Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the whitetail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon.
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, I'm joined by doctor Craig Harper to discuss his perspective on how we can manage our hunting properties to benefit the greatest number of species in the greatest number of ways. All right, welcome back to another episode of the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by
First Light in their cameo for conservation initiative. You're probably familiar, but if you're not, a portion of every sale of First Light's whitetail gear is donated back to the National Old Deer Association to help them with their mission to make things better for deer, deer hunters and deer hunting well into the future. Big fan of that one and today's guest I am also a big fan of. We are joined today by the one and only doctor Craig Harper.
He is a professor of Wildlife Management and the extension wildlife specialist in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Tennessee. He is also the recient recipient of the let me make sure you get this right the Deer Management Career Achievement Award from the Southeast Deer Study Group. In twenty twenty one, he was given the National Deer
Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He's the author of multiple books, books that a whole lot of habitat managers rave about, many many published studies, and he's just simply one of the foremost authorities and one of the best communicators when it comes to deer management, wildlife, habitat management, and so so many things that folks like you and I are
interested in. Craig is is truly the best of the best of the best, and I'm thrilled that he's here with me today to discuss a topic that we have been exploring kind of meandering along the way throughout this month during Habitat Month. One of those main themes that I've brought up with a lot of folks that brought this up with Doug, brought this up with Thomas, and we definitely talk here today with Craig is this idea
of how can we do more with our properties. How can we look beyond the simple, you know, throw a bag of food plot see in the ground and grow food plot and shoot a bigger buck. That's great. I enjoy that too, But there's got to be more we can do. There's probably a bigger impact we can have beyond that if we just widen our view a little bit. And today Craig helps us explore that theme in those
topics really in a terrific way. He's wise, he has a tremendous amount of experience in these in these topics, he's able to kind of recenter me in some places. He's able to folks me in certain places and not just focus me, focus us, I think in some very
valuable ways. So we're going to talk through everything from you know, managing for better cover on your property, to discussions around native versus invasive species and how to be realistic and what we can do with that kind of stuff, why we might want to do that kind of stuff, What types of projects will help our white tail deer, what kind of projects will help our turkeys, rough grouse,
bob white quail, insects, birds, the whole gamut. We're going to discuss it this is one of the best Habitat related podcasts we've had in a while, and I'm just very excited that you guys get to listen to it or watch it if you're over on YouTube. So with that said, I think we should just get to my chat today with doctor Craig Harper. All right here with me now, is mister Craig Harper. Craig, thank you so much for joining me.
No, I am Martin glad to be here with you. While since since we.
Talked, I know, I know. I actually went back to try to find when it was that I last had you on the show, and it shocked me how long it's been. I don't know how I've managed to make the mistake of not trying to rope you into one of these sooner, but it wasn't It's been since twenty sixteen, Craig.
Wow, eight years. I wouldn't have guessed it had been that long.
No, it's it's gone very fast. It's I don't know if it's because I've had kids in the interim, but everything seems to be just flying by this last five, six, seven years.
So well, I'm sure eight years ago when I was with you, I had more hair, and it was darker than it is now.
So I've seen worse, Craig, I've seen worse. You're doing all right, and I gotta give you special thanks for making time to do this, because we were exchanging emails ahead of this, and you had told me that you were just ret turning from several weeks in the back country, so you must be exhausted and coming off of a heck of an adventure.
Huh, well not really. It was a lot of fun,
but uh, you know, I kept up. It's the part that drags you down is I was in New Mexico for a couple of weeks, but then upon returning, I had to to go to West Virginia, and then I had to go to West Tennessee, and so it's it's been four weeks of back to back to back to back, you know, solid being gone, and so I think I've been home one day now, and it's it's impossible to catch up after all that time in the day, but I'm plugging away trying to get back at it.
Yeah, that's the one downside of travel is that you get that whole of emails that you can never dig your way back out of.
Even if it's even if it's vacation. I mean you you sit there and it's almost like excruciating, no, and what's building up, you know, this mountain of emails and phone calls and everything else. That. Man, it's just if you don't keep up with it to the best of your ability. Uh, it's it's insufferable. But when I was in New Mexico, we were in the back country. We were away from everything, in a wilderness area, and after about day four, I finally quit worrying about not being
able to keep up with stuff. You know, you know I can't. There is no service, Uh, there is nothing, no power, no running water. We did have access to one spiccot, but you know, a couple of weeks in the back country, no showers and cooking over fire and that kind of thing. So you know, after a while you get into it. It's like, man, this is really nice where I don't have the constant distraction of you know, the day to day calls and the emails and everything that comes in.
Yeah, you can't beat that. I remember reading a few years ago about something called the three day effect, I think, uh, in which a series of actual studies had shown that it's on day three, at the end of day three when the body starts showing quantifiable physiological changes to that, you know, separation from the phone and the internet and work like it takes that much time to fully disconnect and recalibrate, and then there's all these huge benefits to
to your psyche and everything once you're fully immersed.
And totally believe that that was my experience for sure.
Yeah, well, I'm jealous. I've not had several weeks in the back country, but I could use it. And I'm glad you're back though, and willing to do this and
for you know, to be respectful your time. I'm not going to ask you to give me the whole roundabout resume and explanation of what you've done the past, because most folks have been following you and are aware of that, and I've introduced you already, so I want to kind of drop you and drop us right into the meat and potatoes of this world I've been exploring over the past month or so of folks, and I want to open with a challenge. I guess that I was faced
by something I read from you. I was reading in one of your books that the idea that you can just manage for wildlife is a false one and a bad path to take. And I was challenged by that because I've been trying to in my own kind of path as a wildlife manager and deer manager. I've thought to myself it might be better to step away from managing just for deer and to instead take a larger managing for wildlife or managing for the ecosystem perspective. And
I've been kind of exploring all that. But then I read your piece and said, you can't do that. You can't just manage for a while life. You need to pick a focal specie because managing for wildlife is too ambiguous, And so I guess I wanted to hear a little bit more from you on that as a starting point. Was I interpreting that correctly? Do you believe that managing for wildlife is kind of a false premise and too ambiguous of a goal to have.
