The end goal to the management program is simple, we just want to hunt and kill big deer. You know my end goal is, for everyone that comes here, I want them to have the opportunity at hunting a 150 or better. So our management program it’s actually pretty simple, we’re just targeting mature 150 plus whitetail. You know there’s no secret to deer management, seriously.
Time, it just takes time to grow a big deer and we just have to stop killing the small deer, you know like the 130s 140s class deer. If we let them walk, you know, give them another year or two, they’re in that 150 to 170 class or bigger you know. So yeah there’s really no secret. The number one thing is time.
Number two is having the right people in place sitting in the stands and the ground blinds. You know we’ve got a lot of people that are repeat, I’m going to call them clients but they’re really friends. You know they come here as a client, they leave as a friend. They keep coming back year after year. They buy into our management program and see what we’re doing and seeing the results.
You know we had a client of ours who put it very wisely. He said, “if you take that safety off and your heart rate doesn’t go to the roof maybe you should put the safety back on”. We always say if that deer is a shooter you’re going to know. It’s not going to be a question. If you have to talk yourself into shooting it, it’s probably not a shooter.
I always say I like to coach, you have to coach people. A lot of the guys coming here have hunted SK for 10, 20 years. Those guys know, they've made the mistakes and they've shot the big deer. For the new hunters, I'll share pictures of deer that have been around the blind they're in, I'll say “listen there’s a mature, or a young 10 in there, a young 10 point, you know he’s probably 130, he’s going to be tempting because he’s a 10, but he’s a young deer”.
We don’t typically name a deer unless we think he’s worthy. For example, we’re hunting one deer right now and his name came because he’s just been around for six, seven years and we named him “Houdini”. He just disappears and then he appears, and you know we had one guy see him, we’re hunting him right now. We name some, the clients name some, but there's really no rhyme or reason, they just come to us.
We had another deer that we actually got this year, we’ve been hunting for 3 years, “Mr Krabs”. You know, everybody knew who “Mr Krabs” was. That's the other fun thing about naming the deer, everybody associates that name to that deer so you have a deer that has the name, you look at the picture, oh yeah, that’s “Houdini” or that's "Mr. Krabs", you know so everybody knows that’s that deer.
The great part about doing this is that every day is different. Even if you're in a slow stand one day you can come in at the end of the day and everybody is sharing their stories at the dinner table. So what we like to do is, if you draw a stand we like to stay there 2 to 3 days, for the simple fact of the first day and the third day are going to be different. Then we're sure that we’re not missing something.
While everybody’s out spending the time in the stand, watching for that mature buck that we’re hunting, we’re out baiting, checking cards, looking after things and making sure that if something else shows up we can get people on it. So that that’s more or less a typical day I guess at whitetail camp.
So for our our baiting practices we we like to stay on top of it. Of course I never like to let a bait go low or empty. Typically we go to every bait every two days. There’s always a bale there. There’s always something to hold the deer at the bait you know good alfalfa, good hay and we freshen up with grain every two days, so very important to keep your does and buck small bucks around to keep those mature bucks where the activity is.
Next year will be our seventh season. That’s enough time to grow a big deer. You know, lots of guys say 5 or 5 and a half. Yeah some deer have it at 5 and a half but you know some deer need that extra, that extra two or three years to get to that maturity. The payoff for the clients, the people hunting here, is the reward of putting your time in the stand, putting your time in the blind, and having that at 150 or 180 walk in. That is a huge reward for your time spent.