3 Simple Land Improvement Projects that Will Help You Kill More Bucks

Every other week, I drove across the river into Wisconsin to work on my ground. I got a lot done, but that opportunity was an outlier and not the rule. This year, real winter returned. The opportunities to chip away at my various habitat projects have been put on hold, but the minute we get some real thawing going on, I’ll be back over there.

There are two things I know that are guaranteed to happen when I do make it back into the woods. I won’t get as much finished as I want, but what I do get accomplished will help me and my daughters kill more deer. This is a lesson I’ve learned after years of trying to make incremental improvements to small parcels.

You don’t have to rent a bulldozer for the day or severely alter the landscape to make your piece more suitable for whitetails. You just have to tackle some simple improvements, which are feasible for just about anyone.

Put Your Saws To Work

Last year, I wanted to improve two things on a 30-acre piece of land I own: expanding a small kill plot and cutting an access route to a corner of the land I wanted to hunt. The kill plot expansion was an attempt to address the fact that whenever my daughters can hunt in the early season, we often deal with south or west winds.

My original plot allows for some setups for those winds, but it can be fickle. I wanted to give us another option, so I cut a 30-yard trail off the first plot and cleared out a smaller secondary plot. It took me two days with a brush cutter and a chainsaw, but it changed the arc of our season last year.

Not only did we have a better situation to sit during north winds, but I also accidentally created a perfect bear bait site. This paid off when one of my daughters arrowed a decent bruin in early September, and it was made possible by two partial days of sweat equity.

The access trail I cut to the corner, didn’t help me kill a buck. But it did help me hunt that spot and figure out how I can probably kill a cruiser on the edge of the swamp next year. Cutting some brush for a plot, or creating access trails is simple stuff, but important. It’s also generally pretty easy.

Waterholes

Because my daughters often hunt the early season, we tend to deal with warmer weather. This means that water is key, but that property doesn’t have any water sources. What’s worse, the neighbors on all sides, do.

Just before turkey season last year, I carried in a shovel and some pond liner material, and went to work. It wasn’t as easy as I hoped due to about a million tree roots and some pretty rocky soil, but by the time I was finished I had a small pond set up 20 yards from our favorite blind.

The deer go through there anyway, but now we have an added attraction. I don’t remember what the materials cost me, but it wasn’t more than what I spend taking my family of four out to eat at a chain restaurant. I’ve tried ornamental ponds in the past, along with just burying plastic totes, but the pond liner option is my favorite. It allows me to shape a water hole exactly how I want it.

This is about as easy of an improvement to your property that you can make, and all whitetails share the same trait that if they don’t get water, they will predictably, die.

Apple Trees

I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever killed a deer specifically because it came to an apple tree. I certainly have tried, though. I also just like having fruit-bearing trees on my ground. A lot of critters will eat apples, and while you can go nuts with pears, or persimmons, or chestnuts, or whatever, apples are universally loved by deer.

There are also dozens of different types that thrive in a variety of different environments. While you might need to cage them to keep critters away, which can add some expense and extra work, there is just something cool about planting a few apple trees every spring on your deer ground.

This is a long-game strategy that might not pay off for several seasons, but it’s generally pretty cheap, is fairly easy especially when compared to building and planting food plots, and can eventually turn into a real deer draw.