How to Make Your Hunting Property More Attractive Right Before the Season

Deer will be drawn to your property if you have the trifecta: water, food and bedding. Set up a water system and a feeder and hinge cut your trees to provide them cover. If you have all of the above, the deer will gravitate to your property during the fall hunting season and give you plenty of opportunities to harvest.

Water Sources

Set up a Wild Water System on your property to give the deer a reliable and active water source. You can select from systems that hold 50, 100 or 300 gallons of water. The systems come with either one or two troughs that are each three-feet long. This allows multiple deer from the herd to drink at the same time. The valve system senses when the trough is empty and will automatically open to refill the trough from the main tank. If you fill the tank now you can let the deer get used to the system through the rest of the summer so that they’re already frequenting your property when the season opens. You can use our Wild Water Bladder to fill the systems. The bladder holds 100 gallons of water so you can fill the tanks in just one to three trips.

To make the water even more addictive to the herd, add our Wild Water Mineral Supplements to the tank. The supplements provide specific nutrients that deer need to promote antler growth and overall health.

Set Up Feeders

It’s also important to start feeding the herd before the season opens. The deer need time to get used to anything on your property before you start going back and forth to your blind, filling the area with your scent and presence. If you introduce everything at the same time when the season opens, you’re going to be pressuring them before they’ve even started coming to your property. Let them notice your water and food sources before they notice you.

Our Feedbank Feeders come in options from 40 to 600 pounds. Our Gravity Feeders are placed on top of a single post and have feeding ports that are elevated at the deer’s eye level. Our Timber Feeders are solid feeders that are placed directly on the ground in a stump shape, much like our Stump Blinds. We also have a Haybank Feeder that’s designed specifically to dispense hay. It holds one rectangular bale of hay and is also mounted on a single post. The benefit of elevated feeders, and feeders that don’t have multiple legs or stabilizers, is that the deer can feed freely without damaging their antlers on any of the posts.

Supplemental feeding isn’t legal everywhere, so check your local regulations before placing any feeders on your property.

Hinge Cut to Provide Cover

While you’re clearing your shooting lanes this summer, consider hinge cutting some of the trees to provide the deer with bedding areas and cover. Hinge cutting is when you cut a tree down without completely severing the trunk and push the top of the tree over at the connection, using the connected part as a hinge, as the name implies. Leaving the tree attached to the trunk allows the tree to continue to produce any fruit and nuts as a food source while the branches and leaves provide cover for the deer on the ground.

You can use our products to make your hunting property more attractive to the deer herd now, giving yourself a month before the hunting season starts on Sept. 13. It will be here before you know it!

How do you make your hunting property attractive to deer before the season starts? Let us know in the comments below.