Watching the brute drop that had terrorized the property I was managing had me so excited I completely forgot my Hunters Safety System vest was still attached to the tree. After several tugs, I finally figured out I wasn’t just caught on a branch.

For as silly as that might sound, it does help reveal how amped I was to finally take this bully out. My client was paying me to transform his property into a top-end buck factory, and the 6½-year-old, 130s 8-pointer hadn’t added 5 inches of antler since he was 3½. He needed to be removed.

Believing they must remove bucks with lower end headgear for their age is just one of many common mistakes managers make these days. Between yearling buck dispersal and the doe offering half of the genetic equation, several studies have shown that trying to manipulate genetics on free range ground just doesn’t work.

I wasn’t trying to manipulate the genetics on the property. I was getting rid of a mature, bully buck that drove one stud of a 5 beamed, 3½-year-old into the neighbor’s crosshairs, who killed it, and killed another young stud in a fight. The bully 8-pointer had to go before he could do any more damage.

With more and more hunters striving to improve their hunting grounds, many myths and mistakes are needlessly hindering their progress. Here’s what I view as the top seven. Hopefully, this piece will help you avoid making them yourself.

Mistake No. 1: Buying or Leasing Ground Next to Outfitters

Because so many hunters dream of booking hunts with outfitters, it’s understandable that many also believe owning or leasing ground next to them would be ideal. The truth is, except for a few exceptions, trying to manage ground next to outfitters is often extremely challenging.

Trying to make a living outfitting for whitetails is a tough road. With lease prices and the cost of ground skyrocketing, they simply have to keep a steady stream of clients moving through their grounds. The best do it in a way that offers high-quality hunts to their clients, but that’s often achieved by their clients tagging bucks that spend most of their time on neighboring grounds.

Effective land management is all about increasing the drawing power of the hunting property, encouraging movement past low-impact stands and shaping the herd as best one can to meet goals. However, for as much as we strive to get bucks to spend a disproportionate amount of time on our grounds, in the absence of a high fence, they’re going to leave. The trick is to minimize those departures as much as practically possible.

When the adjoining neighbor hunts a few days a week, his odds of taking bucks predominately residing on your ground during their occasional fence jumping excursions aren’t very high. When that neighbor is an outfitter who has one or more hunters on his ground far more days than not, those odds go up considerably.

At the same time, a lot of his clients aren’t interested in shooting does. You can’t blame them, because few spend $2,000 to $7,000 to shoot a doe or want to risk potentially messing up their buck hunt by killing one. At the same time, many outfitters don’t want their clients shooting does, because that risks exploding their ground by tracking her all over the place. Yet others view them as buck bait.

When deer numbers are considerably over 50% of a ground’s carrying capacity, that can put the manager in the unenviable position of never being able to kill enough does on their grounds. They shoot three one afternoon and within the week three more shift in from the neighbors. It can create a vicious cycle of massive overgrazing and a constant uphill battle to kill does.

Please don’t take any of this as a rip on outfitters. Like in any profession, there are some bad ones, but the majority are good, and genuinely good stewards of the land. However, their loyalties better belong to their clients and offering each group the best hunt possible. Though admirable, that commonly makes it far more challenging to manage neighboring ground.

Mistake No. 2: Wanting Good Hunters as Neighbors

Sticking with neighbors, every time I hear a hunter remark about how, “If they only hunted like me,” I can’t help cringing. Sure, having a group of landowners sharing the same buck harvest goals helps more bucks achieve those thresholds. However, I never want good hunters as neighbors. Give me that guy driving his ATV through his property at sunrise, only to drag his Carhartts on the ground the last 100 yards to his stand. Yes, I had a neighbor that did exactly that almost every morning he hunted and I loved him for it.

Sloppy hunting neighbors are the manager’s best friends. If you are managing and hunting your ground in a very high-odds, low-impact manner, those sloppy hunting neighbors make your hunting better. It’s the osmosis effect of hunting pressure, where deer shift from areas of higher hunting pressure to lower hunting pressure areas, which just happens to be on your ground.

Sure, sloppy hunters take a few deer. They occasionally get lucky and take a really good one. However, they literally help transform your sanctuaries into gold mines. Good hunting neighbors do way more damage to your hunting goals than sloppy hunters ever could. 

Mistake No. 3: Trying to Stockpile Bucks on Your Land

Speaking of drawing deer, remember that you simply can’t stockpile bucks above a certain level. Each property has a cap on how many bucks it can hold. By dividing up a property into sections, offering bucks everything they could want and need within each, increases the cap on how many bucks a property can hold, but there’s still a limit.

