SANCTUARY: THE KEY TO TAKING TROPY BUCKS

Sanctuary to Catch and Keep Your Neighbor's Bucks

Editor's Note: Trophy bucks don't have to move when you're hunting them. Mature bucks can find and have everything they need and want after dark - food, water, sex, companionship, exercise and socialization - without traveling during daylight hours. Too, older-age-class bucks have learned they're more likely to encounter predators when the sun goes down. Therefore, a trophy buck has locating sanctuary - a place where he can stay during daylight hours and not have to contend with humans - as his number-one priority.

You can keep older-age-class bucks on your property as well as pull mature bucks off your neighbor's lands and ensure that they remain on your property. To have most of the good things in life, you must give up something to get something. "The members of our hunting lease give up hunting during the last week of deer season to start feeding and protecting bucks for the next year," Chris Kirby of Orchard Park, New York, reports.

"During the last week of deer season in New York, almost every person who physically can hunt deer will hunt." Most hunting clubs in upstate New York offer little or no sanctuary for deer during the last week of deer season. For this reason, any area providing sanctuary and food can draw bucks onto the property during the last week of the season. When the deer come to the land that Kirby hunts to eat corn put out by spin feeders, they also discover a sanctuary with no hunting pressure.

"We feed the deer during a time when everyone else is trying to take them," Kirby emphasizes. Even after deer season ends, Kirby and the members of his club continue to feed the deer. They plant food plots in the early spring to hold the bucks on their property they've attracted by not hunting the last week of the season. During hunting season, they hunt their property as little as possible and only take older-age-class bucks. Using this system, they've seen a dramatic increase in the bucks they harvest, and they're taking bigger bucks than ever. Sanctuaries remain one of the most-critical components of an overall effective deer-management system and quality-buck management program. If you don't have a sanctuary on your hunting lease, more than likely you're not attracting and holding the number of older-age-class bucks you can. If you want to take more big bucks on your property, then build or provide your deer with a sanctuary.