Dr. Woods Answers Questions from Hunters On How Get Better Hunting (Outtake)

[Music] [Applause] any benefit protecting deer that show exceptional antler potential sure I mean there's it's a risk-reward relationship right something could happen deer break legs running chasing those fighting get a Tyler tines are in the dirt and stuff they're full of bacteria if you take a swab off there and put a petri dish it's amazing lot gross so oftentimes in Bucks fight their gore and this is how they're created you know sometimes deer will die and there be no external wound and you cut them open and the heart was damaged by blunt trauma and that was an antler literally going through the ribs it did not break the skin but it hit it was such force that the blunt trauma hurt the heart I've seen it actually ruptured to heart so if it does penetrate the skin they get infections that's why just units created so floppy and you know you pick a dog by the neck and it goes about a foot up there it's kind of the same thing you know so there's risk we passed deer I live on and on mm lurid acres it's kind of football-shaped narrow both ends fatter in the middle kinda like me and and we lose here every year the neighbors every year that we've watched and passed every year so you have more land but the King Ranch loses deer to neighbors on the edges just you gotta accept that you have to accept that or be frustrated no you're only gonna see their full potential if you do pass them you're just accepting the risk that they may die and not be harvested by one your club members it could be a natural death I don't like that term natural because I think hunting is natural so and we kill a deer what's unnatural about that right like when you pull in front of Yellowstone on the South Gate unless they've removed it recently and I've been after this for decades no National Park is natural right because at front of Yellowstone it says 30,000 Native Americans used to live here at least part of the year well they read they read meat they were getting tools and making moccasins the only the only way Yellowstone can be natural hunting in there it will never be natural until we have hunting and those critters are afraid of humans so it's natural and it's good and I passed here in my place just knowing I'm going to spin some loss now the best deer we've tagged at my place there's a hundred and seventy two inches I don't have nearest soil capacity you all have common for us to grow hundred fifty inch deer that's very common on less land and lower quality soil we have a much higher percentage of our habitat with Sun hitting the forest floor much opportunity and our food plots are really good so yeah for y'all to globe owners here is no big I'm talking gross score net boner is a really unique animal but to me if that was your goal can I get you there can you get yourselves there yes you give up a lot to get there no just trade off and that's for y'all to decide I would protect all young bucks if your goal that's where you gotta set your goal and you need to set to go by I'm happy with three roads knowing some of them could be whoppers and when you set your goal at three you realize you're not gonna kill them all so you're gonna have some fours and fives out there or you set your goal at four and in the higher you notch it the fewer deer will be killed each year and the mortal will be lost to natural causes so right now we're at three and a half that's our cutoff and I mean it seems like it's I mean chime then it seems like it's really difficult for everyone to tell the difference between a three and a half and a four and a half year old deer sometimes it can be it can be that that I would never encourage you to raise or not again that's a personal choice if you said it three you got fours and fives the problem is the best three the one that's gonna be the burner at four or five is the most obvious one's gonna get shot and they usually are the ones to get shot because just there's some characteristic not always but oftentimes they're the more aggressive deer and therefore the more visible and three roads are infinitely easier to kill than a four year old there's a massive jump between three and four in the experience of the deer three roads are going everywhere with no knowledge of caution right they're just doing it so they're more successful two harvests four-year-olds tend to be very nocturnal and tougher to harvest document control hunting pressure and on top of that how can we limit non hunting pressure from joyriders camera checkers and stand mixers talking about hunting pressure first hunting pressure is a misuse term if you're hunting appropriately to be successful you know I'm not talking about to plug but to be successful with you you're going in middle most urban so I don't that's not riding down the road that's the winds right for the hunting location you pick and whatnot I don't care how much you hunt we're on our farm someone's on our farm close to seven days a week it could be my wife's church group my daughter is a photographer she's taking somebody's wedding picture you know right where I'm on a hunt whatever we have a lot going on on our farm and we still kill deer it's not easy but we kill deer so I'm not as worried about that what I am worried about is people carelessly hunting hey it's pretty afternoon football game then start the dark I'm just gonna go set and stand X because it's convenient and the wins all wrong because deer have memory we know this from great research deer have memory they tend to memory tends to be better almost like