Well. Where that came from is where I have given presentations helping people come up with their property and wildlife management plans. And it doesn't matter if you're a private individual or you know a biologist that works with a state agency. It's a very very common thing for us to say, our objective is wildlife. And what I was trying to clarify is that that term wildlife is too ambiguous to plan for. That you need to at least identify a species or suite of species that you're interested in,
because you cannot manage for everything. There's too many species that have very very different habitat requirements, you know, specific items of food, resources, cover resources, water resources, et cetera. And so you'll hear somebody say, yeah, our objective for the property is wildlife, and that's when I say, well, let's try to be a little more precise in what
we're talking about, because wildlife in this sense is too general. Now, when you mentioned managing for deer, what I try to bring out to people very commonly, and this has really come about through some studies that we've finished and worked on through the years, is deer is known as a quote generalist species. You know, at least in the Eastern US, the two most common wildlife species that people manage their
proberty for is deer in wild turkeys. And it just so happens that both of those are considered generalists, meaning that you find them in a wide range of landscapes.
You could be in very open landscapes and totally close canopy forest landscapes and a mixture of everything in between, and you're going to find deer in turkeys in all of those and so they don't have some specialized requirements like say a grassland obligate songbird does, or a forest interior songbird, for example, and you don't find them anywhere else.
And what I've tried to do is use whitetail deer in particular, but turkeys also to try and manage for other species, because at least in my opinion, in my professional opinion, if you're managing whitetail deer to the best of your ability, that means that you're going to have a wide variety of vegetation types, a wide variety of
successional stages available to them. Because although deer do not have to do not have to have any one vegetation type or successional stage in order to have a robust population, their populations generally are more robust and with better body condition if you have a variety of vegetation types and successional stages, because then you're going to have different types of food and different types of cover that are available and make survival and body condition better through the year.
And so then when you are doing that, you then by default are providing habitat for species that most landowners don't know anything about and may not care anything about. And that may be shrubbling songbirds, it might be grassland songbirds or forest obligates. Obviously non game and other game species as well. So I think whitetailed deer and wild turkeys are unique and that a lot of people manage for them, and not many people manage for some of
these non game species. But if we enable them teach them to manage their properties better for deer in turkeys, than by default they're making their properties better for a whole lot of other species.
Yeah, it would be fair to say that that managing for deer or turkey kind of acts like a gateway drug, in that if you're able to get in the door because you're incentivized to have better deer hunting or better turkey hunting, that might be the thing that opens you to the room of possibilities, which might be helping these other critters out, helping these songbirds out, improving your grasslands for this species or that species or whatever it might be,
that you would never ever that would never enter the realm of possibilities unless it's worth for the fact that you were originally incentivized to improve your hunting opportunities.
Right, Yes, I believe that one. Certainly, when you get into what you might call a more holistic approach to managing property for white tail deer, you know, and you can add turkeys in there if you won't, there's no question that you gain a greater appreciation for the various plants that you will then see and for the different species of wildlife that will be occurring on the property.
Yeah. So one of the things that I've been curious about, and that I've been spending a lot of time reading into and trying to learn more about, is how you know sickle coal or how connected everything is on a landscape. And so if we want quality deer hunting or quality turkey hunting, it might behoove us to care about those other things too, that native vegetation, the songbirds, the insects, the pollinators, et cetera, because that all of these things
end up touching each other in one way or another. Right, And while I think it's fair to say that we are living very likely in the golden days of deer hunting. You know that's not necessarily the case for a lot of other species on the landscape. I think I'm preaching the choir here when I talk about the decline and birds across the North America three billion fewer birds now than fifty years ago. I know you've done research a lot on bob whit kwail grouse right significant declines in
both of those species. Forty four percent of insects are threatened with extinction in the relatively near term future. There's a lot of things that aren't doing so well right now, and I've I've thought to myself that there's this unique opportunity that we, the deer hunters of America have, and that we own land for wildlife and recreation. We're pretty well armed with education and tools to manage the landscape, and we're incentivized to do so because we want better
deer hunter better turkey hunting. If we do those things with a slightly wider aperture, we very well might be able to stem the losses of all these other things too. Is that is that a step too far? Am I having delusions of grandeur? Or could we save the world. For lack of a better phrase.
I don't know that we'll save the world, but I definitely think we can make it a better place. How's that not just for us in achieving our immediate objectives or goals, but also for all of these other wildlife species and many plants. As you mentioned, we just finished a series of projects looking at field management techniques and how different field management techniques impacted deer, turkeys, grassland song birds, shrubbling song birds, several different species, and pollinators as well.
And one of the things that we found is the great increase in plants for pollinators when you manage fields more opriately, I would say for deer, as opposed to just having fields dominated by grasses, and so by reducing the amount of grass coverage and increasing the amount of forb coverage, you have by default increased resources for pollinators
and lots of other insects. And it's interesting to see the close tie that so many insects and other invertebrates have with the forb community as opposed to the grass community. Not to say that grasses won't support some they certainly do, but you will see larger populations and more diverse species or groups of species assemblages in these areas that have a much greater FORB component than a field dominated by grasses.
And one of the latest projects Wage of Fellers and Bonner Powell worked on was comparing how some of the field renovation techniques looking at planting native grasses and forbes as opposed to using the seed bank only after getting rid of the vast coverage of non native grasses, and for every metric, the seed bank response was just as good,
if not better than planting native grasses in forbes. And so I'm not saying that you should never plant native grasses in forbes, but I will say, for a majority of the species that we are interested in, and on a majority of sites, you don't have to plant native grasses in forbes in order to have a much much
better plant community and also responding wildlife community. And I think that is I think it's very important information because we found that we could treat restore impact four times more acreage by simply using the seed bank as opposed to plant native grasses and forbes when you consider the cost.
Yeah, I think I've read a piece that you wrote about this study and some of the implications of it, and it had me thinking about some things I could do myself if you were looking at some of the most impactful ways that you could, you know, work on your property, manage your property in a way that like we're talking about that's not just deer in asylum, but looking at the larger ecosystem the health of all these different categories of species. Is field management appropriate field management
for quality early secessional habitat. Is that one of those top tier categories of things that we need to put at the top of our list to be thinking about.
