Maximize Your Small Acreage Shrink Their World: Four Steps to Creating a Whitetail Paradise on Small Acreage By Scott Bestul Photo by the Author
H
e was no magazine-cover whitetail, but he was about as good a buck as we’d grown in our neighborhood. “The Flyer Buck” was 4-1/2 years old, and he’d grown up before our eyes. My neighbors and I had watched him grow from an impressive 2-1/2-year-old into a better mature buck and finally morph into the kind of deer we’d dreamed of growing. When my neighbor’s boy, Tanner, dropped the hammer on the Flyer Buck during a mid-November hunt, it was cause for celebration.
The Flyer Buck did not grow up in a manicured whitetail sanctuary. Although my neighbors and I improve habitat and grow food on about 200 acres, we are surrounded by state-managed wildlife management areas where anyone can hunt and any buck is fair game. We don’t control a buck’s world. But we’re getting better at the things we can control; the places where a buck beds and feels safe, the spots where he feeds and the areas where he finds mineral. In fact, we’ve found that even on relatively small tracts, you can shrink
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/ Vol. 30, No. 1
www.whitetailinstitute.com
