Editor’s Note: Planting a green field doesn’t guarantee that you’ll take a buck on it. Some green fields produce high-quality bucks every season, while other green fields rarely if ever even yield a buck. What factors make for a great green field, and what makes a green field a waste of time and money? To learn the answers to these questions, we’ve contacted Dr. Grant Woods (http://www.growingdeer.tv) of Reeds Spring, Missouri, an avid hunter and one of the nation’s leading deer researchers and animal-nutrition experts.
Maintain a Constant Green Field Food Supply: Doing this will improve and increase the number of deer that use your green field. “Always keep food on the table for the deer,” Woods emphasizes. “If the deer have access to highly-nutritious and highly-palatable food every time they visit a green field, they won’t stray off your property. Also, when adjacent properties begin to run out of food for deer, the deer on those lands will come to your green fields. The more deer you draw in to your green field, the more feed you must provide for those deer.”
Set-Up a Deer Feeder: During extreme winters, when few if any green fields provide enough nutrition for all the deer that come to a green field to eat, you may want to consider using deer feeders, where legal. Also, if you set-up a deer feeder in or next to your green field, you still can attract deer to that green field, even though food doesn’t actually grow in the field after deer season. By feeding the deer in the green field after the season, you insure that deer will continue to come to that green field to feed. If a buck thinks “green field” when he feels hungry, he’ll more likely utilize that green field during hunting season, which helps tie a buck’s belly to his brain. He’ll want to eat where he always has eaten and where he always has found plenty of good-tasting, high-quality, nutritious food. Just like we continue to go to a favorite restaurant week after week and year after year, you can teach a deer to follow that same type of pattern.
Understand Green Fields Require Intensive Management: You can have great green fields that produce high-quality bucks every season. However, the best green fields require intensive management, the planting of more than one crop and trigger-finger management of the doe population to keep the herd in balance. If the green field becomes a sanctuary and a consistent source of high-quality food, the bucks will frequent the field. By using the best deer-management program, you can harvest bigger and better bucks than other hunters in your area and see numerous bucks on every one of your green fields. But, you and the members of your hunting lease must decide how effectively you want to manage your green fields and the number and quality of bucks that you want to produce. The system that Dr. Woods has outlined will produce more and better bucks for you and your hunting club.
How to Hunt and Take Big Buck Deer on Small Properties
In this book, you’ll hear from 14 hunters who either have gained permission or leased properties as small as six acres to as much as 250 acres, and how they consistently take older-age-class bucks off these little lands.
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Jim Crumley’s Secrets of Bowhunting Deer
Using a black magic marker and a gray work jumpsuit, Jim Crumley of Buchanan, Virginia, drastically changed the nature and purpose of hunting camouflage when he created the first sportsman’s camouflage – Trebark. Crumley’s love of bowhunting and his desire to be more invisible changed hunting clothing forever.
In this hunting guide, he shares the wisdom that he’s learned throughout his lifetime about how to be a hunter, how to find a deer lease, how to scout for deer, and more.
Special features include how to:
- Have a magic 60 acres to hunt
- Decide the best equipment to use
- Find deer year-round
- Locate land to hunt
- Know the best place to put your tree stand
- Get bucks within bow range
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How to Hunt Deer Like a Pro
How do you know if the land you hunt has a trophy deer on it? Wildlife manager Bob Zaiglin, of Uvalde, Texas and Jim Crumley, the father of modern-day hunting camouflage, tells you how to find out. GPS can make finding and taking that trophy buck easier. This hunting guide will teach you how to hunt big bucks where no one else can find them, how to call deer, and how to become versatile as a deer hunter, so that if one deer tactic doesn’t work, another one will.
In the chapter, “How to find Bucks at Scrape,” Dr. Keith Causey, retired professor of Wildlife Science at Auburn University, describes the best way to hunt a scrape.
Brad Harrison of Neosho, Missouri, is a nationally-known videographer, professional deer hunter and master at calling deer. Another master is Will Primos of Primos Game Calls. These two experts will tell the best deer calls and when to use them in this book.
And for over 20 years, Bo Pitman, lodge manager of White Oak Plantation, has been studying deer movement patterns. He explains what types of conditions are best for predicting deer movement.
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Deer hunting and deer hunters are drastically changing each year. To learn new techniques for hunting deer and have more places to hunt, I’ve interviewed some of the best deer hunters in the nation and share their tactics in How to Hunt Deer Like a Pro: Volume II.
In Chapter 10, Jacob Lamar tells you his tactics for consistently taking older-age-class bucks on public lands in several states. Chapter 11, Bob Walker explains how to find places on public lands where you can hunt that 99 percent of the other hunters never have considered hunting. The Bonus Chapter with David Ramey tells you how, where, when and with what equipment to take big Kansas bucks on public lands by hunting in 100-degree weather when others won’t hunt.
Chapter 13, Mark Drury, his family and his guests take mature bucks every season by having more small places to hunt rather than one large property. Drury explains the strategy of having satellite farms to hunt that only may be 50-150 acres each or less. Chapter 15, Pat Reeve, who hunts far-northern states and Canada, says, “I don’t like hunting for mature bucks until the weather is 20 degrees or less.” Chapter 4, Dr. Larry Marchinton says that funnels are the most-reliable stand sites to hunt for big bucks and tells why.
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You may also enjoy:
Learn about Deer on Green Fields Day 1: Realize Green Fields May Not Yield Deer
Learn about Deer on Green Fields Day 3: Create a Green Field Deer Will Use
Learn about Deer on Green Fields Day 2: Don’t Shoot Green Field Does
How to Find, Plan, and Take Big Deer Day 5: Apply What’s Learned to Hunt Deer Better
Learn about Deer on Green Fields Day 4: Don’t Spook Green Field Deer
Hunt Deer in February Day 4: Factors Increasing Odds for Taking February Deer
