Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Look after the wildlife this winter.

Turkeys are worse for us on recently planted corn fields than deer. They will dig down and get what is left of the seed, eat the seed and kill the plant. When the plant gets a few inches tall they will grab it and pull it out of the ground.

Neighbor said he saw a turkey pull out a foot tall stalk of corn, and pulled so hard that it fell on its butt when the stalk came out of the ground.

A big flock can make a corn stand have big patches missing.

Deer don't seem to bother corn much till it gets corn on the cob. Between the deer and the coons small fields surrounded by trees in a creek bottom can see a lot of damage.

Quite a few Turkeys up by my property. They roost in the pine trees at night. Still need a tag to bag one.

A local resident, who was a prolific poacher in the area, understands why one should never drop the soap

The transmitter in the Turkey kinda led officials to his property! SOL!!!

The clan disbanded after this incident, and are no longer in my area

Only having 60 acres planted, this year will be corn and the turkeys are definately a problem.

Transmitters, huh?

Hmmmmm

In my state hunting over bait for deer is OK on private property. Everyone does it. Walmarts and hunting fishing stores sell bags of "deer corn". Most hunters dump corn piles all around their treestand. Its funny, you can spot the bright yellow corn piles from far away. But only if it just got put there because deer come thru and it disappears like a vacuum cleaner came by.

And our deer season is 5 months long.

And yes I agree, corn fed deer taste better and are fatter than deer isolated from the farms and bait pile hunters.

From the time it is in roasting ear stage through harvest, deer "harvest" ears off our corn surrounding any fields that are near timber. Deer and racoon's, but the coons REALLY like the roasting ear stage. Deer like it a little more mature.

Then they "browse" around the fields all winter after harvest.

Good article from the QDMA.

http://www.qdma.com/articles/how-to-provide-emergency-winter-deer-food#.UyECS5kVOoQ.facebook

Good article. More science involved than one would think.

Agreed! I'm doing some TSI now, but I'm not seeing any deer utilizing the tops. I'm still seeing deer in the fields looking for waste grain. The deer are in fields that I've never seen them in before, and they are out a LOT earlier in the day too. More deer in a herd too.

On the predator issue, a buddy drove out from Chicago Sunday morning. At 9:00 a.m. CST, he observed 3 coyotes finish their chase on a mature doe, drag her down and start feeding before she was dead. This happened not more than 2 miles East of Wanatah, Indiana, not 40 yds off of Rt. 30 in an open field. The 'yotes could run on top of the snow, while the deer broke thru with every step. Depending on the area, snow was 4" to over 12" deep. He even had the chance to stop the truck and watch for a while from 40 yd away. 2 of the 'yotes kept feeding, while one got ansy with the truck there and kept circling the other 2 and the deer, all the time looking at the truck.

Some guys that keep an eye on the deer on their property are reporting dead deer in the past 2 weeks. The majority of them are bucks that have dropped their antlers, and young small fawns from last year.

I have planted several thousand trees over the years around my pond area and the dear will strip the bark until the trees are three to four inches in dia. For this reason and others my survival rate wasn't good. I saved a lot of trees by putting some of the hanging bark back in place and tapping it all with duck tape. Anyway what I am getting at is as long as there are young trees the dear will feed on bark. And they have fed on the green needled limbs of the pines, spruces and ceders.

A while back when the snow was melted for a short period I was walking my woods and saw a group of Robbins flipping leaves up in the air and eating whatever was underneath. I never saw that before in my life.

If you live near a woods you can draw in and feed woodpeckers in large numbers. My woodpeckers wait in line to feed. Take a round log about six inches in diameter and a foot long, drill 1 1/2" to 2" holes part way into it and stuff the holes with animal grease or half animal and vegetable grease will work but not all vegetable grease. Then hang it on a tree.

John, the bark that you see rubbed off or hanging in strips is from the bucks rubbing their antlers on it, to either scrape the velvet off or more likely mark their territory. Google whitetail rubs and you'll see what I'm talking about. They will feed on the ends of the twigs - that's called browse and in many non-agriculture areas that's their main source of winter food. Even in our agricultural areas, they eat a lot of browse.

Buck rubs

John,
To protect the bark on trees I have used those white plastic wraps around the base. I have seen others use the black drain pipe. It looks terrible, but hey, so does a bunch of eaten or rubbed trees.

Otherwise I have a ton of forage as I let the brush grow in many areas of the property, and so do my neighbors.

The deer are really bunching up in fields right now, scraping for food. They are typically eating for two which is really driving them hard.

Deer do not eat bark, but cottontail rabbits will. We have a lot of issues with porcupines killing large trees by completely stripping the bark off of them. They are a real pain in the butt!

I read that piece, but the article's idea of TSI differs from what the professional forresters I deal with here in the shop advocate doing.

A few weeks ago I had a fairly long chat with one of them about TSI work. Up until that day I had a very poor opinion of TSI, which was supposedly performed about 5 years ago in our woods, while it was being timbered.

What I'm left with now is too much sunlight hitting the ground, an explosion of multiflora and other aggressive species, Ginseng won't grow in the sunlight, the mushroom hunting fell apart, and getting around in the woods is nearly impossible in many places, due to the new undergrowth. It's true that the deer love it, as it certainly provides plenty of cover.

So I launched into this guy with both barrels about the evils of TSI work. He let me finish, smiled, and proceeded to tell me why I should've let a forrester do the work instead of a logger. What stuck with me was the fact that he doesn't usually drop trees while performing TSI. He girdles them instead. He claimed that dropping trees runs the risk of damaging the good trees you're trying to favor, and it makes a mess on the ground....I can attest to that being true.