I believe so. And when you think of it in a by this simplistic way that you can. If you have property, you probably have either woods or fields or both. I mean, if we just boil everything down, and so having a mixture of that is what is most important. If you're interested in species richness, having a variety of either wildlife and or plant species on the property. And so then you get into the nuances of how to
manage that. And that's where a lot of this field management research that we've been doing has shed a lot
of light on. We don't need fields with solid grass coverage for a vast majority of the species that we're managing for I mean, unless it's a grassland obligate songbird such as an eastern metal arc or grasshoppersparra what have you, which still requires some or obviously benefits from some fords, whether it be from the structure or for the food resources that are available from them, whether it's seed or
the insects that are associated with the plant. We see that these forbes communities provide a lot, and your management of the fields to go in that direction instead of simply grass coverage will get you a lot more.
So, what you're saying is that these forty acre plantings of nothing but switch grass not such a good idea.
I would say, in my opinion, No, but the data buried out. I mean, will a deer lay in a switch grass field, Yes? But will they lay in a field containing naturally occurring native forbes just as much? Yes? Do they eat switch grass? No? Do they eat these forbes? Yes? And these forbes, the vast majority of them, the ones that deer select, actually have greater nutritional value than the maximum amount required by bucks growing antlers or lactating dose.
And I'm telling you, when people begin to see the value of let's just use this word loosely weeds, and for most people, they're referring to forbs when they say weeds. It's an inaccurate use of the word, but that's the way most people use it. When people, and especially deer managers, truly understand and appreciate the value of these wild, naturally
occurring forbs weeds, the game is changed buying large. You don't need summer food plots anymore because they're out there growing wild, and we are realizing tremendous increases in both antler size and body weights per age class when you have a certain amount of the in these plant communities that are providing these highly nutritional plants, the various forbes that are just coming up from the seed bank that they didn't even bother to plant.
Yeah, it's hard to argue with that. But I can hear some people saying, well, why would you want your food and your cover all in the same place where the deer would just stand there in daylight and never come walking past your tree stand?
Right?
That's the argument I think a lot of people would say, is like, I want just pure switch here or pure betting here, and then I want pure food on the other side, and I want to hunt in between. And you know, or they'll say, well, we want switchcrafts because it holds up better in the winter and provides better cover at certain times of the year. Right, there's very
specific kind of use cases. Some folks will say from a huntability perspective where they'd want something like that, what would be what's your response to that?
I guess, well, one is, you're not a bad person if you plant switch grass. I mean, it's all right. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, but but I am saying that it's a better thing for the deer if you have better plant diversity out there rather than just switch grass. And the whole notion that you know, my hunting is no good if I have food and cover in the same spot. That's that's just simply wrong.
That's that's it. All you got to do is look at any deer movement study, you know, GPS, collars, et cetera. I don't care what the quality of the cover is, what the quality of the food is. Deer are still going to move. That's a fact. And so you're hunting pressure has a lot to do with when they move. If they're showing up in open areas or wherever before daylight or if they're staying put until dark. And so don't confuse the quality of cover with with hunting pressure.
Both can be very influential. But but look, we manage these fields in the way that I'm talking about, and we hunt over those fields, and you can see deer
moving in these fields. And we're talking about cover that is, uh, you know, at least three feet maybe five feet or so in high and you know, there'll be some plants that get taller than that, and and it's according to the plant composition as to how well it holds up over winter as well, many of these plants hold up just as good and provide just as good of visual breaking with with cover through the winter as switchgrass does. So it's it's incorrect to think that you have to
have switchgrass to have cover in fields. And as we all know, in real inclement weather, the deer aren't going to be laying out there in a switch grass field when it's you know, sleeping and heavy snow and that kind of thing. They're going to be in a in a forested area. Typically, if there's some a a green cover, a vailable et cetera, where the snow is not as deep and the wind is not as hard on them. So you know, switch grass is not the cure all for everything.
Yeah, so then this appropriate management of these old fields, I selfishly have a couple of specific questions because I've got a place that I that I have a certain degree of management control over. But I can't do everything and anything like I couldn't do a burn on it. But I can plant food plots as long as I don't mess with the farmer's crops. It's that kind of thing. And if there's open space, I can do things with it as long as it's you know, kind of out
of sight, out of mind. And there is a large power line that runs through this property, and then a low lying area that drains a lot of water off the fields and now is mostly some kind of cool seasoned grass. I think it's either orchard grass or timothy grass, and it covers almost all of this probably five acre kind of relatively low place. And then there's this you know, I don't know, half a mile long power line that runs through this property that's mostly that kind of grass.
I have a couple of food plots in there, but for a while now, I've known if I could do something with that grass and convert it to something that's beneficial for wildlife, that would probably have a greater impact than just my couple tiny food plots. But I suppose I've just been yeah, Okay, I guess I've just been hesitant to I suppose I've thought maybe I don't have the right equipment or the ability to do it without having fire or a big disc or something like that.
Can I make a difference just by spraying this stuff? Is that going to be enough to get something native coming up again or something more beneficial than this carpet of grass right now?
Yeah, Mark, what you just describe is exactly what I'm talking about. And so if you simply in that situation, you've got a non native perennial cool season grass, whether it's timothy or orchard grass, bluegrass, tall rescue, you can add brome grasses that what have you. All you need to do is go in there in the fall, as I have said many many times, typically after a couple of frosts, and then spray the grass, usually with a two percent solution of glycos sate herbicide one time, and
you've just fixed it. It is that simple spray at one time and walk away. By the following spring, you're going to have an explosion of all kinds of stuff coming out of the seed bank. Some of that stuff is going to be good, some of that stuff not so good. If some of the stuff is not so good, we simply go in typically once per year in May through July, and spot spray the stuff that we don't like, leave the stuff that we do like, and let nature
take care of the rest. Wherever you have plants that are undesirable and you spot spray, you're going to have dead patches, and something is going to germinate in that patch within a couple of rains, you know, during the growing season. And so if you do that right there once per year, over the course of three years or so,
you will have absolutely transformed that field. And by default, then everything there will be what you want because you've been you've simply been killing what you don't want instead of planting what you do want. When you plant what you do want, you still have what you don't want
because you haven't gotten rid of it yet. There's going to be plants coming in from the seed bank that you don't like, and so instead of planting what you want, simply kill what you don't want and let nature fill in the rest.