humans until they get to see now which is about seven for a lot of deer put on nutrition that's nutrition related so man you can educate deer and if you educate deer right the first season it's kind of like it's also like us so you know that break a season until the next season you kind of forget that you need to keep every receipt until next tax season then you do it again and and deer kind of forget well man last time I was in this field it thundered real loud and there's a white belly over there by the next deer season so if you you boo boo the first two weeks of season you got tough season ahead I'm not as worried about canva checkers what I suggest clubs do is can you limit that between like ten and three if you don't go check your cameras after 10:00 a.m. and before 3:00 p.m. there in hunting season or even more critical the two or three weeks before hunting season that's the critical time I don't care what happens now should we continue to perform the deer census we talked about just I don't do the camera survey on my place anymore it's never senseless you never count everything's really a survey it's an indicator an estimate to have more or less deer in the head last year I can tell that my simple utilization cages it's neat to see all the pictures you do it in August most of them change portions of the home range that use my hunting season so it's not a big hunting advantage you just know they're there well you're gonna know they're there if you put some cameras on food plots order during the summer anyway connector roads with adding connector roads cut down on driving pressure by creating shorter access routes to central areas of the property and we've seen the road system pretty there's a handful of roads that get you around I'm finding more roads just because it makes it easier deer in Turkey love to walk roads all this stuff that's to me that's a either way I would rather your members drive the buggy within 100 yards or staying blind then walking quarter mile ABS unequivocally absolutely every single time because when you're in the buggy I mean forts hopefully someone hope I hope someone is on a buggy every day on this property and condition deer that it's that don't be shooting out of it condition deer that's just like deer in Nashville and city park they don't care for Chevy drives by they can't only pick their head up anymore so I want buggies the same bug is what I don't want its opening day of deer season someone bust out the big brand new you know whatever it it's totally different and rips through the whole property but I hope you use the proper year-round and you know and you're not ripping and worn but you're just driving through normal and conditioned deer that's a non-issue and then when you're walking of course you're respirating and the wind's blowing it somewhere it's or the thermals or whatever it's happening but when you're in a buggy it's fumes and they're so used to it it's no big deal and especially what I really like and we do this on our place is I want people to come pick me up out of stand and spook the deer out of the field or the Oak Flat or ever I'm hunting with the buggy and not me walking out that is critical that's one of the biggest things you do for your property Sanctuary should we create sanctuaries how long topic should they be where I like my sanctuaries and you have plenty of opportunity here on side slopes because you can't hunt them very efficiently anyway - winds always gonna stroll on side slope unless you're in that hundred mile storm or something and deer want to be on that side slope because when swirling so to get protection from 360 so it's a win-win you have deer in an area where you're not it's where they want to be and it's not very huntable and you use your bottoms and tops for hunting so I like and I like my sanctuaries a minimum of ten acres when I have long skinny like the states of feds year ago had a program CP 33 which was a width away from tree rows and fields that they would pay farmers to only plant native grasses whatever we caught those predator food plots because they're so narrow at Kyoto whatever can just go on the downwind side and walk along and smelt every turkey nesting fawn whatever in there and they and they wiped them out they instead of increasing walleye populations it decreased it so I like a minimum of 10 acres larger is better some of mine on my place are 50 acres and I'm not opposed to hunting these every now and then I don't try to kill every deal out there we put a big red net blind up whatever and shoot the big buck is there cruising through because you're gonna use them during the rut and pre-rut searching for dose those are awesome places to kill mature bucks my favorite places to hunt for bucks my favorite by far how should we create better turkey nesting habitat warm season grasses or in the timber yeah I feel very strongly that you need to use all your areas that are planned about to plant and create your cover and timber by thinning trees you're short of food so don't give any up for sure it's easy to make making covers the easiest thing to do and planting native grasses is real expensive it requires a lot of maintenance it looks good you see it on TV because they're out in the pasture somewhere this is a different type of habitat we didn't we're to utilize fire at HD to improve habitat strike a match and let them hatch boys use it a lot you need to burn in the spring and the fall burning at different times a year stimulates different seeds to grow cool sit fall burns what we call groins I say fall August September