About J. Wayne Fears

Here is a letter from a Whitetails Unlimited member that is very typical concerning approaches to food plots that are out in the open. It also addresses the question of only seeing mature deer on a property at night:

“Recently, our club property was visited by a state DNR deer biologist. We invited him to look at our property to advise us on why we were never seeing any of the mature bucks residing on the property, except at night. Our club is 1,200 acres, made up of several hardwood wetlands dotted around a mixture of food plots, pasture, and pine ridges. We know the bucks spend most of their time in the thick wetlands and come out to feed in our food plots at night. We are a ‘still hunt only’ club. The biologist told us that since we do not have any deer corridors on our property, we should do drives to push the bucks out of the wetlands, but we’d rather not do that. Is there any way we could develop deer corridors on our property to connect the food plots?

This aerial view of corridors in a recent clear cut makes it easy to understand why bucks use them for daylight travel.

This is a good question and one we are hearing more and more as hunters discover the magic that thickly wooded travel strips, called corridors, offer. Those corridors that connect food plots to bedding areas on a property are especially valuable not only for hunting, but also for holding mature bucks all year long.

What is a Corridor?

Deer corridors are strips of heavy cover that connect deer bedding areas to deer feeding areas, especially high quality food plots. They are natural funnels for older deer, due to the fact they offer safe cover for deer traveling during daylight hours. Examples of naturally occurring corridors may include a wide, thickly vegetated fence row running between a plantation of young planted pines and a soybean field, or a streamside management zone (SMZ), which is a wooded strip (purposefully left after a timber harvest) that runs along a stream and connects tracts of woodlands, or a brushy ditch bank that runs between agricultural fields. I have seen some excellent corridors that were simply poorly drained areas that ran between agricultural fields and lowlands. I know a blueberry farmer who has a long, narrow strip of tall blueberry bushes running from a woodlot behind his barn to a clover field. He tells me that he often sees bucks moving through his blueberry corridor in the late afternoon.

Any strip of high growing, thick cover that gives a buck a sense of security when he is traveling during daylight hours can become a corridor; thus, property with lots of corridors will generally have more daytime buck movement since bucks feel safe to move about in these areas.

	The heavily wooded corridor in the center leads from a hardwood bottom where bucks hide most of the day, into a white clover food plot. They wait in the corridor until dark and then emerge to feed.

Plan a Corridor

Start by planning your corridor system. Take a topo map or aerial photo of your property and mark all known or suspected deer bedding areas. For mature bucks, this is usually the thickest areas. Swamps, wetlands, young planted pines, old abandoned fields, and thick brushy areas are often choice bedding areas. Any thick area that is seldom hunted may be a bedding area.

Next, mark deer feeding areas such as food plots, agricultural crops that offer highly desired food, patches of Japanese honeysuckle, smilax, etc., or groves of mast producing trees. Draw lines from the bedding areas to the food sources by following creeks, ditches, fence rows, or any natural depression running between the two. These are your potential corridor sites. If they are not thickly vegetated, then make plans to get them into fast, high growing cover as quickly as you can.

Develop a Corridor

With the corridor sites identified, the next step is to do whatever it takes to get the area to become full of thick trees, brush, and high grass. Give the bucks a strip, at least 10 yards wide and head-high or higher, of vegetated cover to travel in and feel safe. I have created deer corridors by just letting nature take over the strip. A small creek or ditch bank, in many areas, will quickly become thick with alder, gum trees, cane, high grass, and vines if it is not mowed or sprayed with herbicide. A wide, unmowed strip on either side of a ditch, gulley, or fencerow will usually do the same. An annual application of 13-13-13 fertilizer at the rate of 300 pounds per acre, broadcast throughout the corridor, will help speed up the growth process.

A topo map can be an excellent tool to use in planning corridors or finding ones such as these two drainages that lead from a large swamp out to food plot areas.

If your property is open and flat and lacks a depression connecting bedding areas to food plots, you can plant a 10-yard wide strip of pines or cedars connecting the two areas. You can contact your state forestry agency for advice as to how to plant the trees, how to manage them, and where to get inexpensive seedlings to plant. Within about three years, you will have a corridor that will get better each year. I have a friend who runs a cut-your-own Christmas tree business, and he has a wide strip of Scotch pines growing from a swamp on his property to his food plots. It is used by deer regularly. In fact, he has a problem with the bucks using his Christmas trees to make rubs.

Do Not Overhunt

Hunting corridors can be most productive for mature bucks, but a word of caution is advised. Since most corridors are narrow, too much hunting pressure will cause the bucks to quit using the corridor during daylight hours. Develop as many corridors as you can on a tract of land, and after hunting a day or two in one corridor, change to another corridor, giving each a break of five or six days before hunting it again.

Corridors are an important topographical feature on any property where deer management and trophy hunting are top priorities, and they are easy to create with a little planning and field work. It is fun to develop a plan for hunting corridors and in time, provided all other proper deer management practices are in place, you will see the number of mature bucks harvested on your property increase. Having a thick covered travel lane leading from bedding areas to your food plots assures your bucks of cover for their daytime travel.