So I understand that that false spring is more effective. I think I saw one of your studies that showed, you know, the amount of non desirable species the year or up to three years after is much less when you do that fall spring versus spring planting. But we're
talking in late February. Can I is it so inefficient to spray early in the spring that I should wait all the way till this fall, and or could I start now once that stuff starts greenning up the spring and start to see some kind of positive benefit this first summer and fall rather than waiting a full you know, six seven months from now to start.
Yes. Absolutely, It's just that you will have additional mop up of those cool season grasses over the next two or three years as opposed to having your first herbicide application completed in the fall. And so on average, what we have found is with spring spray in perennial coups, season grasses by the second year after spray and you're probably going to have at least thirty maybe forty percent coverage of that grass because you don't get as good
of a kill on the root system. But if you want to go ahead and get started, absolutely, it just means that you have a little more mop up of some of those cool season grasses down the road.
Okay, and I think I read somewhere, but I want to make sure I understand this correctly. There's a there's a significant thatch layer of all this dead grass that's you know, knocked down every single year right before the spring growing up when there's gonna be that new growth. When I would spray, would it work? Would it be worth my time to go in there and mow that thatch down a couple of times just to knock that down and make it uh so I have better contact
to that new grass when it does start growing. Is that the right way to prep or clean that field before spring?
If you have standing dead material that would block the herbicide coming in contact from the green growing grass, then it definitely will behoove you to mow that before the grass starts growing, get that knocked down, and then when the grass comes out and greens up really good in springtime. And let's see, would you be doing this in Michigan?
Yeah?
And so you would probably be looking at spraying in May, like early May or something, when you know it really starts growing really good and before it bolts and begins to flour. And so you know, if you go over it with and mow it sometime in March April and you're kind of setting the table there, you know, cleaning things up and enabling fresh growing grass to come out,
that that would give you your best result. Now what I thought you were asking, what is about the dead thatch that remains after you spray the grass and you and if you can't burn, and if you can't burn that off, don't worry about it. It's dead. It's not sinescent, meaning you know it's going to come back. It's dead, and so it will deteriorate and decompose over time and plants are going to come right up through that, no problem.
Perfect. Okay, Well I've got my marching orders. This is the year that I finally need to do it.
So well, and you know, I certainly sympathize with you. I know a lot of people are in either places or position whatever where they can't burn, and we talk about burning a lot, and of course burning is a fantastic management tool. But if you can't burn fields, all is not lost. In particular, if you're using these spot herbicide applications, that that is a game changer right there.
We simply drive through the field as if we were mowing on an open cab tractor ATV and off of either side of the tractor with a spray gun, not the spray boom, but a spray gun. Simply spot spray those plants that you don't like. And by doing so, what you're doing is setting back succession. And so you're going right back to square one where you have annual plants germinating in those dead barre patches and instead of
existing perennial plants. And so if you burn a field, particularly if you burn it in late winter early spring, you consume the material, but you are promoting perennial grasses and other perennial plant By doing so, you're you're maintaining a community that's primarily going to be perennial plants. If at some point you scratch the dirt a little bit,
you know, light disking. It doesn't have to be you know, a heavy bog disc or whatever, but you know, you lightly disc that's where you're going to stimulate more annual forbs coming out and that will give you increased plant diversity. So if you can't burn, you know, don't don't worry. Using spot spray applications and and doing some light disking
every two to three years is really good. And even if you're mowing, you know, try to keep your mowing in late winter early spring, before the nesting season of various species. And uh and if you want the disk but you don't have a heavy enough disk, if you mow ahead of time and then disk you know sometime after you mow, that will call some obviously some soul disturbance, and that will maintain a different suite of plants instead of if you just mow all the time, then you're
probably gonna end up with a grass dominated situation. And if you just burn, particularly if you just burn in late winter and early spring, you're going to be dominated by grasses and some other perennial plants. You know, one that's very common up your way is golden rod. You know, you see fields that are just solid golden rod. Well,
you know, I'm not a golden rod hater. I like golden rod, but I don't a field full of it, and so in such a situation, such a situation, you need to disk because that's a strong perennial forb and it can remain on that site for a long long time,
and your species diversity is very low. And so even if you have a light tandem disc, if you mow it ahead of time and then you go over it with a disk, you'll reduce the golden raw density because that's a perennial plant and you just disturbed its root system, and you'll give rise to more annual spaces.
Something I've heard you mentioned over and over again has been diversity, and it it would seem that in many cases that is is like a is a principle to always keep in mind when we're trying to do what's best for the landscape, what's best for the overall ecosystem, what's best for biodiversity is often plant diversity or land use type diversity, whatever it might be. I guess number one, Am I am I interpreting that correctly? And then number two?
Are there any other overall principles similar to this emphasis on diversity that we should be thinking about when trying to be better stewards of the landscape, not just being dear one, but deer plus anything else other than this idea of diversity being important.
Well, I think, first off, number one, you're you're correct, and I think that's an accurate line of thinking. But let's think for just a second about what diversity is. You know, species richness refers to the number of species that you you know, let's say in a field, if you're talking about plants, the number of species that occur in the field, all right, the diversity takes into account
the species richness as well as their distribution. And so hopefully you wouldn't have one group of plants in this corner of the field and another group of plants in this corner of the field. See, if that were the case, your species richness would be just as great, but your diversity wouldn't be Your diversity would be greater if there's better mixing across the field of those plants. And so the same is true, you know, if you're talking about
the versity of a landscape. And so with a landscape, that's where I'm stressing that people should not just manage
their woods or manage their property in woods. If you have a property that is that is solid woods, you know, depending on the size, you should do something to create some openings, because if you create openings, then you're going to have a totally different plant community, and you're going to have different wildlife species, and some wildlife species such as deer, will have additional resources that they didn't before,
and so on the landscape. You can have increased diversity by not just having additional vegetation types, but also looking at the distribution of those vegetation types, and that can be very important with regard to to where wildlife are found, their movements and time they spend in different areas, etc.
That makes a lot of sense. What if we were to continue down that line of thinking, and if I were if I were in the Craig Harper masterclass for how to be a Better land Steward, I think I'm picking up on here managing our old fields appropriately. I'm picking up on diversity of not just species richest, but also distribution. I think we've talked a little bit about the importance of, you know, looking at more than just hey,
what's good for deer in a silo? What would a few of the other pillars of your approach be if you were to, you know, have that bullet list of the main things that you really wanted to drill into someone's head. Someone who's been doing the you know, big buck on a bag food plot thing for a lot of years maybe and is now trying to expand the horizons a little bit. What would the next couple of things beyond that top three, top four list.