somewhere in there it's tough for us you and me it's tough for us to be dry enough the humidity low enough to burn that time year it's not that's going to get away it's well will it carry because there's very few days that time here the humidity is at 30% very very few so you you got a cap on the day it happens you can't say well you know I got to do something else you got someone here burning and fall burns give you more legumes and forbs and spring burns stimulate grass more yu-mong combination both so if you burn the same every year spring spring spring you end up with grass dominant areas and no food not that grass is bad but I like food and cover in the same area so I try to rotate and a minimum you know it's easier to burn in spring there's more opportunities burn in spring humidity is low in the spring more so you know you may do two burns in spring and one in the fall and and people ask me what's my rotation it's not gonna work boys you burn when the conditions allow so it may be two years or four years you just got to burn when you can and as you really can burn every year because there's not enough fuel it won't carry it takes a fair amount of fuel I mean is spot here and spot here in the spot here but to carry through 10 20 30 acres takes a lot of fuel or it puts itself out and everyone sees a fire out in California oh my god we gonna be careful to the liabilities too high got a memory California's average humidity is 8% we're not we're not in that planet and if California not been on lectures on this would use prescribed fire they wouldn't have these catters if they reduced the fuel base when humidity was 50% easy to fire through there didn't win add the Santa Ana winds there wouldn't be near as much fuel and they could control it y'all is liability as much bigger having all this fuel and you do get a wicked wicked dry August and the fire starts and gets in the crown and rose which only happens about once a hundred years in this part of the world literally your liability is much bigger on that to do an obscure fire fire burn it we don't burn we're too busy dirt crews that do burn or it can teach you how to burn just while I see fire is typically about thirty bucks an acre give or take who's doing it whatever get some training have a contractor come in first time or to get y'all used to it then y'all can do your own burns road networks make burning much easier that's one reason to build roads because your fire brakes are just there it miss makes it so much easier is there an ideal part do you have written down and I built burning it's kind of a multivariate regression but I like my humidity we burn on seventeen percent humidity days and I like fire you know I a nice fight fire refer to Bill him I'm used to two hundred thousand acre fires but we've never had one get out I'll tell you that I mean spot jump you know from here to the house or something but as far as oh my guys called a fire department we've never had that I burned right up to a fence where there's subdivisions next door you just it's tough to get conditions to burn here we're more worried about it carry Endon or what's going to fast burning hardwoods we burn hardwoods ours are not a big commercial thing on my property when you burn through White Oaks you can start a bunch of some trees and reduce the amount of income you're gonna make that's a factor it appends on the fuel load right if it's just two years of leaf litters it's you're not gonna do anything another factor is tick stand it just ticks just tick so I learned all the other parasites can easily reduce the antler size by fifteen percent no I just think about this one hundred fifty inch deer fifteen percent one hundred fifty that's thirty inches that's a hundred eighty inch deer I'm doing round math here that's taking the 150 to a 180 yeah it's that real research is done by dr. dye out of Texas it's been done for 20 years its massive the difference parasites make well fire is the only practical way you're not going to get rid of ticks but you can reduce ticks through fire it takes a lot of fire a lot of fire I would like to see y'all get to where you're burning a third of the property a year so you're on 3d rotation burning 20 acres doesn't do anything guys that's to get you started that's kindergarten start lighting hundred two hundred acres at a time I'm so I'm not teasing three of us one two three of us just burn hundred and seventy-six acres and we had a west wind but the biggest straightest line we had on that whole fire was my neighbor's line I mean we're burning looking at houses and timber and three of us then I burned yet - Daniel played both younger healthier more wind better legs all that's better looking all that stuff you know they did that side and I burned the whole other side and I had a road as my boundary and I lit that road right off the bat first thing just let it boom and then started to spend rest a day just stripping what we call stripping so instead of it sitting the valley and lighting whole thing up and it would kill some trees which I'm not opposed to in my place I don't kill them all they would kill some I would go down pin on the slope ten yards 20 yards 50 yards bent on slope and the quality trees in that site that specific site and that just gets it done a lot quicker fired does it only kill some parasites that releases nutrients to the soil we need nutrients it stimulates all these little plants here back to an early stage where there's much more nutritious when you take you y'all cut in your yard somewhere up you know let's say we cut this four-inch tree