The piece of land occupied by a deer is called its "Range" and for lack of anything better, that should suffice for this discussion. The nutritional quality and amount of food available combine to determine the health and the total number of healthy animals that can occupy a given sized piece of earth. This measure is referred to as the "Carrying Capacity". To some extent, the size of the deer and the size of their racks are genetically impacted which is cause for discussion among all dedicated 'Horn Hunters". If you want more deer on your place, raise the carrying capacity.

Impacting the Carrying capacity leads into the world of food plots and supplemental feeding both of which work, but are time consuming and expensive. I have always believed that the first order of business in raising CC is to utilize methodology that imparts the greatest amount of nutrients to the greatest number of deer....YEARROUND. That means improving as large an area and as much browse as the budget will allow.

The quickest way to raise CC cheaply is the judicious use of FIRE. As long as you can keep the area in the earlier stages of progression, the amount of browse will be high. Next use the bush hog and keep as much browse within the reach of deer as possible, and finally fertilize and lime as much of the range as you can afford. On a limited budget, these practices give the most bang for the buck.

Putting in food plots with exotic plant mixtures is fine except that it takes a LOT of it and if you just plant a little, the effects are temporary at best. These plots are sometimes touted for attraction, but salt and corn do a wonderful job of putting deer where you want them to be. Special types of food plots that are effective and cheap are fertilized mowed areas of Japanese honeysuckle and fertilized coppice plots. The coppice is made by cutting and removing trees like Blackgums that deer like to browse, and fertilizing the area containing the stumps. Usually it works best when the clumps of trees are 6" or less and concentrated into a grove. An area large enough to let sunlight meet the ground will create a huge amount of preferred browse and the deer will flock to it. The large root systems of the trees are browse generators that last several years with little or no maintenance, just fertilizer.

DEER LAND USE DIVISIONS

This subject breaks the tract into zones based on use by the deer and gives a view of the tract found highly useful for hunting. It will be obvious that many divisions are possible, but I have settled on four categories, which as in the classification of trails, allows fuzzy boundaries and at times combined usage. In ascending order of importance for killing a dominant buck, they are as follows:

NON-USE

This is apparent and requires little or no explanation, except to say that areas where deer go, but are never available during legal hunting hours. For instance a wide open pasture that draws deer only at night would fall here, but not the edges and the bordering brush. Ponds, parking lots, houseyards, etc., all these are non-use areas.

FEEDING AREAS

Most seasoned hunters have seen deer take a bite of some shrub just about anywhere they are in a tract, but in this instance we are talking about areas where the deer go specifically to feed, to the exclusion of most other activity. These include low browse, mast concentrations , crop fields, edges, etc. Deer are seasonal in this use and will move about the tract according to the availability of the most enticing food at the time. Everyone is aware how they congregate for acorns or fertilized plantings. There is no reason to spend a lot of time here, the area is large and the usage scattered about. Lots of deer are killed here, but during rut the chances of getting a dominant buck feeding is not the best odds you can play.

COVERTS

These are areas where deer go to lounge during the day and they abound with sexual indicators, with many rubs and scrapes. Usually they have enough cover to make the deer feel secure and ALWAYS have escape routes. This is the second best place to kill a deer, and most deer killed are in these thickets which includes the edges that surrounds them. There is feeding of course, but the primary purpose here is safety and the chances of a dominant buck detecting your presence and slipping away unseen is high. There is a minimum size to a covert and most are several acres at least. They are found throughout the tract and are not specific to topography. Many times the more open space within a covert will serve as a staging place where the deer gather before moving out for afternoon feeding.

TRAVEL CORRIDORS

A travel corridor is the most advantageous place to kill a dominant buck and determining its location is primary for stand location, but just what would a TC look like? Envision all the buck deer on a tract having a tracking device which plotted their movements on a map of the tract during hunting season. Next eliminate all activity from the map that occurred outside legal hunting hours and you have a visual record of buck availability. These lines would necessarily be all over the map, because a buck is going to find and follow a doe in heat regardless of where she takes him. However, most of a buck's time during rut is spent searching for a doe, rather than breeeding with a doe. Therefore, while the buck is searching, he is placing the most black upon the map. Where he travels while looking for a doe is the most important area for killing bucks, and that means ALL bucks, including especially the dominant bucks. This is the Travel Corridor for the tract and it reveals itself on the map as a solid black area that traverses the tract. It will vary in width and can diverge and converge, but wherever it is, that is where you want to be. Hunting a tract and recording sightings and kills is the best way to define this area.

It is at this juncture that I part company with the Scrapehunters, there may or may not be scrapes on this corridor, but there will be bucks. An example came one morning while I was still hunting a tract and had stopped at one of my viewing points. A large eight point came from behind on my right side, about 50 yards away on the side of the hill. He was plodding methodically in a straight line parallel to the ridge top. I was going to shoot him when he stopped, but suddenly he hunkered down, stuck his tail straight out and began frantically searching like a dog does when he loses the trail of a rabbit. He then went at an accelerated gait, but not a run, still hunkered, over the top of the hill and out of sight. Now, everybody that is anybody knows that was sexual behaviour and that buck was going after the doe that left that trail. But, there was no scrape, rub or any type of buck sign anywhere on that hillside, and the place where the buck first began his antics was nothing but a feed trail leading from the bottom to the ridge. I am certain that a doe in heat does not wait to find a scrape every time she has to urinate, and wherever that occurs she leaves the same calling card as she is reputed to at a scrape. It is entirely possible there were scrapes nearby where she had deposited her scent and left her trail, but by the time a buck came to that scrape and followed her up, the party would have been over.

Nature favors those breeders that can effect a shortcut and that is what happened here. From that experience, I began to put together where that TC came from and went to. Some 150 yards from that spot I placed a stand along the side of that same ridge, where the swamp pushed out and the top of the ridge was clear. The last five times I hunted that stand, I took four bucks. Sevety-five yards in any direction and none of the bucks would have been seen. I never saw anything but bucks traveling along that corridor, but saw many does and yearlings CROSS it on their way from the bottom to the top of the ridge.

I believe that bucks travel these corridors when searching for breedable does, because this avenue gives them scent access to more does than any other way they could traverse the tract. Certainly they would encounter far more does than traveling a scrape line, which I believe is placed in areas where does frequent the most, to establish the buck's availability. But, instead of hanging around waiting on the doe, the bucks cut cross country to pick up the inevitable give away scent trail the does carry with them.