One of the things that I think is very important is not just managing a property, but thinking about your scale of management. You know, one ilmost say problem is
that a lot of people don't manage their property. You know, they just have property and it doesn't even cross their mind that they can do something to improve their woods, improve their fields for different wildlife species, or or they might know they could, but they don't because of calls, they don't because they don't want to expend the effort,
et cetera. So not managing is one thing, But then when you look at the group of landowners who do manage their property, not that many of them think about their scale of management. And so what I'm getting at there is, let's say, for example, you're going to burn a section of woods, or let's say that you're going to set back succession in your fields by either burning or disking or what have you. Well, how big of an area do you burn or how much of the
field do you disk? Or do you disk all of your fields in the same year, or do you leave some of them for you know, a rotation such that some are disturbed one year and not the others. And so thinking about how big of an area should be managed at once is very important, and I think that's particularly important with fire. Of course we use fire to manage woods, but do we have areas broken out where you're burning five acres, ten acres, fifty acres, five hundred acres.
You know, there's lots of thought, you know, into that, and it's not that something is necessarily right or wrong. But when you think about the movements of a particular wildlife species and uh the area that they typically are found, you know, a seasonal home range, then you consider, wow, you know, if I burn five hundred acres, I've just displaced that animal, most of them for a certain amount
of time. And so would I benefit that species if I implemented my management on a smaller scale, And if so, what should that scale be? And that's something really that that we're still trying to tease out in research. And I'm not just talking about myself, but a lot of people are working on this concept of scale and what should it be, what would be best not only for species A, B and C, but for you know, a wider assemblage of species. So that that's something that I
find of great interest. And we were doing a workshop just two or three years ago, I remember, and we were burning. We were burning a field, and of course in a workshop, the area that we burned was was fairly small. And I remember one guy asking me, well, you know, how big of an area do you need to burn to help something? And you know, like and what he was getting at is to attract deer and you know, provide you know, a fresh you know, re
sprouting food source to deer. And I asked him, uh in the crowd, I said, uh, what is the smallest food plot that you all have planted and killed a deer in? And so, you know, their answers came in, you know, half acre, third acre, or whatever the case may be, and I said, so what is wrong with getting your backpack blower out and blowing around a half acre spot right there and burning it? Do you not
think that will attract deer? You know, of course it was, so you know, and don't stop at that, go to another one, and another one and another one. Now that's an extreme example. I'm not telling people to burn on halfaker scale. But the point is I would much rather have several smaller management units than one really large management unit. That way, I'm providing more resources both food and cover for a particular wildlife species through the year better than if I managed it all at once.
Does that even all kind of trickle back down to creating diversity because you're creating time scale diversity in management applications.
You absolutely are yeah. Interesting and and see don't I don't like to get you know, just wrapped up in you know, the word diversity or the concept of it. You know, you could have of greater species richness. Let's say, for example, you have fifty native plants in a field and twenty five non native plants. Well, your species richness and your diversity are greater with those non native plants.
I don't want those. So you know, there's a case where you know, less species richness and less diversity would be would be better. So we have to keep things in context that you know, we're we're just trying to make things better. And so if if you or I or most people go into a restaurant, we would like to see and let's think about this, you could only eat at that restaurant. Well, we would like to see a lot of things on the menu, wouldn't we. We
would like some choices every once in a while. And you know, even our needs change not as much now as they did thousands of years ago, but they changed through the year. I mean, I certainly find myself eaten a little differently in hot summer as I would in
cold winters. And so that's the whole point, trying to provide different wildlife species with as many options as we can, because they inherently know what they need, and so if we provide lots of things, they can do the picking and the choosing and come out in best shape possible.
Yeah, So you mentioned another thing that if I were making a list of what I'm trying to create here, which is like maybe my ten commandments for better landscape stewardship or whatever it might be. We've talked about a few of these different things, but one of them is native managing for native versus non native species. That seems to be something that universally across the board almost everyone says is going to be better for landscape health, better
for you know, most species. If you care about the whole suite of wildlife and your price, pretty managing native is usually the way to go. But we're here, I'm hearing more and more folks say, well, what's native versus non native anything anymore?
Right?
Everything around us is from somewhere else. That's the way of the world, that's where things are going. So many of these species are naturalized now, they've been here for one hundred years. I see birds eating the berries on my automolive all the time. YadA, YadA, YadA. Two questions out of that. Number one, what's your response to someone who has that perspective? And then number two, why is it that managing for native vegetation is so much more beneficial for wildlife in general?
Well, let me reverse the questions, if I may, sure, managing for native species by and large in general is going to be native plant species is going to be better for native wildlife because that's what the wildlife evolved with. The Wildlife didn't evolve with plants from a different from a different continent. And so when somebody says, well, what is native what is non native? Well, I can answer that fairly easily. If a plant is from a given area,
it is native to there, then it's not native. You know, that's pretty easy. And when they say, well, you know, is there any need to worry about this? You know they're naturalized and that kind of thing. You know. I remember the day when I was kind of wrapped up in this more than I am now, and it would really really bother me if there was anything non native on a particular property, and I wanted to go out of my way to get rid of it. But I guess I've changed my way of thinking a little bit.
I still am a strong native plant proponent and in general want to get rid of non native species. But for example, if you have all molive, and I've watched turkeys eat break the branches out of automolive trees eat eating the berries, is that that big of a deal
if you're not letting it spread everywhere? I think, if it's a non native species and it is helping you meet your objective, as long as you're not allowing this to spread all over and take over the property, and you know it's not an easy situation because somebody can say, well, it's it's spreading onto other properties, not just your property, And that certainly can be true. However, more likely than not,
if it's on your property, it's already on the neighbors. Also. Now, if you're in a situation where you have a non native species, and particularly if you've brought it in and that could then spread from your property to others, I think you have a responsibility of getting rid of that plant, because then you're you're having an adverse effect on other people, and and and I don't want to do that, but I've backed off a little bit on you know this,
this strong approach that I used to have. If anything's non native, let's get rid of it. You know, there's several examples of non native plants that the wildlife species that I'm managing for is benefiting from it. Now, I still kill multi floor rows. I don't care if rabbits are a focal species on the property or not, because I can easily manage fields and have a field full of rabbits without multi floor rows along the edge. And there are others that whatever circumstances there is, you need
to get rid of it. Things such as Cerisia, lespadiza, cogan grass. I mean, there's lots of examples where there's there's no reason to have this on your property. But you know, you wrote up automolive, and you know I don't plant, I don't promote automolive. But you know, if you cut the stem of a big automolive bush and let it re sprout, those resproutes have some of the highest crew protein content we've ever recorded in any plants, above forty percent. I mean, it's like off the charge.