right here if we cut it right now this time year it's gonna sprout back right now you got 20 years of roots feeding something that's big it's infinitely more nutritious I don't want your deer eating hardwoods that's getting popular hence cutting all this absolute nonsense dear don't get big eating toothpicks I don't want you dear eating hard loops I want to burn and reduce hardwood saplings so forbes can grow annual broadleaf plants that's where deer get big the farmer we've got a farmer here fifty to seventy seventy acres of total food plots he farms in the bottoms and then a couple of smaller fields our larger fields up here hmm typically rotates corns and beans we've talked him into doing beans the last two years he's gonna plant corn this year trying to figure out if we need to keep them part ways with him do something different in different locations things like that okay so the farmers farming for a cash yield you're trying to go dear I don't know about the cash rent or you know your payment whatever is well that's kind of low you need to go straight better with that most people I see her thirty percent it's it's a farmers could be a tool to get it done you know it takes a while to plan 130 acres that can be a tool to get it done you're short of food I would rather see it standing and on our rotation words this is me without looking at your budget I was selfishly would want to see it a hundred percent for deer now the deer eating on the beans all summer while they're out there but he harvests and if he plants a longer maturing beans I could group five or six it's probably not much time to get a fall crop in their heap I'm not doing much good in the fall and you watch your deer this is critical for deer to express their potential critical most people manage deer especially in hardwood timber and they do this they gain let's say you know start May whatever it or gain or weight gain and weight gain and weight hit the rut they may be level and start dropping that's the critical part okay do they drop so much that next spring or catching or do they only level off so an ideal deer herd and I it's tough to be ideal but an ideal deer herd games and then level then gain so it's an increase then level then gain and level and you used to notice because if you're killing those in January whatever if your body weights are starting to suck big difference especially on your dough's and your Bucks gonna lose weight but if your dozers dropping off your deer there's no chance they're gonna suppress the potential and you need to carry that all the way through and this is what I tell people it takes three generations to really improve a deer herd a lot is this is well known in humans and deer when that doe was carrying the fawn and she's not not the mo condition that turns certain genetic codes in that fawn and through its life it will never express its full potential so you mentioned Mississippi State earlier some of the best research they've ever done and they've done a lot I know him well work with them they took some some deer from a coastal barrier island very small deer right and took deer off the Delta so the big steer body sizes in the world right bottom up to the recent wild free-ranging deer I'm up to do research pins fed them both the exact same ratio and kept it several deer so they could breed whatnot and kept those deer populations for three generations now they're eating the same and the first year even though they're eaten same the body weights and outer size were significant list off those coastal plain dear and near to to grown not year to generation to not year generation and generation three there's hardly any difference between the biggest deer in the world and coastal plain deer because those genes will kick on once they get good nutrition but it's not going to make a difference in that deer see offspring so we have to get better quality habitat let those dough's have fawns those doe still had turned off genes it's very simple terminology here and that those fawns that are born have fawns generations now we can make improvements in the first year but for deer to express their potential were generations away the short answer for me would be if you have the manpower and time equipment power and you can control the farm and you're gonna be better because your objectives are different no no I don't know why your plants going for dere corn taking up space all summer long there's nothing to eat a little bit cover it's not providing anything for antlers or fawns or milk and then deer don't really like eating corn off the cob it's hard to get they loved shelled corn it's candy it's you know a lot a lot of sugar but corn on the cob is hard to get you ever watch the duty to soybean plant they picked I had to vacuum it off there so soy beans or legumes whatever provide protein all summer food in the winter corn is providing energy in the winter energy then grow antlers acorns provide energy and and if we look at this this is great great information if you look at the you can google this and find it if you look at the soybean yield per county under the NRCS and then look at the boone and crockett map it's almost an exact match the difference is Texas and that's because they put on a semi and haul it down there and make feed and feed deer in Texas and about 70 percent of the native vegetation in Texas is legumes makes nitrogen yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so a corn if you and then if you look at hardwood density by county and look at boone and crockett size it's an opposite I mean go up and