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.

Unfortunately many hunters have ideas of planting whitetail deer food plots in open areas and the deer will just file in come hunting season.  There is a lot more to a successful “hot spot” than most people think. I was a city slicker when I was young like a lot of other hunters and didn’t know the first thing about growing a food plot until years of trial and error.

If you want to eliminate the mistakes most people make when creating their first food plots for whitetail deer, you need to ask yourself the following questions.

• What time of the fall am I going to be hunting, early or late?

• Are there already other farm fields with crops and what kind?

• What type of soil do I have on my property, is it sandy or clay?

There are other questions to ask but let’s answer these three first.

The time of the fall you plan to be hunting is critical for the type of plants you choose. If you want your food plot to peak during the early fall for bowhunting, then you want to plant a perennial such as ladino (white) clover or falcata alfalfa. Deer absolutely love these legumes during the summer and early fall. However, right after the first hard frost you’ll notice the deer backing off a bit because this forage loses some of it’s pallatability (good taste).

If you want to really draw the deer in during the firearm or late muzzleloader season, then you want to go with a mix of perennials and annual brassicas. The brassica family of plants consist of forage rape, kale, canola, and turnips. You may be more familiar with these brassicas, broccoli, cabbage, spinach, brussel sprouts, etc. During the summer and early fall, brassicas have a bitter taste due to the alkaloids in the plant. However, after the first hard freeze, the bitter taste will be eliminated and these will become the preferred best food plots for whitetail deer.

If you have other fields with crops in your area, don’t plant the same thing. Deer love variety. If your neighbor’s fields are planted with corn and/or soybeans, plant something that will be more attractive for the late fall after a hard freeze. It will be too difficult competing with the security that standing corn provides and soybeans are less attractive after they turn yellow and brown.

Before you start spraying weeds to prepare your future whitetail deer food plots, check the soil to see if it is too sandy or has too much clay.  You should be able to tell. Dig a 6″ hole with a spade shovel. If there is a lot of sand with very little consistency to it, or if the ground is so hard that it’s difficult to dig a simple hole, you have too much clay. In either case you’re better off to find an alternative spot.

If you take the time to answer these questions before you get started, it will save you from wondering where all the deer are while you’re sitting in your tree stand and wasting a whole hunting season.

Good Hunting,

Randy VanderVeen