acres, if you're fragmenting that person with a lot of food and a lot of different food plots, even though you have a large parcel, you're creating such a stressful environment with the amount of food on that parcel and the amount of traffic in and out of that food by both dose fons and hunters, then you really infringe on the depth that you need to actually have a mature box. And so that's one of the things that I I take a good hard look at, and that's also what I look at on public land. You know, I like, if i'm if I have a perching spot, I'm looking at working at a hunt an hour in forty five minutes in and get in the middle of the cover where there might be a mature box that um has been pushed through or is preferred to bet in um away from the high traffic hunting locations. So you're looking at a pretty large depth of cover that you need on publicly and versus private, and then trying to manage the locations of your food sources on private land so they're not infringing on your depth, your potential depth as as much as possible. So what's what's like? And I realized this is there's no cookie cutter there's no perfect cookie cutter answer to this, because it's all dependent on your situation. But but if you had to give me like a cookie cutter answer as best as possible, what's like the ideal way to position a set of improvements so that you get these things you talked about so you get that great depth of cover. But you you know, I'm also thinking about you talked about having food plots too close to the edge of the property then sending the deer to the neighbor, Like, what's the You had to give a generic best way to position these things. If you had like your perfect scenario, maybe what would that look like. Well, a lot of times food works really well near borders UM and borders meaning borders that your neighbors don't have the cover on that will potentially households deer during the day, So food plots close enough to the border that you can still get around it without spoken deer and your position in that food For example, UM, I've had clients that had some great food plots up near a school or near a factory, near subdivision, UM, near an open egg field, where you're bringing deer out of your cover and from fifty yards from your property border so that they can hit that food source as an afternoon food source that that um, you know, hour before daylight food source, and then after dark they slip out to the egg field, which is a safe location. The opposite of that would be as if you put a food horse on your neighbors on your border right next to your neighbor that houses the best cover in the area. Then you're potentially putting deer back on your neighbor's property that relate to your food source, and you're giving the neighbor of the daylight movement and the opportunity to actually harvest the deer that are focusing on your food plot. Um you know, after darker, at darker, just before dark. Betting areas work really well next to um high quality or high high pressure on your neighbors. And so a lot of times, let's say your property was along longer road, there's agg field to the south, you had open woods, and then your neighbors have woods to the north of view. The worst spot to put a food plot would be at the back of your property on the north side, right next to your neighbor's woods. The best spot to put that food to be closer to the road, so that you're actually holding deer on your own land, letting them travel across the depth of your land and then hit that food um, and then potentially go to the agg fields out to the side. You don't want to ever create a situation where you're forcing gear across the road, but um, you know, maybe your cabins are You're putting that food plot a safe distance behind your cabin so that you can actually get in and out of the cabin, get onto your property, and not spook those deer out in that food plot. But the food plot represents more of a dead end of movement mean, meaning that they come out of the cover, come across your land, hit that food, and then go wherever after dark. Interesting. So through all this, and you've mentioned this several times while even explaining some of these scenarios, but you talk about defined movement UM and I and I mentioned this early on, but part of what I'm so fascinated about when it comes to how you approach this is how you have everything kind of working together. It's a it's a systemized approach. Some guys just put a food plot where wherever they can put a food plot, and then they put some bedding or they try to improve some bedding where it looks good and they're like, all right, cool. They put as much food as they can get in there. But but it seems like you're always thinking very very strategically about how these things interact with each other, how each provement interacts with the others, and so then you create what you call defined movement. Can you tell us more about a what you mean by that and be how you know expand on how you create that, How these different positions and things you've talked about, how they create that defined movement? Well defined movement is the daily movement of a deer herd. And it's pretty cool because dose move more straight line. They basically during the daylight hours, they move from betting in the afternoon to their afternoon food source, hopefully about an hour before dark. Hopefully it's on your land, and then they move off from there, so they move that straight little window and and really it's a small movement. Um. I love to use food sources to position um those doughs first because you can get them to bed fifty sevent yards off that food pot if you have just adequate cover, and then you can you're basically by using food, you're positioning does and you're telling the door heard, I want you to bed within a hundred yards of this food source. And then that's freeing up the rest of your cover on your property for potential buck bedding at some point somewhere. So once you have that food, once you have a dough bedding, then you can figure out where the buck betting is um. It's important that your food sources aren't open right into the cover, meaning that if you have open hardwoods for two yards surrounding your food source, then that potential bedding is going to push two hundred yards back to whatever cover starts wherever changes and then again buck betting is gonna behind that, so you're starting that first doll lay or a long ways away from food. So what I'm trying to do is have a compact movement of daily defined movement where we have a reasonable expectation that box are bedded over there somewhere, and it might even be on the edge of