down to smoky mountains boys no one says I'm going to the mountains of North Carolina to hunt no one says that no one says that there's hardwoods all over with tremendous size right I live in those arts it's all hardwoods no one says I'm going to brand Simms already shoot me a burner burner no one says that yeah you kill big deer come from prairies we're a lot of sunshine Instagram more about farming implementation of Buffalo system than our food plots we've got clover we planted beans we've always had a tough time with beans they just get cheered off put cages around them pretty evident um we switched last year to predominantly clover not that reason we got over plots that were great huh and then you're drilling into that yeah that's not necessarily bad I think that Blinn could be tweaked a little bit sometime beans don't work everywhere I get that I have fields beans don't work in that's that's no big deal I like a minimum of eight species in a Blin there's a lot of research that shows that eight the magic number no one knows why different plants all different species of plants have different root exudates they're leaking carbon different forms of carbon carbonic acid to be specific out there roots and those different acids release different minerals from the soil and the rock in the soil literally and you have more earthworms and all these things when you put a bigger diversity of plants out there so I like minima eight I know people plant sixty literally sixty my garden blend that's 50 I put in a no-till drill go right through the food plot I have 50 different species in there literally I never weed it's so thick I never weed I'll do anything I walk out there's a bucket every Sunday morning usually pick litters ripe I don't know what's gonna be that week deer love it by the way divert your have healthier deer healthier plants fewer past all that stuff if you're putting in your food plots by the way what's your dough harvest last year it was way down because of the temperature okay once you what's your five-year average on doe harvest when we started really getting after it we were killing 30 30 to 40 does yeah oh yeah then no no no we have to kill our dough's in a neighbor's dose and you're gonna do same thing so we kill 50 plus deer year I mean just with bows and a little bit of guns on my place y'all need to be killing a hundred dollars a year you're never get to your goals objectives lest you do this they'll take me wrong I mean I yeah there's some things go on here when you kill a doe her button bucks usually stay there if you don't kill her she drives them off now you got four thousand acres it may be driving on one side of property or the other this is you know awesome research this isn't just thinking so you have to kill doze that the the one of my dissertation questions was which I thought was horrible until I went through it then it was really good it was as well as the adult sex ratio the white-tailed deer population pre-european settlement what God put here and I thought would they want me to fail there's nobody get an answer and so you know you can't argue so you go library and start digging and turns out I found museums from South Florida to North Dakota that are dug up Indian bins basically trash heaps on the outside of camp and pelvic girdles a deer I can sex a deer humps inaccurately from a pelvic girdle and get a pretty good indication of age and I found about records of 10,000 pelvic girdles and reconstructed a deer North America and of course no gore-tex and o30 out six and nothing like that they killed 50 50 50 percent bucks 50 percent doze or average buck was over three and a half years old that's what you heard should be their average shot with seven yards well we do on our property play all of us I mean my daughter's we see a dog we got tagging we shoot it we don't sit there waiting on a buck and the vast majority I used to keep records not only more but I think at the time 25 percent on the mature bucks I killed were killed that's the states all over guys were killed on the same hunt like a morning afternoon hunt lanai really kill or dole out that stand the biggest attraction you ever have four bucks a dead dog laying in front of you any time of year you got most hunters the biggest mistake hunters make drives me nuts is they think of deer like humans if we saw a corpse here clay and I would hide in the truck and you know read for Missouri but deer don't think like that they don't think that all but I've we have on video if you watch or show you see it every years someone kills a buck coming to a dead dodo it was chopped 20 minutes earlier the best attraction you got has a dead dulling in front of you that's the no reason shooting shoulder drop them right there in sight but yeah we kill an average of about $5 for every buck on our property and we have four years but it's not that race don't get stuck on ratios because you can kill six deer say I met my go and when utilization cages are awesome as I said that earlier they're better than a camera survey not a census a survey and and when we can grow food now you got a taker food plot you're not going beans you got to be realistic here but you got a hundred acre field it all looked like a dog on Iowa bean field it should not be over browsed and you got a five acre field it'd all be looking in there's gotta be some browser pressure but it should be making it you know should be making it logging related questions how should we prepare a logging related food plot damage and then also I think just how to probably turn this wind event into a