What are core areas? How many do deer have? How can we use this info to our advantage? The questions are many, but the answers are surprisingly straight forward.
This is Chapter 3 of Steve Bartylla’s free online book, Understanding Mature Bucks.
Last chapter we discussed how every deer has one home range at any one time. Most bucks have the high tendency of having two home ranges over their life — the one they’re born into and the one they “disperse” to an average of 1–10 miles away from their birth range when kicked out before the rut as .5-year-olds in highly segmented deer cover and 1.5-year-olds in more typical deer cover areas. They have the high tendency to stick to their second home range for the rest of their life. Outside of a small percentage of bucks getting tempted away during the rut and northern deer migrating to overwinter yarding areas and such, most deer are pretty much always found in their established home ranges.
That makes a lot of sense to me. They know their home ranges nearly as well as we know the areas we spend most of our lives in. When we want to get milk, do we head for an area we’ve never been and hope to find it or do we go to the most convenient store we already know sells milk within the areas we know well? Doing so makes sense for us and it sure makes sense for bucks, as well.
At the same time, just because you live in some area that you know doesn’t mean you spend equal time within that area, does it? The area you know is essentially the same as the buck’s home range. You know that store you thought of getting milk from. I’m guessing you also know where the courthouse is, as well as obviously knowing where you work and where you sleep most nights. It would not be at all unheard of to see you at any of those locations, but I’m betting the overwhelming majority of us spend way less time at the courthouse, unless we work there, than at the store, which is way less than at home or at work. At one or more points in our lives, we need to be at all four locations, but we sure aren’t going to be spending equal time at them all.
It’s the same for a mature buck’s home range. He knows where the courthouse is, within his home range, but that doesn’t mean he’s there anywhere near as much as he can be found in his own bed, his favorite grocery store, a watering hole or even out doing his job, which is making sure he holds his spot in the dominance structure, for most mature bucks.
Core areas are different animals. View them as the hotels, friends’/families’ homes and your home in the area you know. You’ve got a whole bunch of options for places you technically can sleep. You likely greatly prefer one or two over the rest, but there are other places you will gladly sleep, under whatever specific circumstances.
Core areas are kind of like that. You may be perfectly comfortable going most anywhere in the area you know, but you sure aren’t comfortable sleeping just anywhere within that area. Fall asleep in a corner of that grocery store and you’ll probably be asked to leave. Do so on a road and you may get ran over. Sleep under a tree in a park overnight and kids may harass you. Cheesy, but you get the point. Some areas you feel very comfortable sleeping, others you don’t mind, some you’ll tolerate in a pinch, there are a bunch of places you would refuse to sleep and other areas you wouldn’t be able to sleep, even if you wanted to. It’s essentially the same for mature bucks and their core areas.
As noted, bucks can and very often do have multiple core areas. They shift those core areas due to changes in the habitat, weather and changing desires. That thicket may not be so thick after leaves drop, that cooler northern exposure in the dead of summer is far more attractive than when the temps are in the negatives, and so on. At the same time, Mr. Big may want to be left alone in his core area for most of the year, but he sure doesn’t mind bedding with an estrous doe he’s tending or near ones that may enter estrus at any moment.
I’ve learned a ton from the small to the ridiculously large grounds I’ve managed. The small does wonders for teaching the importance of specific details, whereas the big ones have always done fantastic at showing me the big picture.
Nowhere has that helped more than in understanding shifting core areas. When a buck shifts his core area a half mile away, it seems like he vanished to the person controlling most real-world deer grounds. When controlling somewhere north of 1,000 acres of prime deer dirt, odds are decent he’s still on that ground after shifting a half mile.
Most all deer want and/or need food, water, comfort, a feeling of safety and breeding opportunities. Always try to remember that, as it explains sooooooooooo dang much of what, if not all that deer do/are driven by.
Whenever given the chance, study what changed in the areas Mr. Big abandoned as core areas (be it a temporary or long-term shift) as well as what the new area he relocated to has to offer. You do that and you’ll almost always be able to see it was due to food, water, comfort, a feeling of safety and breeding opportunities.
I suspect at least some of you are wishing I’d shut up about home ranges and core areas already. I know it’s not the most thrilling topic in the world, but these are nuggets I’ve found to be key to both my hunting and management efforts. I can’t connect all the dots that they connected for me here (we’re talking books’ worth of stuff), but I can at least lay enough of it out for you to connect some of those dots yourselves.
Here’s some low-hanging fruit to show what I mean. We know that deer are driven by food, water, comfort, a feeling of safety and breeding opportunities. We also know that deer don’t spend equal amounts of time in all areas of their home ranges, focusing more time in the areas that are currently best at offering what they need and want at that time.
So, doesn’t it stand to reason that either offering deer all they could want/need or at least one or two specific things they want/need better than they can get anywhere else within their home range, generally translates to them spending more time on our dirt than they otherwise would?
Doesn’t understanding these concepts, along with noting how deer historically use our hunting grounds, allow us to predict what will happen before it even does, allowing the proactive amongst us to be sitting there, waiting for Mr. Big, when he pulls these seemingly unpredictable vanishing acts?
Hopefully, you can start to see how each of these tendencies start building on and explaining overall deer behaviors. Next, we’ll dive into seasonal shifts and show both why they tend to occur and how we can be in position or potentially stop the shifting all together.
Read Chapter 1: Whitetail Tendencies
Read Chapter 2: Whitetail Home Ranges