your neighbors. But you're trying to define that after new movement, so that bucks are there, dolls are closer to the food, and they're all moving towards that food source in the afternoon, and then after dark they go wherever. And so that's that definition of movement. You're using bedding, area, positioning, and food to define that daily movement. And then along that definition movement, if it's hill country out here, then I'm using benches and saddles and the topography of the land where deer moving already, and then you can enhance that with travel cord or cuttings. You can enhance it with betting areas where they should be in betting area, cuttings that are appropriately matched for that size of the parcel, and then um you're using water holes and even mocked scrapes to further define that movement. So the more you can define that movement, now you can go on it and not the other way around. You know, the old school thinking is this is a great open field, let's put us if this is the best soilers, put a food pot there. This is a great place for betting area because it's nice and all. This is a good spot for a pond because it's a low area. But you have to match those habitat improvements to each other. So it's not like you're just gonna send deer on and a carousel on your property all the time. It's this year trying to create the movement. So that and that's why you like using multiple food sources or long food sources, food sources where dear can be hidden around owners, because then you can tap into multiple betting areas and multiple movements, small compact movements on even a small parcel, so that you can actually fit more deer into that movement more dear into that definition of movement, and then that gives you a wide variety of stand locations. So by by creating strategically located improvements, be that betting areas, or food sources or a few of those other things you mentioned, you can get dear to more consistently travel a route that you know about. And then once you know that route and once deer doing what you have manipulated the habitat to allow them to do, that allows you to a make sure you're hunting more consistently in the right place, and B I think you would agree with this. It also allows you to better access and exit your property because you know where deer should be at any given time, which results in less educated deer. Right is that is that kind of why having this deflopment? Yeah? Yeah, you you define it a lot easier than I did. Mark. It's a lot shorter and more concise. But but yeah, that's that's it in a nutshell. It's really and the thing about box are a little bit different, is um. I have a video coming out soon when I talk about those traveling in straight lines and box traveling a loopers meaning a buck will travel from the same betting area every day, but depending on the wind and maybe even his mood, he might come in from a completely different directions. So it's almost like a football. You know, one one way comes in on the lower side of the ridge and it it It has this big arc that loops into the food plot on this way there in this direction or food source, and then depending on his mood or wind direction or another buccan area a doo he wants to chase, he loops the other way. It's almost completes a football pattern of movement where you have the same starting and stopping point, but he loops around regardless. So if you're making those habitat improvements, worry beds, worry travels, the attractions along that travel route and in the form of the same mox scrapes or water holes, maybe in a mineral station if legal in the summertime, you're really reinforcing that movement, making that movement more attractive and more defined. And then at the same time, what I find is a stand locations along those movements. There's some stand locations, and I can get away with hunting every few days, even in a high pressure area, because I'm rarely given the deer an opportunity to see me or get into my wind cone or hear me when I get in and out. Because they're defined movements make my hunting approach highly defined. Okay, so let's let's let's go to the first part of this defined movement, which is where they spend most of their day, that being a betting area. Um, can you can you tell me a little bit about how you go about, you know, choosing the area when you kind of already have I guess, but if there's anything else when it comes to choosing where to make those betting air improvements. But then more importantly, what are the some of the things you recommend doing to improve or create betting areas? Um? Yeah, talking about that? Yeah, that, And I really like that question because, um, if you look online, there's a lot of information out there about creating buckbeds, for example, and in what I find is it's a little bit of reverse situation where um, once you have high quality afternoon food source of high quality food plot. And what I like about food plots versus an egg field is, for example, you can have a one acre food plot and if that's gonna last enough in your season, and you have a diverse enough planting in there, then you can highly define movement to a one acre spot on the map and as opposed to a forty acre or a d acre egg field. It's very precise and and you know obviously compared to a uh fifty acre clear cut. And so by having that food plot very small area. At the same time, when you improve and let's say you screen that food plot, so when you're standing in that food plot, you can't see into the woods very far. It doesn't take a great distance before those will feel comfortable bedding close to that food source, especially if you never spook them out of that side of the plot. It might be the open timber on one side, grassy field whatever, and the other side you have you have betting areas. So really you're using that food to define dough betting opportunity. And then what's left over is that buck betting opportunity. So that might be up on that upper knoll if you're starting from bottom going up. If your food sources are up top, then those doors are going to bed just over the over the edge, over the military crests around in that area in a bench, and then you're gonna have those box betting down low. So really the food of the position of the food will dictate if box are betting high or low, and where those doors are betting. And then so you have those that logical chain where you have food, food sets up dough betting, and then do betting sets up buck betting opportunity. Doesn't make sense that as long as you have adequate betting, the dough betting is actually more important than the buck betting, because if you can hold