Owning and Managing your Dream Hunting Property - Part 1

Troy Esau

Many outdoorsmen dream of owning their own piece of hunting ground. A property that holds deer, turkeys, elk, moose, maybe a stocked fishing pond. Whatever your dream property consists of, many of us dream of how we want to set it up with tower stands, heated blinds, food plots, and water holes. There are so many things that can make a property hold more animals and be extremely huntable. You can educate yourself with one of the many different sources readily available online these days but I believe the root of all the articles is to create big, mature bucks or bulls or gobblers. In many states and provinces the main push or goal that needs to be achieved is food plots, in others one of the only ways to accomplish more food on a property is by TSI (timbers stand improvement) to create more natural browse for the deer. Hinge cutting can be an extremely important tool used to create bedding areas as well as more food within reach of a deer or turkey. This is just a short list of the many tools and tactics that can be used to maximize your hunting property.

For me, I want all of it, and I want to do it yesterday, today, and forever. I love being in the hunting country and just creating a vision of how to hunt every property better, or what could be done to funnel deer in certain areas or hold more deer all year round. In my hunting area, whitetail deer and turkeys are the species that are easily available to hunt, therefore most of my habitat improvement projects are done with these two animals in mind. Many of us hunt public land, or private land that we don't own, so the habitat improvement projects that we as hunters would love to do are subject to approval by the landowner. This will obviously depend on the landowner and your relationship with them. They may give you free reign on cutting down trees in areas to make clearings or better shooting lanes, you might be able to simply cut a few limbs to hang a stand, or maybe just sit on the ground and not disrupt the lands natural state. There are however a few lucky landowners that can do whatever they please with their own property to try and maximize it for hunting purposes. I am fortunate enough to have been able to purchase an acreage that has lots of tree cover, and now I call it home.

We purchased the property 2 years ago, and last year we built ourselves a home tucked away in the bush. My list of projects regarding hunting improvements is very long and will likely never get any shorter. I am hopeful that we will be able to check a few boxes off the list every year, but I'm sure as one box gets checked off, 2 or 3 more will get added to the list. We live in Southern Manitoba where food plots and baiting during hunting season are illegal, which means that unfortunately for the time being planting a couple acres into food plots in the middle of 60 acres of trees is out of the question. There are still many ways to try and create more natural browse in certain areas to attract the deer. One critical key element that our property was lacking when we purchased it was a sustainable, year round water source. This was the first thing on the project list the spring after we bought it. Our plan all along was to build our house on this property, so we needed to decide where our home was going, where our lane yard would be, and what areas were going to stay untouched so the wildlife still had a place to live their natural lives. Once we had our yardsite and lane locations picked out, I knew we were going to need some dirt for backfill around our home. I got a local backhoe operator to come and dig a hole back in the trees near a small natural clearing. Right on the edge of this just happened to be a lower lying area of the property. As it was an extremly dry spring/summer, the water table was very low and we ended up having to dig about 14 feet down from natural grade before we hit water that we were confident wouldn't dry up. The last thing I wanted was for wildlife to come there expecting to get a drink and find a dry sandy hole. Sustainable water source, in my opinion, is the largest most effective piece of the puzzle in holding animals on your property. Without it, animals will be leaving to go to a neighbor's property.