A true key I’ve found to effective habitat and free range deer management (if there even is such a thing as effective deer management, without a high fence) is understanding the animals and their habitat. The better I understand each, the more effective I find my management efforts to be. Let’s look at how all this starts tying together.

This is Chapter 21 of Steve Bartylla’s free online book, Understanding Mature Bucks.

Now, let’s try to apply what we’ve been able to learn to managing our dirt. Specifically, let’s talk using the checkerboard approach to laying out our grounds/improvements as a way to maximize buck numbers while minimizing stress.

Specifically, we need to recall the chapter on social stress, where we explored how it’s really social stress levels as much as anything that drives bucks to shift core areas from areas of high buck competition to areas of lower competition, resulting in an osmosis effect of going from higher to lower concentration areas (using the term liberally, as it actually applies to gases). If you’ll recall, that’s mainly due to fighting over limited resources and social stress levels becoming too high.

So, that leaves us managers with a question. Are we better off concentrating food in limited areas, concentrating deer to the max and having little guesswork in where they’ll be feeding OR offer everything they could want in multiple areas, assuming the acres allow for it, making hunting harder, at least in some ways?

Before we jump much deeper, I should take a time out to state that it’s a given that when your ground dictates one approach that you’re almost always better off working with, not against it. What we’re covering today likely won’t apply at all to those owning 10 acres, for example. Even if a person owns a 120, and it is 100 acres of wide open crop fields with a 20-acre woodlot, well, you’re going to work with what the dirt is giving you to work with, almost regardless of how you’d prefer to approach it. At the same time, a lot of 20s and 40s can pull this off, too. Just fit your plans into what you have to work with, instead of trying to force them.

With that in mind, if we want to take the guesswork out and increase the number of deer seen per sit, assuming one does it intelligently, going the one main food draw route may indeed be your best route, but that will likely come at the cost of fewer mature bucks on the ground and the stress levels for all deer being through the roof, if deer numbers are moderate and above.

On the flip side, say we can essentially divide our 120 into four 30s, each offering all Mr. Big could want. Does that mean we’ll now hold four mature bucks? Probably not, as they don’t seem to realize they are supposed to stay on their 30. Still, the odds of four are sure better than if that 120 had one main food source, though. Truth be told, assuming good deer numbers and populations with ample mature bucks, four mature bucks regularly using our divided dirt is about as likely as one, with two to three often being the norm, assuming in a good area and such, of course.

The potential costs of going the four versus one route are increased man hours (as a silly example, it’s more work doing four 1-acre plots in differing areas than one 4-acre plot in one spot) and more guesswork in where Mr. Big will be each day.

The point isn’t that one approach is the best for all, as it isn’t. As with all of this stuff, the real point is that these are some common options, as well as the main advantages and disadvantages of both. Now, you fit whatever route works best for achieving your goals in and run with it.

With that in mind, this checkerboard approach doesn’t do anything as drastic as truly dividing that 120 into stand alone 30s, with clear cut boundaries. Frankly, I wouldn’t want that if I could easily pull it off, as I want to design a flow between those 30s as well, and Mr. Big is VERY unlikely to truly stick to his 30, anyway.

The divisions are one part art and one part science, with no uniform sizes or shapes. It’s merely me doing my best to strike the balance between concentrating deer, while keeping stress levels lower and mature buck numbers higher. All I’m really trying to do in each is be sure there is food, bedding, water and comfort being offered to Mr. Big. By offering multiple locations, I’m also reducing the social stress levels and increasing the comfort factor, in ways.

Now, as stated, Mr. Big isn’t likely going to stick to his area. That said, when he comes to the one main food source on that 120 and drives two other mature bucks off, where do they go? Most likely to the neighbors. Now, put four food sources on that ground and where do those two mature bucks go that Mr. Big drove off that one of four food sources? Well, they still could and may jump the fence, but we now have three other locations, as well. If we did our jobs right, those three other places are also superior habitat to the neighbors’, as well. In that situation, I’ll personally take what’s behind the second door, Chuck.

Hopefully, this made the point. I’ve noticed that people generally try to lock this down with questions on how big these areas are, how many on ___ acres and so on. Without stepping on your dirt, I can’t answer, and I tend to adjust on acres, as in maybe two 20ish-acre areas on a 40, but make them closer to around 100–200 acres each on bigger dirt.

READ: HOW TO PICK THE RIGHT DEER HABITAT CONSULTANT

Also, I don’t pretend to know all I’ll know about this even just five years from now. There are a lot of moving parts to this one, and I’ve only really been seriously experimenting with it for the last 15ish years or so. That may sound like a lot, but, when the factors list is nearly endless, it’s really but a blink of an eye. The checkerboard approach is something I completely made up on my own and have been trying to figure it out as I go along. I’ve done it enough to be supremely confident in the logic behind it and its real-world benefits. However, I’m nowhere near foolishly blind enough to believe I’ve got all the details down.

That said, I’ve also managed to somehow not fall on my own face in this area, as I try new tweaks. I’m beginning to believe that there really isn’t a “wrong way,” just ways that work better in specific situations. I say all of that because some have legit concerns about messing their ground up with improperly planned improvements. I don’t think this is an area you should be overly concerned with messing up. If you put in too many plots, do less next year. I’ve found the sweet spot more than once, merely by adjusting the “squares” until they’re giving me as close to the desired results as I am hoping for.

Finally, I sure hope I’m doing a good enough job for you all to see what’s happening. ALL the stuff we’ve covered the previous chapters is now coming full circle into actual real-world applications. In fact, these last few chapters are actually the least exciting, in my eyes, as we’ve already really covered everything we’ve been talking about for the past few and remaining “chapters.” All I’m really doing at this point is showing how I connected the dots, hoping it will lead all of you to do so yourselves, only even better than I have!