those doughs, like for example, go into a Buffalo County property in Wisconsin, you know, famed Big Trophy County area, and you have these finger agg fields down below with these hardwood ridges, and the deer might not be bettered until there's three d yards up on top of that ridge because it's all open, wide, wide, open mature timber all the way down to the food source. By creating cuttings along the food source, going up to that first bench a hundred yards up, maybe that second bench that's two yards up, you can pull those does that are bedded on top right down to the food the food plot or ad field edge, and then that second bench you get hard How are you how is more does or even young bucks. By time you get back up to the top, now you actually have room for mature bucks. So it all starts with creating that betting near the food and then positioning from there. So as far as positioning and and betting opportunity, I hope that makes sense. And and then yeah, and then when you dive into um how to create betting, really it depends on your property. For example, I like a lot of a little tight constricted betting areas where you really want side cover. Side covers very important. If um you know about whether it's thirty of the lands I go to or thirty five, it's appropriate to hinge cut on us on a you know a small percentage of parcels hinge cutting. I really like to create hinge cuts that are about waste time because then you're putting cover and brows and potential food right at deer level. A lot of these hinge cuts that are had high for one more dangerous to cut. But too, you're putting that cover above the deer, and you're putting the food well above the deer so that they can't utilize the cover or the food if they're looking side to side. So I like hinge cuts and I like cuttings where deer can actually maze and pocket throughout those cuttings, and if they can only see five ten yards in front of their face, that's great. And low cover areas like northern Ohio, you know the areas I've talked about, southern Michigan, southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, northern Indiana where you have um a lack of cover in some areas and you have a lot of deer that you're trying to fit in one spot. But if you take that same betting area where they can only see five ten yard in front of the face, and you put that up in a big wood setting up north, or even a big wood setting over in Pennsylvania, down in Kentucky, southern Indiana, wherever it might be, where we have a lot of space and maybe fewer deer, then those gear what I find is they completely avoid that area because it's too tightly constricted. And you can kind of imagine if you have deer that are up in the wilderness area up in northern Minnesota and uh up in Michigan, for example, and they have there's a lot of coyotes, but there's a lot of wolves, and there's even cougars in some of those areas. Those deer do not want to be in a tightly confined area, and they're just really even for example, switch grass field, if they're bed in the switchgrass field up in the up in Michigan, a wolf can go on the down wind side of that and pinpoint every gear that's in there and easily take on whatever they want. I think deer realize that. And so up there you're looking at a deer used to see in forty fifty yards. They might be had a little knoll, they might have cuttings around them, but they're not right up against them. They can base the escape in any direction. And so you're trying to match the size of the bedding area, and that how tightly constricted that betting area is, how far a deer can see, how many different ways they can escape, and how many different directions, And you're matching that to the number of deer in the amount of cover you have. As a number of gear decrease and the amount of cover goes up, then you're making your bedding ears a lot larger, so deer can freely move around them. They still have browls in the ground, they still have side cover, but they can flee in any direction, and they want to be able to see in their beds yards. And as the amount of cover shrinks, as the amount of deer goes go up, then as populations increase, then you can fit a lot of deer. You can compartmentalize so that you can actually literally fit deer, fit a buck into a small bed that he might it might be okay, he might tolerate that you can only see five ten ft. So know, like, just like there's no cookie cutter plan for a parcel, there's no cookie cutter design or plan for a betting area. And so I get a little nervous when I see some of the stuff online where you know, uh, someone's talking about this is the best way to make a betting area or this is the best way, because really with that balance of size, um, there's a lot of different ways to make a betting area. And then again it goes back to landowner resources um their familiar area with a chainsaw, and you know, again, let alone the complexity of the number of deer and the amount of cover. Some of the betting areas that like just general wood woods maintenance, it might be that you have and overall attraction for the woods and trying to increase the cary capacity. Might be that someone would go in and every thirty forty yards are knocking down a giant red maple on their land, and the low land setting in Michigan, for example, they're putting that log and top on the ground. But the decrease in the canopy overall by about thirty so you get more regeneration. And so you can take a ten fifteen acre area that you really want to hold deer generally, and and and put a lot of structure on the ground and a lot of regeneration browls here turning that betting area that was a one or two out of ten into a five or six out of ten. And then if it's tightly constricted area there's not a lot of cover, then you can really work on half acre one acre pocket cuttings that are a little bit more like a clear cut or deer and mazing pocket room. So you can say that generally in my woods, this is going to hold more deer. Maybe you're creating a timber cutting in the select cut harvest of your timber if you have good timber value. But in these little one two acre pockets out of this forty acres, you might make five or six. I'm designating that there's a possibility for mature box to bet here, to define movement from this betting area through this um you know, mid range level of quality betting area to a food source and then you give them a travel corridor and they and they follow it. So really a betting areas, no, no cookie cutter betting areas depends on the property. And I really we try to talk about that in the videos that I create, in the in the articles, but that that does create a