Look at it like a pyramid, with nubbin bucks making up the bottom level and mature bucks the top. As bucks reach maturity their tolerance for competition tends to drop. As a result, when mature buck numbers reach the cap, the most dominant bucks typically drive those beneath them that are also striving for dominance away.

To put it in perspective, a prime 1,550-acre piece of ground that I managed, for all intents and purposes, hadn’t been hunted for six years prior to receiving this assignment. It had a lot of mature bucks on it, but that number actually increased as I divided the property up, offering them all they could want in more locations. After doing so, the mature buck numbers remained pretty constant, with the surplus spilling over to the neighboring grounds.

You’re not doing yourself any favors by not killing bucks on your grounds, once the property starts nearing the cap. The trick to maximizing hunting potential is to skim the surplus each year, making new holes for the up and comers to fill the following year.

Mistake No. 4: Killing Too Many Does

When it comes to skimming the surface, remember that your goal shouldn’t be to kill every doe on your grounds. Lately, it has been so drilled into our heads that we need to kill does that many of us have become our own worst enemies.

The goal should be to keep deer numbers right around 50% of the habitat’s carrying capacity — the maximum number of deer a habitat can support. When deer numbers approach 100% of carrying capacity, habitat destruction occurs through over browsing, with many of the preferred browse species literally being wiped out. The longer the property flirts with 100% of carrying capacity, the lower the carrying capacity typically becomes and the more difficult, if not impossible, it is for the habitat to ever naturally regenerate to a healthy state. The poorest-quality browse is often all that’s left over.

At around 50% carrying capacity, deer numbers are in balance with the habitat. In fact, increased reproductive success and decreased natural mortality make it so as many deer can be shot each year from a property at 50% carrying capacity as from ground at 100%, only the deer from the 50% ground are healthier and the bucks almost always have bigger racks.

For as much as one doesn’t want to flirt with 100% carrying capacity, going much below 50% doesn’t make any sense either. Between recent disease outbreaks, many states offering ridiculously high numbers of doe tags and the near constant preaching about killing does, a lot of areas are beneath 50% carrying capacity, which is simply a waste.

Determining whether to shoot does on a property is pretty easy. Simply walk the ground during spring, summer, fall and winter. When doing so, note what deer are browsing on the heaviest. Consider those your top quality browse species on that property. When less than 20% of easily accessible top quality browses remain untouched by deer, you need to kill does. When over 50% is untouched, you most likely should use trigger restraint and build your deer numbers.   

Mistake No. 5: Not Knowing When to Offer Supplemental Food

Of course, an effective way to increase a property’s carrying capacity is planting food plots. With the explosion of food plot seed blends, there’s been a big push for offering high protein plantings during the spring for maximum antler growth. What’s rarely mentioned is that most areas where whitetails live offer a bounty of cool season grasses and weeds during spring and fall, with much of it offering around 15% protein.

If you really want to improve deer health, focus on offering food when there’s a shortage of high-quality nutrition available. In the Midwest and points north, that’s almost always over winter, yet offering nutrition over winter is the most ignored. In the South and areas suffering from brutally high temps and droughts, mid-summer is typically the weak point.

It’s a great idea to offer food plots year-round. Just don’t forget to offer extra nutrition during seasonal shortages. Do that and you’ll improve deer health 100 times more than offering slightly more nutritious plantings during seasons when a surplus of nutrition is available.

Mistake No. 6: Failing to Improve the Native Habitat on a Property

While on the topic, it has been drilled into our heads that habitat improvements are all about planting food plots. Though doing so is important and increases hunting success, there are many additional things that can be done to improve habitat.

To get deer to be their healthiest and spend a disproportionate amount of time on your ground, offer them the best food, cover, water, feeling of safety, comfort and breeding opportunities they can find in that area. Do that and you’ll have the best deer ground around. Five of those six factors don’t involve planting seeds.

Even when it comes to food, don’t  forget that woody browse is important, even in agricultural settings. Heck, it’s of vital importance in most areas experiencing prolonged snow cover. That can often easily be addressed with a chainsaw.

Mistake No. 7: Forgetting to Have Fun

Lastly, perhaps the biggest mistake a land manager can make is to forget to have fun. Don’t look at improving your grounds as a race. Instead, see it as a fun journey. When doing any improvement starts feeling like work, quit for the day. We are ultimately doing this to increase the fun factor when enjoying the outdoors. Make improving the property part of that fun, not a chore.

There isn’t a mistake listed in this piece that I haven’t made myself. We all make mistakes. The key is to learn from them and not repeat the same one twice. Hopefully, this piece will help you avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made.

— Longtime Deer & Deer Hunting contributor Steve Bartylla is one of North America’s top deer hunters and private-land deer managers. Contact him at bowwriter@yahoo.com.