I probably shouldn't have mentioned that. Probably some people we need we need to have more of that. But see that's not allowing it to produce berries. That's cutting a stem and just keeping it, you know, vegetative resprout. Yeah.
Well, so much of it comes down to prioritizing limited resources, and most times that's limited time or financial resources. Right, And if time and money were no object, and we could just snap our fingers and change everything we wanted on the landscape, well then maybe we would get rid of every single non native because you could replace it with a more beneficial nonnati or native. But that absolutely okay, But in reality, right, that's that's not the case. We
can't do that. We have to make choices how we're going to spend our time, what we're going to focus on. And so it does make sense to me that there might be more efficient uses of your time, or better bang for your buck uses of your time attacking other native species that are invasive and spreading, or doing these different things we're talking.
You have to pick your battles. You're exactly right. And I'll give you a couple of perspectives. One, if you've got a field of non native grass, that is one that you should you should address. If you're interested in deer, turkeys and most other wildlife species, that's your low hanging fruit right there. Simply kill it and you're going to
improve things tenfold and greater just by doing that. And as I mentioned, there's other plants, whether it be cerisio espadesa bermuda grass, there's lots of them that I'm going out of my way to do what I can to control those. And that's an interesting word right there. Does control mean keel or does control mean completely eradicate and
get rid of? Or does control mean maintain it at a level that allows you to meet your objective, and an example of that might be something like oriental bittersweet. It's a vine that grows in the woods. It's extremely prevalent in most areas of the eastern US, and I mean, it's a problem, it's a problem. But how did the oriental bittersweet get there? It got there by birds eating and dropping the berries, not on my property, but on
somebody property. It could been miles and miles away. And so I put all this time and effort into spraying getting rid of oriental bittersweet in my woods. Well, I can't be surprised when I find it in there again next year, because the birds came. And so the whole thing about controlling non native species now it used to be looked at more as an event when we you know, I'm will say, twenty five thirty years ago, we didn't
have near the problems that we do today. And now gotten to the point where people say, well, you know, I don't think I should cut any trees or disturb my woods or whatever, because if I do, I'm just gonna get non native species. And to that, at least, my perspective is no, no, no, no, no, I'm definitely managing my woods I'm definitely using disturbance. I know that non native species are going to show up. It's simply a way of life now, it's just something that we've
got to do. Combating non native species has just gotten to be a standard procedure anymore. You can't look at it as an event. I'm gonna get rid of it and won't have to do it again. As long as you manage land, you're going to have to continue to deal with non nighted spaces.
So you mentioned a couple specific species examples, and then you mentioned that, you know, if you've got a cool season grass field that's you know, like a side layer, that's a that's a fire five star alarm kind of thing. Are there any other more general categories of problems that would be like this has to go right to the top of your list, Like, like I'm imagining maybe one of them might be we've got this monoculture cool season
grass field that you just described that's an issue. Is the same thing true if you have a monoculture of old age class hardwoods or something like if you've got a really old mature forest where there's nothing growing underneath, you know, is that one of those things or Hey, that's got to go to the top of the list because again we lack diversity in species richness anything like that. Am I in the right path of something like that?
Or are there other things that you would call out as being these, hey to the top of the list?
Yeah, no, I agree. I think you're right. At least the closed canopy hardwoods, according to what species they are the wildlife, even if there's nothing growing under in the understory, at least wildlife would get something from the mast that's being available where they're For most species, they're getting nothing
out of the cool season grass field. But yes, there's so many things that can be done to your woods by simply allowing a little sunlight to come in, and there's all kinds of levels of sunlight that that will allow better development of the understory. And then you think about your disturbance regime as how you can change that over time, either through cutting or fire, what have you. So there's there's lots of work that we can do both in our forest and our field to improve them.
But again, to get back to that central theme, having a little bit of a whole lot of stuff available is very important to many of these wildlife spaces that we're interesting.
Yeah, okay, so here's one species that you mentioned as being a generalist, but I'm curious if there are any specific things we can do to help this generalist, which are turkeys. They've been in the news a lot over recent years because we are in some states, in some regions of the country starting to see these declines. I know you worked on a study relatively recently looking at that I think down in your neck of the woods
around Tennessee. When it comes to turkeys, if that's something that we're worried about in our area, what are some of the most effective management efforts we can tackle that are going to help with some of these limiting factors that are possibly slowing the growth or rest racial turkey populations.
Well as related to habitat, trying to provide something on your property for all of their life's needs. And so, you know, a turkey will nest just about anywhere. But interestingly, in the five county area that we conducted the Turkey Project, then over its eighth year right now, right at fifty percent, almost fifty percent of the nests were located in either early succession or a very young regenerating stand which represented
only seven percent of the landscape. So I mean think about that, Yeah, nearly fifty percent of the nest occurred on seven percent of the landscape, and having that available can be very important because also nest success in early succession was greater than any other vegetation type mature woods, regenerating woods, pasture, hayfield, what have you. Nest success was greatest in early succession and so you know, in like
an old field. So then thinking about what happens after nesting, Well, they have broods, and so having cover that is appropriate for broods with regard to the height and the density is very important. And so there's where forbes can be very important. And particularly if that cover is not taller than the hen. You know, if the hen can see
out over the cover, she typically selects those areas. But the cover is tall enough to conceal the poles, that's very important and mark you know, forever everybody has always thought of fields as being the best brooding cover. Well, they fields may be, but that's dependent upon the structure
of the field. If the growth and thatch at ground level is so dense and tight that poulps can't maneuver through it, then you're going to see the hens with broods either use woods around the edges of fields, and that is precisely what we have seen in South Middle Tennessee. Of the fields that they had available to them, they would strongly select them for nesting, but the structure was so dense in general at ground level they didn't brood in them hardly at all. And so that's when you
begin looking at managing your woods a little differently. I would argue, and I've said to many audiences, I would say that an oak woodland or an oak pine woodland where you know your the amount of sunlight coming in might be anywhere from around thirty to seventy percent. But having those oak woodlands where you're managing with frequent fire, those are I would consider them the single best vegetation type for wild turkeys. They have fall foods, they have
spring and summer foods. There's cover for nesting, cover for brooding. Obviously, they can roost in there, according to when and how often you manage it. There can be loafing cover. There's there's something in these oak woodlands for turkeys at all times. So don't overlook the value of your woods and reducing the tree density to allow a certain amount of sunlight to come in, because those can be outstanding brood rear
in areas, not just your fields. And and and if you do have fields, you definitely want to manage some of them either with fire or disking to open up the structure at ground level. So it's uh, you know, it's there's a plant canopy, but it's open underneath where the where the polps can walk about very easily. And you'll see increased use in the those types of fields versus those where there's a lot of thatch build up, dead material and it's so dense that the polpes can't hardly move.