lot of reading for somebody and a lot of viewing. And but I do try to break that down because again it goes back to same concepts of gear management UM that I feel work on any parcel. But at the same time, the application of balance can be drastically different from different from one person to another. Yeah. Now, now, from what I gather from you know, hearing a lot of things you've talked about and from you just said there, it seems like there definitely is something to the location of betting areas that might define where doze bed versus where bucks bed. But I think correct me if I'm wrong here. But I think I've also heard you say that you don't put much stock into the idea of like creating a single specific buckbed and saying this is gonna be where buck's going to bed because I pulled this tree down and I cleared out this space, and you know, people try to do that. Is that Is that right? Yes? Definitely? So what what I like to do is and it's almost like, um, you know, I'm not a betting man. I don't play poker much. You know, a little bit deer Camp dabbled, and I'm not very good at it. I I'll play when there's nickels and dimes involved, let's put it that way, and there's nothing else to do. But I do feel that you play poker in the Deerwoods a lot, and you're making decisions based on balance and level of risk versus reward, and one of those comes into the form of creating buck betting and betting opportunities. So, for example, using food sources to define where dough betting is now doe betting opportunities the same as buck betting opportunity. Just because you make a larger room or a smaller room doesn't dictate that there's gonna be more doughs or less does or more box in that location. Um, it's just gonna betting opportunities. So you're you're housing those doughs next to that food source. And then you're saying, I want box to bet up on that knoll or bench instead of going up there and hinging all my efforts and all my bets on a betting area that's twenty twenty feet and I'm making this canopy tie down thing, and I'm gonna I'm gonna hope that a box beds in that exact spot. I'd prefer to take a quarter acre a half acre there, um, knockdown appreciable amount of timber, make sure that deer can freely move throughout the inside of it. There's very few dead ends, meaning that a deer turns right, there's a twenty yard corridor and at the dead ends and he's he's a sitting duck for a predator that's going through there. So I'm making sure I take out the dead ends. It's more like amazing pocket. If you took your your kids too, they could maze through there and have a good time and um and enjoy it. Um. You know, never ending trail through there they can escape in any direction. I'd rather say that I'm pretty sure that the buck's gonna bet up there, and he's gonna be half acre to hal to one acre, maybe even a quarter acre in that area sometime, and I'm gonna probably take about one tanket chainsaw gas, which will run about an hour and fifteen minutes hour and twenty minutes to cut time. I'm gonna cut that timber down um in the safest way it'll fall, mindful that I don't want to make a big mass with a big, you know, top that's going to fall in the middle of everything. And then I'm gonna go through, back through and clean it. Put about a half tank of gas. So I'm gonna use one tank of gas one and a half tank of gas through the chainsaw in each one of those locations. And and then I'm gonna use travel corridors, maybe even have a stand location or two in the back set of that betting for different winds, maybe even different access points, different departure routes from that betting area. And so instead of hinging all my efforts just on that one small betting area, I much prefer to take a quarter acre to one acre betting area and be sure that he's going to be in there as opposed to hoping he's going to be in there, that I hit the right mark with that with that bock betting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, what about a situation where where in that instance where you talked about not having a lot of cover, Let's say my property has poor cover, maybe a lot not a lot of timber, a lot of open fields. But I know I need to improve betting or create new betting areas. How would you say I try to create a betting area from an open field? Could I use something like switch for gas or something like that. Yeah, that's ah, that's that's one of them. That's an area I'm really passionate about. And it's a lot of fun because, um, early successional growth is a great buzzword, you know, early successional growth. Just take an old field, let it go. Well, I have an old field and if you look on some of my videos and some of the drone shots and some of the work we do on on the main property, we shoot a lot of videos on that field has been foul since the fifties and it's probably covered with about five per of deer cover. Deer cover meaning that there's no structure in there that will actually hold deer throughout the hunting season. Once saw the foliage comes down, you know, I'd say November, December, October UM for that three months. And so even though that's been there for sixty seven years and hasn't been agged, it's been allowed to return to early successional growth. It hasn't taken place. Now if you go to better soils or other areas, maybe areas that are as a steep they can they can fill in and uh ten to fifteen years UM, which would be on the early side. The beauty of switch grass. Switch grass is a grass. To me, it's only white tail grass that I really like the plant because it's the one grass that can withstand snows, heavy winds and last in through January February and a lot of times through March or April before you get spring green up. So that's it's a type of cover species that you can quickly convert an old field to it. And so let's say you have an agg gland, you know, some agg land that you want to convert. You can frost seed switch grass from September through February media in early March, get the seed on the soil, and then you can use chemicals to make sure that that seed, that switch grass is established. So let's say just for quick you know, quick thought. Here, you take ten acres of idle agg land. As long as you're soil exposed, you can throw the switch grass at about eight to ten pounds an acre, which is a high rate. You want very thick cover. What you're doing is you're putting that switch grass around the outside, around much of the ten acre space in there, but you're only putting out about five acres of switch grass in total. The pockets in between the switch grass you allow to revert to early successional growth and you kill out the grass in