Sanctuaries: The Key to Holding Mature Bucks

Sanctuaries: The Key to Holding Mature Bucks

By: Gerald Almy

After you’ve solved the food part of the habitat equation by enhancing natural forage and establishing food plots, no project can help your hunting more than creating a sanctuary to help make the property attractive to mature bucks.

As an outdoor writer specializing in deer management, I pour over every biological paper that might provide insights into mature whitetails. I’ve seen many great articles and some that mostly cover old ground. But one that sticks in my mind is a University of Georgia study that monitored the behavior of several mature bucks during the firearms season. In a nutshell, the study showed that two 5-year-old bucks survived the season by holing up in a remote mountain laurel thicket during daylight.

If there’s an article that clearly documents the value of setting aside a sanctuary on your hunting property, that’s it. I’ve seen the same thing demonstrated on my land. I’m fortunate to have a little more than 116 acres. It’s a nice property with varied habitat. But if I did not set aside a portion of this relatively small tract as a no-entry, no-hunting zone, I would be hard-pressed to attract and hold mature bucks.

That was proven a few years ago when an old, gray-coated buck with brown-stained antlers slipped out of that sanctuary late one afternoon and eased toward a creek I was watching to hook up with a late-cycling doe. He was six years old, with multiple kickers and bases just shy of six inches. I never formally scored him, but those mass and age numbers proved again the value of sanctuaries. I hadn’t seen him before on trail cameras or while hunting. Neither had the neighbors.

The Power of Sanctuaries

Simply, sanctuaries attract old, reclusive bucks to your land and help hold them. Security is a mature buck’s No. 1 priority. A properly laid-out sanctuary gives him that. With a bit of planning and sometimes a few weekends of work, you can create a sanctuary that will attract older bucks to your property and hold them there. And if you don’t offer such a security area for deer, it’s extremely likely mature bucks will find one elsewhere when hunting pressure builds. They know their survival depends on it.

Definition

We’ll define a sanctuary as an area that’s declared completely off limits for hunting and other human activities so deer can have a location with abundant cover and no intrusion where they feel safe. The only exception to the rule should be when trailing a wounded deer. Refuge is another good word. The sanctuary will probably encompass one or more prime bedding areas on your property but not all secondary or satellite bedding areas. You need to be able to hunt some areas bucks frequent regularly besides feeding spots.

At first, glance, creating a sanctuary looks simple. Block off a remote area or section of your property that has some good cover, and leave it alone. Done. Not so fast. Although not difficult, setting up a high-quality sanctuary that will improve the land’s ability to hold mature bucks is a little more involved. It requires forethought, planning, and careful execution to succeed. But it’s worth the effort because the result will be far better hunting on the areas you don’t set aside.

The best area to select and how to lay out the sanctuary usually become clear as you analyze your hunting setup and neighboring landowner activities and attitudes.

Do they hunt? Bow, gun, drives, weekends, every day? Do they practice quality deer management? Take one step at a time as you analyze your hunting needs and the surrounding property owners’ attitudes and behavior.

Consider what you have, which areas older bucks would likely want to hole up in (thick, remote), and what you need to add for habitat to make the chosen sanctuary he best, most productive one possible. And what does that mean? The most productive sanctuary will hold more older-age bucks and produce better hunting throughout bow, gun and muzzleloader seasons year after year on areas you hunt. It might seem puzzling, even illogical, but by not hunting a chunk of your property and managing it as a refuge, you will improve big- buck big-buck opportunities on the remainder of the area you do hunt.

Features of an Ideal Sanctuary

When deciding where to establish an area off-limits to hunting, look for several qualities. You can start now, but the best time to analyze the land and make final decisions is after deer season and before spring green-up. You won’t hurt your hunting then. And during summer, thick foliage makes it harder to decide which areas are best to set aside.

Cover: This is obvious. The area should have lots of cover.

Water: It can take the form of ponds, springs, creeks, tanks or pools you’ve created by damming small streams.

Seclusion or remoteness: Areas that are steep, swampy, isolated, remote or hard to reach always make the best sanctuaries. They might already be largely left alone.

Recognizable borders: It’s easier to let other hunters know the boundaries of the sanctuary if you have creeks, ridges, fence lines or other features to mark the edges. Otherwise, use ribbons, paint, or signs to designate the boundaries.

Practicality: Isolation is critical. Create it in a location that’s easy to avoid. Areas that are difficult to hunt undetected are perfect. Note that I didn’t list food plots. Keep those out of the sanctuary so they will attract bucks where you can harvest them.

Work required: All these elements affect the desirability of a sanctuary, or its attractiveness to a 3-year-old or older buck. The more of these features you have the better. Some might be there already. If you’re lucky, a perfect sanctuary might already exist and might just need to be put off limits to hunting and other human disturbance, such as scouting, hiking or ATV riding. In most cases, some elements might be present, but you can improve the location with habitat work during the off-season. Basically, you can divide potential sanctuary areas into three work categories: those that require no enhancement and just need to be designated off limits, those that necessitate some extra habitat work to improve, and those that offer good potential because of location, remoteness, neighboring land use or other factors but need to be created with a few weekends of elbow grease and chainsaw or dozer work.