And is that same kind of management philosophy or set of ideas appropriate or helpful to other bird species like woodcock, bob boy, quail grouse, similar type habitat needs. Is that going to help across the board.
With regard to the structure, it can be very different by different bird species, But with regard to having something on your property available such that they need all the way through the year, absolutely that holds true. And so the structure that a grouse is going to use is going to be very different, of course than a bob white or a turkey, and ditto for woodcock. But so
your management would be different for those species. You know, specific management for woodcock versus specific management for turkeys or bob white, but the overall general requirements are the same. It's just that the specific types of cover and specific types of food can be very different.
So that's where it gets like tricky in my mind, is how do I how do I go about making a decision on my management prescription when I don't necessarily and maybe you have to to do it right, When I don't necessarily want to prioritize grouse over turkeys or deer over turkeys. I do want quality habitat for the deer, but I also have turkeys that I want to make
sure this is going to be hospitable to. And oh, by the way, there are rough grouse out here too, or I want to make sure that there could still be grouse out here, and oh, by the way, I also want to make sure that I'm providing opportunity for a B and C down the list, small mammals, rabbits, whatever. Is it just a matter of the fact that you can't have it all? Or are there them general? How do you get what I'm having a hard time for me a question around here? How do I make sense of this?
Well, I think what you're getting at is if you manage a little bit for everything, you can have a little bit of everything, but you might not have a whole lot of anything. If if that makes sense, and so if you have a wide variety of vegetation types and successional stages, then you're going to have the structure that that density of vegetation that a grouse would prefer, and you would have the density of vegetation that you know, turkey brews would prefer, you know, whatever the case may be.
But your property might not be tuned in the best possible for any one of those species. But you're providing at a little something for all of them. And so the occupancy of your property can be very high by different species, but it might not be the best property in the county for species A, B or C. Does that make sense?
It does. So my next question then would be is that the and so if.
I may, if I may interrupt you, So in that case, I think your objective then would be to provide a property that provides as much as possible for the widest number of species and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I think that's a great objective. But that's very different than if somebody is wanting to hold as many turkeys as many gobblers on their property as they can. That's that's two different objectives.
Yep, yep. Okay, So I follow you there, and I think that that doesn't make it. That makes it very clear if you're trying to establish you know we talked earlier, we might not be able to save the world, but we might feel to make it a better place. If you are a generalist hunter land manager who wants to make it a better place, then providing a lot of different habitat types for a lot of different habitat species seems like a good rule of thumb if you have
a focus yourself. Though, there's nothing wrong with putting a prescription on the ground that is more specific to them. That all said, I guess there's ten thousand things that we could cover here, but I'm going to skip towards kind of the ending to keep you well rested and not using up all of your little bit of free
time you have coming off of all your travel. Let's end with top three bang for your buck or efficient use of time progest if you had to pick three very specific things that someone could do, that someone could pick up a tool now and get out there and do a thing. And I understand it's all region specific and all that, but feel free to pick a place of your choosing and pick three projects for somebody who has this larger perspective, for someone who's trying to do
something that will make it a better place. What would the first three things you would recommend someone get going on this year? We've talked about a lot of different options. There's a lot of new ideas I think people probably have percolating now after hearing this, But what would be your top three list?
I would say number one would be some forest stand improvement. Grab a small chainsaw and get a squirt bottle with some herbicide. Go under your woods, kill the trees that are not helping you toward your objective, and steer your forest into the composition that is the best it could be and into the structure that suits your objective. And so you might have areas where you implement more thinning than in others because you like the you know, stem density to be fairly great to help hold deer and
serve his bedding cover or potentially nesting cover. You might have others where you would want to be more open and be good brooding cover. You're killing trees that are competing with good mast bearing trees and enabling them to provide more food to me. That's the easiest recommendation. Grab a chainsaw, go enjoy the day, and you know, in just several hours work you can make a huge difference
in your woods. Number two, I would go back to the field situation that you described, and if you've got fields of native grasses and you're wanting to improve the habitat for most species on your property by simply getting rid of those grasses, that that's gonna that's that's that's the lowest fruit right there. That's that's a very easy one. And then number three, I think I would probably encourage people to, if they haven't already, to try prescribe fire.
And what I've told people is don't start big, start small and get some people who have implemented fire to help you. Go to some workshops. If you have prescribed fire certification course in your state, either through the state Forestry Agency, prescribe fire councils, et cetera, learn more about fire, because if you can use fire, you can get to the next level with your your your habitat management. And
it doesn't have to be a great big burn. You know, if you burn you know, an acre of a field, you know, disk around one acre and under the appropriate conditions, and I know we can't get into all that, but under the appropriate conditions you can have a very safe burn event. Ditto in your woods. Don't let anybody tell you that you can't burn hard woods without killing trees.
That is a myth that is patently false. Period, take a leaf blower, if you've got nothing else, and blow a firebreak around a section of woods, and again, in the appropriate conditions, use prescribe fire, low intensity, prescribe fire in those woods and watch the effect.
It is tremendous, great, great working orders for us there, Craig.