those areas so that you actually have broad leaves come in. Broad leaves in the former golden rod, ragweed, woody brush, woody brows, shrubs, trees, maybe throw some box old seeds in there, some maple seeds that grow quickly. All come in the form of food. Grass equals no food when it comes to even switch grass. So what you're doing is using the switch grass that in most areas will grow anywhere from forty inches to five ft in the first year and by the second year six seven ft high. You're using that as the betting structure, and then you're allowing for those early successional pockets on the inside to actually create brows that's actually hidden by the switch grass. The difference of the field like that compared to early successional growth is you can white tails can use that. By the end of the second summer and going into the second hunting season, you have sufficient cover, lots of cover, and then you have brows. It doesn't matter if it's only a foot higher two ft or three ft high within that switch grass that you can actually house deer hold deer or in that same field could take anywhere from ten to twelve fifteen years on the early side, as much as twenty thirty years to cover in and fill in appreciably enough to actually hold deer, just allowing to go and and have early successional growth. That is the same concept to let's say you have ten acres a red seedar. Instead of just getting rid of all the red ceedar and trying to replant something different, just pocket out of that red seater on the inside, kill out the red seater that's coming and kill out the grass, allow it to revert to broad leafs early successional broad leaf growth. Now you're using the red seedar as your base base form of structure and cover just like the switch grass, just like you can do with pines, you can do with spruce. Might even have shrubs that that you can do that in and and so you're using that base form of structure in the form of the switch grass or the red seedar, creating those pockets in the inside. And it's the same concept either way. So yeah, that kind of stuff is really intriguing to me because I feel like when you a lot of people look at a big white open field or something as like dead, no good land for wildlife. But if you look at it in the way you're talking about, it's almost like a blank canvas and you can paint whatever picture you're awesome, Like, that's pretty cool. Yeah, kind of limiting for a tree stands. But at the same time, kind of imagine if you have ten acre field, you're looking at a wreck tangle north to south. Um, let's say you have an open egg field to the south. You're going north into that switch grass field. You're putting a large food plot in the salt east corner in the southwest corner, and you're hiding it within that switch grass. That switch grass is six seven ft tall along the side. Let's say it's fifty ft into your property. And then you're creating lines that come down to that those food plots and go between those food plots. You're just basically carving out with a brush hawk through the switch grass up to the woods to the north. Might even put some food along the way. You might put some mock scrape on some posts along the way. You might put a water hole if it's dry along the way. You can actually put pop up blinds like some of the redneck gilly blinds or some of the soft sided blinds. You could just um pile in with switchgrass and uh and hide that blind in and you could actually come into the back of the switch grass, go into a blind look out a couple holes through the switch grass, watched gears are passing by to go to big food. You can sit on that big food source with the right winds northwest wind or northeast wind on those lower food plots, making sure where the deer entering and exiting the egg field, and then you could actually hunt those in the evening with a gun with a bow um hunt deers on the way in and out, and then those lines of movement that you carve out to the switch grass that connect to your woods up top to the north. Then where those cuttings in the switch grass and those trails at your brush hog, where they meet the woodlines. Great places for stands, great places for mock scrapes, for water holes if needed, and in senior mean you might actually go past those food sources in the switchgrass. Two yards set up in the morning, wait for deer to come off the egg through your food, through the switch grass cuttings, and you start to assemble um that entire line of movement. And the switch grass can be just a huge, just key component to making sure the deer on your your food plots. In the afternoon hours, you're hidden, you can hunt them to and from and at the food source because of the switch grass. Then you're just sending them out after dark into the agg fields and you start to develop that entire line of movement, line of daily movement for the deer where you can capitalize on, you know, backside betting areas way to the north and for box and then closer to the wood's edge for intermediate areas, and then finally to the food to the south and the switch grass for evening sets. Yeah, I can, I can see it all in my head. I don't know if that makes sense to you. I hope that translates it to people that I hate not being able to draw a picture. But um, but yeah, that's that's how that switch grass can be such a golden opportunity to really define movement, hide food, hide betting. Can you can you create a huge amount of opportunity. Can you talk more about the hiding aspect that you can use switch grass or other things for. You know, you talk a lot about screening in a lot of your articles and videos and stuff. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by screening cover, how you can use it? Um, Why it's important? Sure, screen cover is so critical because basically, what you're trying to do on your property, especially on small property, and half my clients have sixty acres or less. My average clients about a hundred acres that have a you know, quite a few large ones in there that bring up the average, And so it's really critical that when you move in on and off your property, you're not spoken deer and you're not You're not allowing the year to see you. And so if you're laying is flat. For example, you can have thirty ft of switch grass along the edge of a food plot, and if you're walking and being quiet and you're using the whim on the outside of that switch grass, then you could walk right by a food plot and half thirty deer out there and they don't they not know that you're walking by, especially with some thick cover like switch grass. I've had clients that have actually used a berm. I have one client that went a