*Don’t forget to check out my trilogy of Advanced Whitetail Strategy books, including my latest book,”Mature Buck Success by Design”.
How you hunt your land has a great deal to do with how attractive your land is to an old monarch during the day, but there are several cool habitat activities that you can take advantage of for creating daytime buck travel as well! Food, water, scrapes, rubs and daytime mature buck bedding opportunity are all habitat improvements that can be completed with the ultimate goal of controlling buck movements, in an effort for attaining your herd, hunting, and habitat goals.
Long Lines of Food
There are many reasons that a mature buck may want to travel to a neighboring parcel of land:
1. Agricultural fields not only contain a large supply of decent food offerings, but often contain prime time social activities combined with safe bedding opportunity, all night long.
2. For several years we watched and took advantage of deer moving from the bedding areas on our land, to our food sources, and then finally across the fence to access a water source behind the neighbor’s house after dark.
3. “Does”. Doe family groups and bucks rarely bed together unless forced to do so. With small parcels it is possible to create situations where you can control a very thick and secure portion of habitat that is more conducive to the reclusive nature of a wise old buck. If your land is more attractive to bucks than does (this is a bad thing!), you can bet that bucks will eventually leave to search for does.
Creating daytime buck travel often boils down to forcing a buck to pay attention to a variety of habitat improvements on your own land. The opposite of this of course, is a mature, open stand of hardwoods. No cover, no rub or scraping opportunity and singular, unrelated food sources can be passed by fairly quickly by a cruising buck. This is why long lines of food sources that parallel, but still stay hidden, within your borders you can set the stage for a controlling a large % of daytime buck movement! Long, thin lines of food that matches the flow of your habitat, forces a buck to not only wander and seek for does, but to travel great lengths to do so. If a mature buck leaves his bed within your land while exiting towards a neighboring food source he may pass quickly by a 1 acre square food plot, even if broken up with grasses and screenings. However, if that same food plot space is spread out to parallel your borders in a snake-like natural flow of the land, a buck has to make a choice: To turn Right, or Left. How long can 1 acre of food be stretched out to? Consider that a plot that is 50′ wide by 900′ long is just a shade over 1 acre. That’s 300 yards that not only a buck has to search through, feed and spend a considerable amount of time to travel through, but 300 yards of potential stand locations for a variety of wind directions! There are also many additions that you can make to a food source line of movement in an effort to even further control daytime buck travels on your land.