Well, you know, it seems it seems simple to me. It seems overly simple, and a lot of times I'm kind of talking about the same thing with different folks.
But try those things. Work in your woods with a little you know, a small chainsaw's not wearing you out, Get a squirt bottle of herbicide, Spray the grass out of your fields, even if it's planted native grass spray that you know, if you've got like a maximum of thirty percent grass cover, I've said that so many times, you're going to have a field that is much much better for the vast majority of wildlife that would be using it. And try prescribe fire. You know, that's a
big thing right there. Try and prescribe fire. There's a lot to that. I don't mean to make it sound overly simple, but I think those three things right there will really help change your management.
Yeah, well, there's actually for anyone who's interested, there is a learn and burn event occurring here in Michigan, put on by the National Deer Association, actually on a property that I purchased and managed and then we gave to the National Deer Association the back forty. I don't know if you're familiar, well you probably worked.
I saw that, isn't it in June? Is that correct?
I think it's July thirteenth is the number that's popping into my head. But anybody interested in that should go to Deer Association dot com and you'll see information about that. It looks like a pretty great event in which there's going to be a burn taking place on the property with folks there. I think Kip's going to be there and a few others helping walk through how to safely manage to prescribe burn, how to put together the plan, how to do the whole thing.
That'd be tremendous, so that that'll be great.
That's in southern Michigan.
We do. We do something like that at most of the deer steward two courses. And you know, those typically are in the summertime, not all of them, but typically in the summertime, and so it can be difficult to burn some areas in the summertime. And so what we'll do is have the landowner or land manager spray a certain area of a field, you know, two to three
weeks before we get there. Because that way, you know, even if it rained the day before, if sun pops out, you'll probably be able to burn dead vegetation in the field. And at least that allows people to see how to start a fire, how to you know, the different firing techniques, et cetera. So it's a very good thing.
Yeah, So to close this all out, Craig, if there were folks who have been intrigued by this whole conversation and just and want to learn more, want to go down this path further. Are there any resources you recommend for people to read, watch, listen to. I'd love for you to plug your own things and then also if there's anything that you've enjoyed reading or looking into yourself that you might recommend to folks.
Well, you know, people can find just about whatever they won't write at their fingertips pretty easily by searching various categories and topics.
Know, I try to.
Make available the publications that we've written on my web page. Someone can go there and find all that. But you know, I'm just one person. If you look at the people involved in wildlife and academia across the country, you know, most people have a web page that's that's full of information. I would encourage people to search different wildlife professors that are doing research on different species and see what they have available. Most of the state wildlife agencies on their
websites have all kinds of information. And if you're interested in fire, absolutely get in contact with your state forestry agency and see if there is a prescribed fire council in your state. Join that at least go you know, to a to a meeting and see what all is said and done. Your eyes can be opened in a big way. And in these states many of them also
offer the burned certification courses. Those are fantastic. There's just tremendous information to be learned there, and that's a great way to get started with some experience and get to know some other people who would be willing to help you go forward. Yeah.
Well, I will specifically plug a couple of your books here, Guide to Wildlife Food Plots and Early Successional Plants Stellar, as well as managing Early Successional Plant Communities for wildlife in the Eastern US. If you're watching this, you just saw those two covers. There's so much here. I've only been able to scratch the surface as I've had various projects and pulled out pages and red bits and pieces,
but there is a lot there. When I started that back forty project, I really found the Guide to Wildlife Food Plots and Early Successional Plants super helpful because you've got this whole back section where you detail each specific species. You know what's useful, How is this valuable to wildlife
or not? When I was trying to understand on that property, there was half of that property was old Fellow farm fields, and so we had all these different things coming up in them, and I was trying to figure out is this a good thing, is a bad thing? Should it be sprying this? Should we be keeping it around? And your book was tremendously useful in that, so highly recommend those two.
Well, I'm very glad that you were able to use that, and I appreciate the kind words. The publication on Managing Early Successional Communities is available on my web page, you know, and you can download a lot of this stuff, purchase a hard copy if you want it, And please know we're not not making any money off of this. It's just going into an account to go back into reprinting
the food plots and early successional plants. It's gotten a lot of attention, a lot of demand, and the copies are out right now, but I am hot on a revision and I'm hoping to have that out by the end of the year, So if you're interested in that one, stay tuned. I'm adding as much as I can some additional plant species profiles as well as different mixtures for food plots and management techniques, you know, regenerative approaches or have become very popular, so trying to add more with
that in mind. So a lot you know, if you continue to do research and you continue to look at others research, there's there's always new stuff coming out, and I try my best to keep things as fresh as possible, but a lot of times it's hard to stay on here.
Well, we might have achieved a first within the genre of white tailed Deer and Wildlife Habitat Management podcast because we had an entire episode without once talking about food plots. So we might have just broke the internet with that.
But maybe when that new book comes out, that next revision, we'll have to have it come back on and talk through some of the new regenerative food plots philosophies and ideas you write about there, because that's another thing that I've found really interesting and explore more too.
So there's a well, you know, I like food plots. It's just very fun to plant something and watch animals respond. But you don't have to have food plots, you know, the management of your naturally occurring plant communities. You can do everything that you need with those and see terrific wildlife response.
Yeah, well, next time, and with that Craig, I'll let you get back to your day. I can't think enough this was This is.
Great pleasure, pleasure talking to you. Mark.
All right, thank you for tuning in to today's show. Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. As I mentioned there at the end, you definitely need to go pick up a couple of Craig's books if this is the kind of thing you're interested in the best way to do that is to go to his website over on the University of Tennessee website. It's a long complim, ok you, Arel, So rather than giving you that you orl I would just say google his name, Craig Harper, Tennessee.
If you do that, the first link that shows up for me at least is that website. Click that. Then you'll see all the books, all the publications, links to umpteen different articles he's written, all sorts of studies. He's published. A tremendous amount of information out there for you if you want to learn more, and Craig has lots to offer. So that's it for today. Thanks for joining in, Thanks
for being here with me throughout this habitat month. As we've explored this kind of habitat management beyond the norm in the deer world. I hope that you've, you know, maybe been inspired to try a few new things, maybe been encouraged to expand outside of what you're comfortable with or what you've done in the past.
I know I have.
I'm excited about it. And so with that all said, until next time, thank you for being here, and stay wired to hunt.