quarter mile down the road, a quarter mile up the other road, and then a quarter mile over, so he's three quarters of a mile berm to hide basically a fourty acre field on the inside that he converted to cover and food plot. So he walks into a blind. It literally parks on the road, has a padlock on the back of his blind, can't even see the entire field until he opens the blind door, gets in the blind, looks out the window, and so he can watch those deer every single day and they never know that he's ever watching them. It's basically like walking up to a window and looking outside looking inside. Um, you're you're looking into their world without them ever knowing you're doing that. And that's why switch grass is great. Egyptian weed is something that's a short term um solution. It's it grows, it's an annual one year switch grasses can be maintained for decades. I love spruce, white spruce, and sandy soils, highest a soils, Norway spruce. Where you have a lot of sun and you have qualities soils, you can use quit growing pines for an interim screen of five to ten years, twelve years and then let those spruce take over. So there's a lot of ways that you can establish those screening walls. Access is one thing, getting on and off your property, getting close to hunting situations, but then screening is really important around food sources because screening sets up that first line of security to deer to where they now feel comfortable betting thirty yards, especially as doll family groups thirty yards into the cover from a food plot, So you want that screening there in the form it could be hinge cutting, so you're putting low hinge cutting through there with several trails getting in and out for the deer, they don't feel too confined. Um could be switched grass, could be Egyptian week, could be spruce. But you're bringing that first layer of cover right against the food plot edge where you want the deer to start betting into that side of the woods. And then that's in that case where you're using screening on an open wood lot to actually pull deer. They might not feel comfortable betting until they're two hundred yards in, but because of that screening, now they feel really comfortable betting right behind that screening wall. That might be that that the edge of the woods faces the northwest where you get extreme winds, extreme cold winds, and now that you have thirty switch grass there, they can get behind that switch grass and they're completely out of the wind. They're completely sheltered, and they're not exposed to anything that's going on in that food plot. So screening around food plot also forces box that are back in the timber. They can't just cruise by a d fifty yards and the heart would look out in the food and say there's nothing there. They actually have to come out in the food. Now, look around in that food plot, see if there's any doors out there. You know, if there's a buck out there, they want to chase past or if they're mature buck, Um, they actually have to go into the food plot and out draws them out of the woods. But really on that screening, that first screen layer sets up the betting opportunity going into your woods, which helps compact the movement and might help put that mature buck on your properties instead of off your property borders. Yeah, yeah, I love the screating ideas. I've started incorporating this into some of my spots that I hunt, and uh if seen a seen a huge help there too. Um. Taking a step back a little bit, we we talked about betting, We talked about, you know, some of the different things when it comes to positioning things, but something we kind of glossed over is like that transition that travel from betting towards the food. Um. And I know you've talked about creating either transition areas or like buck corridors or travel corridors. Can you talk talk to us about that how you can actually direct that movement by creating what you call like these bow hunting buck corridors. Sure, yeah, what what I like? And again going back to you know, first off, I really don't like using any kind of canopy across this because, um, if the canopy falls into a corridor and you're making a hinge cut across the top or tying something, then it then it blocks off the whole corridor. But what you're trying to do is define the timber, use the number, use the habitat that you have, and make sure that deer can travel from point A to point B and that they have a much higher probability of going on this travel quarter than outside of it. So I'll give you some examples. Um, let's use big hardwoods, big open mature hardwoods. If it's a northern setting where deer and not used to being confined, I might define that line that I want them to travel from point A to point B. I'm gonna curve it a little bit, not not necessarily nine degree turns, but you just have a gently sloping curve that goes through there so that deer can't see more than thirty forty yards down the quarter. You don't want them to. You want the deer to think this is an access road or an a TV trail. Um, you want them to think this their their trail all the time, just a dear trail. And I might define that with ribbon going through the woods from point A to point but let's say it's two hundred yards long. Then I'm gonna go into that big open hardwoods, and I might find advantageous trees that are leaning away in perpendicular to that line of movement and cut them in you where from ten to fifty ft away from that line of movement on either side of the line of movement. What you're trying to do is put structure on the ground, not cutting all the trees down. So it's a big clear cutting mass, and the deer feel confined because again that you're thinking, this is a northern setting, not a lot of deer. They're used to a lot of space. So I'm making a pretty subtle cut on either side perpendicular to the movement, so that trees are falling away from that deer trail. And what I'm doing is I'm lowering the canopy, reducing the amount of canopy, which increases stem counant amoudel of brows that's in that cutting area, with with really that deer trail being centered at within that cutting trail or cutting area, and then you're also putting structure on the ground in the form of logs and tops, So now the deer have more of a subtle cut down area, almost like some high winds came through. But then they have this chiseled out deer trail right through the middle of it that's surrounded by high quality brows, regeneration, and those tops and debris, so that after a couple of years it kind of is all together. Now they can travel within that cover. If they're on the outside of that, cutting their back into the