Bedding area improvements - Food Plots and Wildlife Habitat - Food Plots and Wildlife Habitat

In seeing some recent posts regarding bedding areas and how to improve them I thought I’d throw this up here. This is a quote from a fellow that goes by the name of NorthJeff, he’s a land consultant from Michigan. There are some great points brought up here and I think that they can apply to any area/type of terrain in the country.

Installing and enhancing bedding areas…

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I included this on the last post in the “Advanced parcel layout and design…defining lines of movement”, but thought it would make a nice topic on it’s own.

***You have to find the best location, and then use/install the habitat and topography within that best location to develop a bedding area.

1. Determine the location by your access, you prevailing wind directions, and exterior influences of adjacent food sources, bedding areas, habitat funnels, hunting pressure, etc.
2. After the location is determined then build and enhance your bedding areas relative to the habitat, or future habitat.
Some examples:
a. Open ag land
*Establish conifer and/or shrub pockets that are hollow on the inside, 10-20′ in diameter, and planted close. 5-6′ spacing of spruce, speckled alder, or some local variety of “deer-proof” plantings. Quick growing pines can be the interior ring, then spruce, then an exterior of shrub plantings to further enhance the edge effect and create a natural transition into the interior bedding pocket. Then, after the bedding pockets are located within the ag land you are improving, surround by native grasses and maintain as a bedding area possibly with adjacent food sources and natural funnels to encourage deer movements within gun or bow range as it relates to the rest of the parcel.
b. Select cut/post-timber harvest. LEAVE tops and debris! Pocket cut tops and debris to encourage bedding rings within heavy horizontal cover with 2-3 access/escape routes. Plant conifer bedding pockets within cuttings that take advantage of openings, humps, bumps, ridges, etc. The conifer pockets will define and grow into long-term exception bedding pockets regardless of future timber operations.
c. Dense conifer stands of timber…young. Cut interior pockets “chest-level” and lower to define bedding pockets with connecting trails, and use the exterior screening cover of the stand to protect the interior bedding pockets. Old conifer stands can be used by dropping a small % of undesirables/low quality trees to define bedding pockets by using horizontal cover. The exterior of older conifer stands should be screened by young spruce or other screening cover, including dropping exterior pines/spruce to further screen and define the exterior of the bedding area that includes the bedding pockets within.
3. Allow for seperation of quality. DEFINE your bedding areas with pockets, and leave the rest alone outside of improving stands of timber by removing undesirables. Define that seperation of quality and you will define your access, deer movements, and stand locations. Use your undefined areas of mature or low quality habitat as access and downwind blockers for stand locations.

Random timber management is one of the worst ways to ruin a good deer parcel. You have to have definition of bedding and food source!

4. Screen, screen, screen…an area of bedding pockets is not truly a bedding area until it is defined by exterior screening protection. Topography, bushes, conifers, tops, logs, debris, burms, etc…without screening cover it’s not a bedding area.

For example, take a 10 acre woodlot and install 100 bedding pockets within. Until the exterior of the 10 acre woodlot is secure with screening cover, the 100 bedding pockets are not fully effective because the exterior pockets…could be 20-30, are exposed to human traffic outside of the 10 acre parcle. When that outside % is not secure, there will be a continued flight movement of pressured deer towards the interior. When the flight pattern is allowed to continue the interior % of bedding pockets are less effective, making the entire 10 acre woodlot only a fraction of the % of effectiveness it could be-regardless of the quality of interior bedding pockets! It is far better to have 10 defined bedding pockets within 10 acres of screened/protected bedding cover than 100 bedding pockets within that same unsecured/unscreened/non-protected 10 acre parcel. In those two scenerios the unprotected 10 acre parcel can never offer true privacy and security even with an extreme number of bedding pockets because the spoiled exterior pockets contribute to chaos to the rest of the pockets as well as the entire 10 acre parcel.

In the end though….location, location, location Pick the right location first…then define, build, enhance, and maintain the bedding pockets and bedding areas for the forseeable future-no rotation, no changes in location, all completed in a cohesive unit of predictable deer and human movements on the entire parcel relative to exterior influences..make sense?!?

Think about this…your success will not hinge on the ultimate quality of a bedding area, but instead on how adequate bedding areas are maintained and used by you as a hunter, and how well those bedding areas fit within a cohesive unit of movement on the entire parcel. Of course if you can exceed adequate…great! But exceeding adequate alone will not get you to your property’s potential whether it’s a bedding area, a food source, or a biological philosophy of harvest and herd dynamics.
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