Whitetail Management with Greg Lavoie

Chaparral Hunting Adventures owner/outfitter Greg Lavoie talks about Whitetail Management, naming deer, deer baiting, tree stands and more in this video, shot in various location across his deer hunting lease.

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 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. It’s number one is 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. So you know the biggest thing in management is is just letting those small deer walk.

You know the hunter’s role, the client’s role, in the the management program is don’t pull the trigger. You know we had a client of ours, I think that you talked to just in the muzzle loader season, you know he 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”. You know 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, I mean you have to coach people. You know a lot of the guys that are coming here have hunted Saskatchewan for 10, 20 years, those guys they know, they’ve made the mistakes, you know, they’ve killed the big deer. They’ve made the mistakes in their early career hunting Saskatchewan so the biggest thing I like to do with guys that are new to hunting deer here, number one is share pictures. One thing I don’t do, is I don’t share a bunch of pictures of the big deer. The big deer are easy. Big deer are easy, I mean when they walk in you’re going to know he’s a giant, he’s a big deer. You know the ones I like to share, so say somebody draws a stand, uh “Bear Dead” the one we’re at right now. You know I will share pictures with that guy saying, “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”. So that’s the thing, I think is beneficial for the guy sitting in the blind or sitting in the stand if he knows there’s a ten in there that’s close and he has a picture on his phone. That deer walks. You know, “yeah, Greg told me that’s a a 130 class deer so he lets him walk”. That’s been a really successful way of helping guys not pull a trigger on a young deer.

We don’t typically name a deer unless we think he’s worthy, you know, and the name, where the names come from, well some of them we name some of them are the client’s name. So you know, 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. So yeah, the names are usually unique to the deer or to the person hunting the deer or you know stuff like that, but there’s no rhyme or reason to the names, it just comes to us, or somebody pulls a name out of the air and says yeah, that’s a good name kind of thing. So it’s just something fun. We don’t typically name a deer that’s 3 years old and he’s got really good potential. We won’t name him because he’s not worthy of a name yet, so that’s kind of where the name comes from. The other fun thing about naming the deer is 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” you know so everybody knows that’s that deer. 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. We send a drop box out. You’re like, “oh yeah that’s Mr Krabs”, so yeah that’s another fun part is all the people that come here and hunt here associate those names with those specific deer.

That’s the great part about doing this is you know every day is different. You can be on stand one day, oh man you know my activity was slow, and it’s fun to come in at the end of the day and you know, say you have six guys out, and everybody’s sharing their stories at the dinner table and and you know one guy says yeah my activity was pretty pretty good up until 10:00 or 11:00 or 1:00 or whatever. It’s always the same, you know you might have one stand that’s really active all the time but that’s why you know every day is different. So what we typically like to do is hunt, 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. So that’s what we like to typically do is at least hunt that spot for two to three days just to make 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, we’re 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 other day, every two days I guess. 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.

We got one at every bait some have two, where I have a cell cam I also have a backup camera just in case there’s a fail. So yeah we’re probably running around 80 cameras.

One thing I’d like to talk about, we get lots of questions about our tree stands. You know we’ve got over 50 bait sites and we’ve got 30 to 35 tree stands. These are custom tree stands. As you can see, we’ve got a skirt around them, 3/4 covered. All of them are in evergreens. I always have them in an evergreen, better cover and stuff like that. Measurements, they’re 50 inches from the tree out and then the seat, the width is 33 inches, so plenty of room. When you sit down, as you can see, you’re camoed a bit. You know you’re covered, and, as you can see, there’s a deer at the bait right now. We’re sitting here talking but it’s kind of cool. So yeah, these are just, you know it just breaks the wind breaks, your movement from this, from the bait, and it’s solid. There’s little, obviously you can’t see from down there, but there’s little hangers here for whatever you want to hang there, your binoculars or backpack, whatever, and very very safe. Whole rail all the way around. The only way you’d fall out of here is if you jumped. So it’s solid jumping on here. That’s one thing I wanted to point out. We get a lot of questions about that.

Next year will be our seventh season. That’s enough time to grow a big deer. You know, five, lots of guys say, “oh 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.