open timber, so they might as well travel right on the inside, and they have brows on either left or right all the way through their travel area. Because it's a straight line movement, you limit the amount of deer that are actually bedded with on that within that travel quarridor because it's just basically a straight travel route, there's a lot of high traffic on there. And you can kind of imagine if this was fifty yards off and paralleling your your property border, you could walk along your border and walk into that cutting area, get into a stand location, look down into that deer trail. It's now enveloped and brush and briers and regeneration, tops and logs. Get a twenty five yard shot with a bow. Basically until you're halfway up that tree, the deer can't see even climbing in. So for one establishes a really good wall of protection along your property borders, but to allows you to hunt and get in close. Now, if you had Egyptian not gical wheet, but switch grass brush briers, pretty easy to go in there. If it's a large area up north, you might want to use your brush hog. If you're northern Ohio, there's not not a lot of covery dr brush trimmers are great. I've had a lot of client cheese those in southern Michigan northern Ohio in those those limited cover areas, because you can create this two to three ft deer trail right through anywhere you want a deer to travel through thick cover, and they'll travel through it. Um. Now, if you're looking at say a medium age maple m poplar, you're cutting that timber down. Let's say it's a high deer density area where there's not a lot of cover. Then you can afford to hinge cut trees away from that travel corridor right up to that age. You might be that you're defining a line that's only two to three feet wide. And then you're hinge cutting trees that might be within two or three ft on either side of that line, so that there's hinge cuts that you're still making all these travel cordas poorous, meaning that deer don't feel like they're confined like a travel like a cattle shoot. They can turn the left or right and get out. Um. But in that case where you have very limited cover and you have a lot of deer they're used to being confined. You can push that hinge cut right up next to your actual deer trail and bring gear down a pretty tight corner or a pretty tight deer trail where you can't see him, they can't see out, And and again it offers a great spot for stand locations, and you can highly define movement because there's more cover and more brows all the way through that deer trail. You just have to consider the balance of the number of deer and the amount of cover in the area, and what they're really actually used to when they're traveling through their habitat, and how they relate to habitat. Are they being too confined or not confined enough? Yeah, you said. It all comes back down to this defined movement idea. UM. And I know one other tool you use is water. Can you talk about how water fits into all this for you? Yeah, you know, it's pretty cool because we started using water tanks, oh, fifteen years ago, and we're using a half gallon drums, cutting them and a half lengthwise, and of course you get about twenty seven gallons left, and we found if the deer used them, um, and it was it was warm mouth. They were done with them in a week and we weren't back up, you know, down to the property or where we hunted for a month and they ran dry deer. You lose that us, that pattern of use that the deer daily visiting the water holes and experience, and then they don't come back because they're not used to that water, you know, they're used to be that water being gone now, so we started migrating to sixty gallon tanks and now ten gallon tanks seems to be a good balance between. For example, last year, I didn't have to fill my water holes at that hundred gallon size just because we had so much rain. And so what water holes are great for. And when we first started realizing this is the previous landowners had created mineral pits and so they actually held water and we loved it. We actually tried to line them, we tried to fill them, um they'd always seep out. But what we found was was really cool. In October September November is when we came up in the early season. You know, Wisconsin opens the third Saturday in September. We could see pictures I can remember in one poll, a camera poll over about a six or seven week period, and about seven those pictures were in the evening as deer we're heading to the water hole and made us thinking, why are they not hitting that in the in the morning hours? Do you think about it? At night? They feed on green vegetation, They feed on high quality food. They has a high moisture content, very digestible, and that supplies their water for them on a daily basis. They don't even need to take a drink, so all night they're they're feeding on this great vegetation, their food plots. They didn't really need to hit that water in the morning. We found most of the time, if the if the deer hitting in the morning is it's that's exactly when the rot starting. So all of a sudden October twenty three, we're getting buck pictures at ten in the morning. In the evening, though, think about these deer they're back in brows areas. You want high quality brows in their area, meaning woody shrub tips, hardwood regeneration briers, maybe even smake horns. All that stuff is hard for them digest, to digest, there's a high wood count to it, and and even corn is hard to digest form in late November when it's a low moisture content. So if they're feeding that on that all all day, they feed five times in the twenty four hour period. One type of category is their daytime brows. That's what they feed on the different things I've talked about. That afternoon food source is the most critical, and that's that you can supply in the form of food plots in private land. And then at night. It's great when there's agg land around because you just send the deer out into the agg for them to feed twice during the night. But think about those deer back in their bedding areas feeding on brows all day. It's dry, hard to digest. The first thing they want to do is hit water on the way to food. So I love to position water near bedding areas, also keeping in mind of where box are going to cruise during the middle of the day, middle of the morning, and then making sure those water holes or a quick stop on a defined travel corridor or defined bench system point saddle where you know deer are coming from that bedding area. They're gonna hit this water hole and then they're hitting that food source a hundred yards away or a hundred fifty or even fifty