Random travel routes on your property are a major stumbling block to your hunting success with hunting equipment. An example of this would be taking a large piece of property and making it all sanctuary by doing a large scale timber harvest. Another example of this is the wildlife approach by attempting to improve every square inch of your land for deer or other game. The end result of random travel corridors is a property that is almost impossible to hunt! Great if you never hunt the parcel, but not for hunters. You don’t want to be left with land that evenly distributes the deer herd across the entire property, making it impossible for you to walk in from any direction without spooking deer. This is less noticeable on several hundred acres, but on a small parcel you are setting traps for yourself by spooking deer through random, undefined patterns of movement which can ruin your property in the first couple days of trophy hunting.

Travel corridors within the property can be anchored and enhanced by larger hot spots and can be better defined in a few ways such as:

1. Creating small whitetail deer food plots.

2. Creating bedding pockets, which usually attract the female portion of the local herd due to the high-traffic location.

3. Creating brush, hinge cut, debris, or timber cutting lines that separate outer “non-improved” areas through which you access your stand locations, with the created and improved areas upwind and behind screening cover to offer a defined edge of travel.

4. Lay of the land could be an inner topography change, open pond or waterway, or any other natural feature that constricts deer movement to one side or the other.

It is critical that both hot spots on each end of the corridor, and the corridor itself, are insulated or screened from the approaching hunter in some manner. Both bedding and whitetail deer food plots have to be screened effectively to be secure. You are providing very private and secure lines of daily movement for the local herd so each hot spot has to be protected from your movements. It does no good to have the “perfect” bedding or food plot if a deer in either of those locations can stand on the edge and see you 50 yards away as you walk by or access your stand locations.

By trophy whitetail hunts the travel corridors, and not the hot spots, you decrease your risk of deer/human encounters. A “line of movement” is just that! The deer are traveling in a line from hot spot to hot spot. Unlike a hot spot where a deer may visit deer food plots or bedding areas for hours at a time, a deer spends a very little amount of time traveling in a defined line of movement. Of course a deer will stop to browse or a buck may be successfully slowed down by providing licking branches within the travel corridor, but by hunting a line of movement you expose yourself only a fraction of the time to deer in comparison to its hot spots.

These lines of movement are one of the most important aspects of property management. Often the success of the property doesn’t fall under the perfect bedding area or deer food plots. Instead your success will fall under how well you establish and maintain the integrity of the lines of movement on your land.