Hot n dry here but... for some, deer are a year_ round obsession.
A few pics foodplot, perennial hot spots treestands, superb bedding cover/ deer trails.
Bare dirt pics are fertilized, sprayed and ready to plant in a couple weeks.

Looks good bucks!

I’m going to head out today and hang 2 trail cams and also take my treestand down at my bear bait.

Archery season starts at the end of August here.

For year round, you’re getting a late start, lol.
I enjoy deer hunting and finding bucks with potential and keeping up with them. Got a couple I’m really keeping an eye on, but I may or may not shoot. I may give someone else an opportunity. I figure if I can have everything in place and even if they get the kill, I still had a part in it and plenty of pics to prove it, lol. My son says I’m more interested in getting pics than a kill, lol.
I’ll do my part in management, but there’s nothing like watching someone else shoot their first trophy buck and their reactions afterwards. My DIL wouldn’t let my son even start tracking her deer last year until I got there to enjoy the moment with them.

Definitely a year-round thing for me. I'm on one of my leases every day doing something for deer or turkeys.

Been pre-baiting 8 locations past 10 days on one tract.....cameras go up tommorrow for 14 days to gather deer population dynamics info. Been 20+ years since I've done a complete pre-season survey on this particular tract.

Lots of free time for this retired deer hunter....lol



Archery opens here Sept 14th.

Put my first camera up yesterday for deer. Got some new land to scout hopefully next week. Be another month before most of my cameras get placed as cattle are still on most of the place. Only be 2 of us hunting this year, going west to hunt muleys first. The whitetails are plan b if we don't get one out west. We got 1/4 ,section food plots here, we call them fields. They are doing well this year.

Very nice

….checked my feeders … they’re set to go off end of September lol

Walked last weekend and checked mine as well. So far all are looking real good. Sawtooths are loaded as well as the persimmons and the oaks in the drain. Only issue when they ALL produce is finding their favorite and getting a stand there. My stands are located in the thickest stands of oaks I could find.

… dropping oaks close to thicket are typically the best for daylight feeding

Used to be some beautiful live oaks, red oaks, and white oaks on one of my leases.

But, they left that property a couple years ago as wood chips loaded in a semi trailer headed to a wood pellet plant.

Timber company landowner is in the tree business...not the deer business.

bucksnbears Have you ever tried planting a few squash in the pumpkins to see what the deer think of them? I would think they would like them.

They’ll be happy with a nice salad bar!

Thanks JP.
Wanna be, habitat work is year round. I plant plots for all seasons. You know that.
Swamp Wolf. Just being out in the woods has become just as enjoyable as sitting in a treestand.i believe alot of us " older" folks feel the same.
Yes sir. Good luck on the Julie's.

Bruce T, thanks.

MJM, sure have!!
Used to plant Acorn squash/ Pumpkins bout 50/50. Deer seemed to prefer the squash earlier.
I prefer hunting later so I've gravited more towards pumpkins.
Turnips,radishes will be going in soon. Just need to see a good amount of rain in the Forcast.

Do you think y’all’s deer eat the pumpkins and other veggies because of y’all’s harsh winters?
I have few buddies that got all excited about radishes and the deer never touched them. And I mean those big jokers too. I didn’t even know radishes got that big.

I may go ride tomorrow if my knee feels up to it and take some pics of the areas we hunt. Think it’ll be pretty cool to compare. May ride out to my sons plantation and let y’all see some ragweed fields you could hide a tractor in, lol.

I've had the same experience with pumpkins. Put them out here and they just rot down... nothing eats them.

Won’t be any punkins here this year, they are eating the plants as soon as the leaf.

Wanna be. The deer here feast on the leaves BIG TIME!,
By the time hard winter sets in, they migrate miles to the nearest sugarbeet field.
I don't plant them for the tubers. Only for the leaves.

Angela, agree. Plant them in a « plot« they get destroyed. Introduce a a few after Halloween, the will probably not get touched.

Don't know why?

I seldom hunt over my foodplots. Prefer sitting in thick cover but as the years go by, pumpkins are becoming my favorite for mid/ late season.
Pumpkins are cheap,easy to plant, and provide a great amount of forage.
I did struggle this year however. « first time ever« with mice finding and digging out the seeds.
Never seen that before.

I set out a half eaten watermelon and nothing touched, not even the hogs when they came through.
I will say one of the best dove hunts I’ve been on was a previous picked watermelon field and whatever was left was just harrowed over with busted watermelons everywhere. We out shot a corn field .25 miles away, lol!

It's the vines the deer are after WB.....not the melon or the pumpkins.

But, if you want to see something truly amazing....find somewhere to get a load of sweet potatoes and dump them on your hunting tract. Chop a few up with a shovel...sprinkle a bag of corn on em......and just watch.