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BTW: My own personal experience involves the management of my own place. As with everyone else's, the results are impacted not just by what I do here but by what external factors impact the habitat I try to improve; weed seed blowing in from the outside, seasonal migration patterns of all desirable species, and predators, both large and small {coyote, lion and wolf and to a small degree bear}.

I have 540 acres adjoining tens of thousands of acres of state, federal and timber company land. In fact, I can walk out one side of my house and stroll 185 miles without seeing a building of any kind and only then when I do it will be in the "raging" metropolis of St Regis, Montana. Find that one on the map if you can!

I do not have high fences, so critters are free to come and go as they please. And we have relatively {on the scale of many countries and states represented here} low carrying capacity for low overall game numbers.

So what is my basic plan for hunt management for my goal of both good trophy size AND "subsistence" meat hunting?

Since I am limited by public ownership of game, and do not have the ability to significantly control off-property predators, I make the habitat as suitable as possible {within cost and other competing contraints like timber management on my place} for the desirable game species, which during the hunting seasons basically means deer {elk remain at higher elevations above my place at that time of the year}. My goal is to "invite" as many breeding females as possible on my place during the fall hunting season, breeding females being the "bait" for bucks. And it works; we have shot quite a number of excellent heads on the place {...well, my kids have...

}.

Later in the fall season we kill does because later in the spring the greenup always brings in a new herd of deer, a number of which replenish the crop we took off in the fall. Works!

Nothing has been said about grain food plots, mineral blocks, enhanced feeding programs. I could introduce all such tools, but to me I would lose the "wild" aspect of the place if I did. To each his own. If my neighbor decided to do same, I would not condemn him, and certainly would not hesitate to shoot the produce of his efforts were the "Monster" to wander over onto my place during the hunting season!!

Are my goals being met?

You bet!

Not perfectly, but almost perfectly, with the real and significant threat to my efforts not being the failure of those efforts but rather the predator policies of the State.

There's lots more to it of course {the hard word of all-year-long predator killing [coyote trapping and shooting], weed spraying, trail cutting/maintenance, blind construction, timber cutting and thinning, etc, etc, etc} but you get the point. Call it a peek into the window of one little guy's little world of game management...

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Edited by 9.3x57 (08/05/09 11:13 PM)

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