How Many Sanctuaries, How Big, and Where?

Those are the preliminary questions you should answer before deciding how much extra work each area needs to make it appealing. In general, one sanctuary is good for 40 to 200 acres. For larger parcels, you might want more. A lot depends on the vegetation and topography. Sometimes, two or even three areas just scream to be placed off limits, such as a native grass stands bucks flock to when pressure builds or a remote canyon that’s difficult to hunt because of shifting winds.

You might want one main sanctuary and one or two smaller satellite ones. Size? Anywhere from five to several hundred acres might be involved. It depends on topography, prevailing winds, the amount of land available, thickness of the vegetation, surrounding land use, quality of the habitat and other factors. These need to be considered for each specific property. Some landowners reserve as much as two-thirds of their hunting area as a sanctuary. That’s extreme, though, and usually is not necessary or practical. Often, five to 25 percent is a good compromise.

Selecting the Site

Besides size, you must determine the location of the refuge. This depends a lot on the location of areas with good existing cover. Those are clearly the first spots to look. It’s also vital to consider your neighboring property owners’ land-use habits. If they’re hardcore if-it’s-brown-it’s-down types, you want the sanctuary as far from that border as possible.

Conversely, a non-hunting or seldom-hunted property is perfect to abut your sanctuary against because it enlarges and enhances the benefits of your reserve. In my situation, half of my neighboring landowners don’t hunt, but the others hunt virtually every day. Abutting my off-limits area against the non-hunting neighbors’ property almost doubles the size and value of my sanctuary.

Also, think about access to areas you plan to hunt, considering the deer’s senses of sight, hearing and smell. You don’t want the sanctuary positioned where you can alert deer as you access your stands by having the sanctuary immediately downwind. And you don’t want it where deer can see or hear you.

Remoteness, elevation, steepness, boot-grabbing mud or anything else that discourages human entry is also a plus. The most useful sanctuaries are in hard-to-reach areas where rough habitat already discourages humans from penetrating. Studying topographic maps and satellite images, such as those on Google Earth are a good starting point for locating the best sanctuary sites. Then, scout on foot to get a complete picture, and make sure an area fits a deer’s needs to escape humans and find security.

Although it’s often recommended, unless you have a large property, putting the sanctuary near the middle of a tract might not always be the best choice. You’ll probably want to hunt or otherwise use perimeter areas at various times.

On smaller properties, that means a lot of human traffic from every direction around that center core — perhaps more than a mature buck will be willing to withstand. For small-tract landowners, it’s often a better bet to have it adjoin a tract that isn’t hunted, landowners who practice quality deer management or a distant corner that’s easy to stay out of and not circle continuously as you hunt around it.

If you’re surrounded by landowners who shoot any legal buck, though, a central location might be the only appropriate choice. Benches, brushy hollows, heads of draws, wind-damaged tracts, weed-choked conifer stands, regrowing clear-cuts and overgrown marshes are prime areas.

Beyond remoteness, favorable bordering land use and a setup that lets you access your hunting areas without spooking deer in the sanctuary, cover is the most crucial ingredient. The more natural low-growing cover it has, the better. If an area offers a jungle of thick vegetation, it might already serve as a sanctuary. Sign or trail-camera images will tell you if that’s true. In that situation, simply stay out, and delineate the boundaries to create your sanctuary. Chances are, though, that some habitat work may make it even better.

Improving and Enhancing Sanctuaries

Felling some low-quality trees in the area to create more security is a simple and productive way to enhance a potential sanctuary. That gives the deer bedding cover, protection from wind and tender branch tips they can browse on. Cut some of these only partially through at waist to chest high. Sever them just enough so they fall but remain attached to the stump and roots (hinge-cutting). These will usually live for another year or two, providing even more browse and cover.

Another way to enhance a refuge is to plant clusters of conifers. Putting in some fast-growing pines, cedars or spruce provides a wind- break and thermal cover that offers shelter from storms during winter, attracting more bucks to your sanctuary bucks to your sanctuary. They’ll also provide a cool, shaded spot where bucks can escape summer’s heat. Plant them 10 to 20 feet apart in clusters of one-quarter to one acre. Shrubs offer another ingredient you can add if the sanctuary is still too open.

Finally, if you have lots of open fields but with little cover, these can easily be converted to terrific sanctuaries by planting native warm-season grasses. These will grow 5 to 7 feet tall, providing superb security cover and protection from cold winter winds, yet they will remain open enough overhead to allow warming winter sunlight in.

The Final Step: Do Not Disturb

The main thing that makes or breaks a sanctuary is whether you and others who use the property respect the meaning of those words. Post signs, paint markings or print maps that show the borders and be sure everyone who uses the property knows where the boundaries are. Stay out except to retrieve a wounded deer or to do additional habitat work in spring, if necessary.

You want the oldest buck in the area to believe that’s the most secure spot around — the place he needs to be to survive. Give him that and he is more likely to stay put. Then next fall, when he’s even bigger and you catch him outside the sanctuary chasing a doe or seeking a bite to eat from a lush food plot, you’ll get your chance. Be ready.