He went on to tell me that girdling the tree will kill the canopy, opening up sunlight to the remaining trees, and as the tree continues to decay while standing it will shed limbs gradually, more or less straight down, without damaging the surrounding trees.

When the trunk finally does come down there will be less chance of damage to other trees, as it's usually just a stem at that point. What he said made a lot of sense to me, and while his method won't feed those deer, it did strike me as being more of an honest attempt to protect the woods while performing TSI, rather than simply bringing down a tree to feed the deer and calling it TSI after the fact.

Tony:

Sometimes girdling the tree won't kill it. An easier way is "injecting" the trees. Take a hatchet that has a blade that has about a 1" cutting surface. Chop deep into the bark and into the cambium layer all around the tree, leaving bark between the chop marks 1" wide or less. Use a squirt bottle, (spray bottle set on stream) give each cut a squirt with Picloram, Crossbow, etc. Use a chemical that has been proven to be effective. (I have a book that tells me what works on what species of tree, and how much to use per inch diameter of stem).

You can do that any time of the year except when the sap is really flowing in the spring. It works exactly like he explained, killing the tree, not any of the surrounding ground, and letting the stem become habitat for woodpeckers, etc.

You can also hinge cut smaller trees (6"-10" DBH) and tip 'em over. Those don't do a lot of damage as they come down (you can direct them easily by how you cut) and they'll grow, sending up branches that the deer & turkeys will use for cover and food.

You can also basal spray thinner barked, younger trees with a chemical (again, the book that I have lists what works for what species) to kill them. No cutting the bark is required, just walk and spray the stem all the way around it for a 4"-6" wide band.

Scott,

I found it easier to use a chainsaw to griddle and then spray Tordon RTU into the cut. The tree is toast at that point. I didn't find anything that Tordon didn't take out. I had a lot of black locust coming up in my wildflower/prairie grass planting along the pond. Last fall I when in and cut all of them down and immediately after painted the stumps with Tordon RTU and I don't expect to see those trees back. I am planning on burning it in the next couple of weeks. Waiting for it to dry out a little more and the right day. Sorry for the slight hijack.

Mark, I used almost 15 gallons of Picloram (4-Amino-3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinecarboxylic acid) last summer when I removed a dense stand of River Birch on a 9 acre area of woods. Couldn't drop 'em because of the understory of trees that had to be saved so they could take over the same area. Same as Tordon, 'cept stronger and you have to have a license to buy it. I thought about using a chainsaw, but after talking to a retired forester, he convinced me of the error of my thoughts.

About 60 hrs of chop/squirt.

I will have to remember Picloram as I have had one maple tree I had to griddle three times before it died. THat is the only tree in thousands that didn't die the first time. I have a license so no issue there.

Thanks all for the info about dear not eating the bark. I would have never of guessed it was from the bucks rubbing their antlers on the trees. I put up scare crows trying to keep the dear away from the trees. We don't have many rabbits anymore but what few we did have were hard on the trees when they were small. However the duck tape on the damaged part of the trees did save many of them. I assumed the dear were eating the bark because they were biting off limbs of the spruce and pines. It looked like a bite and not an antler rubbing because the cut was clean and sharp like they had been sheared off.

John, clipping of twigs is generally also a sign of mating behavior during the rut. It will usually be accompanied by a scraped out area under the clipped twigs where the buck urinates to advertise his availability to the does.

I have heard of der stripping and eating bark during hard times but mostly agree that what you are seeing during the fall is rubbing. It's like a sign post and will often be accompanied by other rubs on his travel route.

Thanks Dave. In this picture I was just trying to figure out the biting of the limbs.

John, that looks like mating behavior. They often break off small branches with their antlers. They can get quite vigorous when they start rubbing. They often do this to rub the velvet off the newly hardened antlers. The rubbed area is of a lighter color than the bark and is easy for other deer to see.

This is called a rub. The area under an over hanging branch that is void of leaves and grass is called a scrape. It doesn't appear that he scraped that area.

These are generally advertisements for the opposite sex.

Some people say that the bigger the tree that gets rubbed; the bigger the buck. I have not found that to be always true.

I think that is why the sprial plastic tree protectors work. Not only do they help prevent damage by having a protective layer, but the deer see it and it looks already marked so they leave it alone.
The deer here demolish my young pines when rubbing, and target trees that have no branches to get hung up on antlers. My apple trees I have trained low and stubbly. No nice straight trunks and they are left alone. When I started them, I caged all of my trees until they were well above eating height.
Even then they get me. Had a nice white birch, and it was time to take off the fence. Tree was about 9 feet tall, so I took off the fence to put on the protector. I forgot to put on the plastic that night, and the next dang day it was rubbed all the way around! Boy that makes me about as mad as I can get! I had to chop the tree off at the base of the rub, and see if I can recue it. I grew that one from a seedling, and it was just getting pretty. It is my fault, but at least give me a few hours to protect it!

Liquidsquid I was as mad as you when the deer would destroy or mutilate a nice tree that I had planted from a sapling and had grown to a nice tree about 6 to 10 years of age. The deer were particularly hard on my Yellow Popular, White Pine and Norway Spruce but seemed to leave alone my Black Walnut and River Birch.

Thanks for the info on the deer you guys. I didn't know this stuff.

We had a small stunted pine that a buck would beat the crap out of if in the fall if we didn't protect it with something. I wanted to whack it, but my dad -- who lives on the property in an apartment above my garage -- wanted to give it some time even I know it stayed the same size every year. Anyway, one year we forgot to protect it and a buck mangled it so bad it was beyond help. I got my wish and cut it off just above ground.