yards away, where you can hunt that location over and over again. It's a quick stop for the deer, but you're not spooking the deer out of the bedding or the food source that they're traveling to. So as long as a deer doesn't have to go backwards from his betting area, like let's say you have a bedding area that the neighbor might have a water source a hundred yards away the opposite direction of the food Even if it's a great water source, you can expect them to ignore it and hit your water source on the way to food. If that food source that you have is where they want to they want to feed every afternoon, you just add that water they're going to go out of the way. A hundred yards to get to the neighbor's water. So even if it's a swamp that's a hundred yards behind their bedding area, as long as it's dry between their bedding area and the food source, then a water source can be appropriate. Well, Jeff, I have about seventy two more questions I'd love to ask you, but I know that we're gonna have to do this another time. There's so much good stuff here to cover. And what I want to tell everyone listening is that I'm gonna give you homework because we haven't even talked about food really at all yet. So I'm gonna say, go go back and listen to Wired Hunt podcast number eleven. That was the first episode Jeff was on the podcast, and then that one we we focus primarily on food plots and food, So go listen to that after this one and um and then hopefully Jeff, we can get you on to talk a little bit more. But I guess if there's one, is there any final quick thing that you think we should definitely mentioned related to habitat that we haven't touched on yet before we let you go? Anything else you want to make sure leave us with no I you know, what I can leave you with is really I like where you touched on that. Obviously, I love connecting habitat improvements, making sure that you highly define that movement and that you you really moved your safely around within your borders, that you know in a location that you're not setting yourself up to be to spook here, that you can actually hunt this line movement. It all boils back to trying to really hunt like a predator. You know what's great about private land as we can say, you know, I want the deer to bed there, I want them to feed here, and you can set up that movement because if you're hunting your land like a predator, you're leaving a very little footprint behind when you hunt, Your not allowing the deer to see you, smell you're here. You then you can set those deer up as the season progresses, because in most locations, um deer spooked more and more as the season progresses. So if yours is that one property where you're setting the daily daylight table for them and you maintain that consistent consistency throughout the entire hunting season, you hunt like a predator. You match your habitat improvements to hunting a mature buck to where you actually you're hunting the lowest hole in the bucket. You're removing your hunting pressure, you're being ultra quiet, ultra secure, making sure they can't see you, smile you. Then you really can have an exceptional opportunity on on private land, even on you know, my persons that I that I hunt out here are forty acres, so you don't need a lot of space. Then you can take those same concepts and if you want to do a lot of boot work out on public lands, you can go find those same definitions of travel and those same concepts apply to public land as well, so privately and great opportunity to shrink it down, hunt like a predator. Place your food plots, your habitat improvements, you're betting areas as as you can actually be able to hunt them. Give you that opportunity to hunt them like a predator. And uh, pretty cool stuff you can do on private land, even on a small parcel. Yeah, yeah, very cool stuff. Where can folks find your information elsewhere or if they want to go somewhere on and get your stuff, where's that at? Well, they can visit White Till habitat Solutions dot com. Um, if they put in my name, they can find that pretty easily. If they forget the name of the business and the website. UM. I also have a Facebook pages under a white tabitat solutions dot com. UM. I sell my books on Amazon or the website. And then also UM, I have a YouTube channel that I think I still have. We just shot four more today and we have about eight in the loop that I'll put out over the next week. We can have, but I think there's roughly one fifty on there right now, and um, you know, and then on the website I usually right, I think last year about a hundred and fifty five articles, and UM, we put out about ninety videos a year. Will probably do so. YouTube channel wait to habitat Solutions, website White to habitat Solutions Facebook and then Instagram under white to habitat Solutions too. There you go. Awesome stuff, Jeff. Always enjoy having you on here and thank you so much. Yeah, pleasure to be on here. And I can't believe that first one was episode leven, thinking back, what episode is this? Mark? That's that's amazing. UM, I'm really happy for you and that's a success story in itself, so pretty cool and and really honored to be back. Hey, thanks Jeff, I appreciate let's talk against him. And that's going to be it for us today. I hope you enjoyed this one. And like I just mentioned, we only cover probably about half of what I wanted to. Um, still a lot of great stuff, but so so much more that we could touch on, So hopefully we'll get Jeff on again. And really in our conversation today were we were mostly just focused on kind of the strategic ways to think about positioning improvements on your property or creating improvements on the property that will help you as a deer hunter. UM. But there's so much more to discuss on this front, just related to improving the the overall health of the animals and white tail her on your property through improvements as well. So that's something we're definitely going to cover in the future. There will be more habitat related episodes to come here in the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that. And um Man, we appreciate you joining us really quickly here. I do want to thank our partners who helped make this possible, so big thank you. Too, Sitka Gear, YETI Cooler's, Matthew's Archery, Maven Optics, the white Tail Institute of North America, Trophy Ridge and hunter ra Maps, and finally, as I just mentioned, big thanks to each one of you for being here for your attention and your time and you know your open mind to learning about these new ideas alongside of us. It's a blast. I'm glad you're here with us, and until next time, stay wired to Hunt,