positive logging damage log into the source of income it's necessary we need more daylight hitting ground you've got a man up and redo it I like to have them not destroyed my food plots fine you know go over here and make a new food plot cut some more trees down have that beat a logging deck and then you work on restore net to make it a food plot don't mess up an existing food plot don't replant them in pines all right pines are useless for deer not a good pine market necessary anymore west Vagos moved out been on there's not a pulp mill here I got clients all around Katie's all up in there that we can give pines away we can give them away ya can't give them away don't ever replant them in Pines you just gotta have to burn that and keep burning and keep burning it and if you want to replant I wouldn't waste my money replanting hardwoods but if you want to when you replant in hardwoods you're getting seedlings from a nursery door fertilizing icicle cones for deer deer can tell that fertilization like that and they just walk down eating your real expensive hardwood seedlings I would just keep burning and over time nadie natural regeneration will occur and then you have to go in with a backpack sprayer and say I like this tree I don't like this tree I like this tree I don't like this tree or to be too thick and it be what you have it takes unfortunately unless you're please hear me clearly on this and I own land in a worse area than you have land but unless you're Nile WA and the farmer is doing your food plots in hundred acre fields it takes active management to make a property productive for wildlife very active and the southern quail plantations by the best example I mean they're working on habitat year-round it doesn't have to be expensive management you're behind eight ball so you got spend some money to start with but it's gonna take active annual management like we do something then we hunt for ten years that's never gonna happen here I promise you never and reach objectives it's not gonna happen there's no chance it takes active we burn every year at our property we try to burn every spring and every fall it takes active management and by the way you just experience this God doesn't selective harvest very much right natural habitat is a wind storm or hurricane or catastrophic fire or an insect infestation whatever it's not selective harvest and when you selective harvest you've got a treat it's green and weighs tons like that big tree right there and if it you cut it in where it's standing there it has to eat another tree on the way down yeah I'm sure you've seen this here it breaks off limbs or knocks bark up to order but that's where fungus and insects eat in trees right just like an antler we talked about going in the hide of a deer and that hit tree never expresses its full potential so when you clear-cut you're not worried about that scarring and you can clear-cut a much smaller area and get same volume of wood for income and when you clear-cut your compact and so that equipments vibrating and heavy it's a min psychic Tantra compactor right you're squishing soil so rain and the oxygen and insects can't get in but it heals and then we're not back on it for another 50 years or whatever but when you're selectively cutting and going in every seven eight ten years your soul never heals right and it's never as potentially not going to money volume you can you're not going to plant clutter you can you're not going to dear you can you think about dragging your equipment over these hills over 200 acres get the same volume got off a much smaller acreage it's much more profitable it just works better and you don't have to think I'm cutting this tree or this or this tree you just cut everything in front of you it's much better forestry much much better two things I want to say that the only reason we have the word clear-cut is kind of like we have some political terms on the same thing here now but clear-cut is it should have been scientifically I was taught it's even age of generation it wasn't clear-cut clear-cut is a nasty you know environmental term that's the form of forestry called even age regeneration you take it all down everything starts the same age and the second thing is I've caught two babies my two daughters and I got to tell just being really candid here my wife hates and I say this but I mean when they first come out they got blue and brown crap coming out orifices that shouldn't be there I mean you're you know they're not do looks pretty bad and then after a while you can't clean them up about time they're five-door human and then at ten Roque and fifteen are pretty fun usually you know and and that's kind of clear-cut it was ugly the first year like a brand-new baby I don't care who you are if you're being honest when they first come out boy it's kind of a sight to see and then it starts getting better and better and better and better I like to savannas but my savannas are pretty doggone close I mean we have all I can show you every 100 feet or 200 feet you know it's a big state leo because my trees are not commercially valuable just because of poor soil where I am so savannas are ultimate productive you got acorns you got grass you got food all in one place and that's the ultimate you

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Keywords: hunting (interest), deer hunting, habitat management, TSI, hunting strategies, white-tailed deer, video, How to deer hunt

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Length: 35min 14sec (2114 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020