5 Important To-Do's on a New Hunting Property

Purchasing, leasing, or gaining access to a new property by permission is one of the most exciting things hardcore deer hunters can accomplish. The Christmas morning feeling of walking a new property can be overwhelming, yet full of promise. The temptation to fire up a chainsaw, hire a logger or bring in heavy equipment right away to clear a huge food plot is very real. However, a little exercise in caution and patience will reward you down the road.

Maybe it’s my personality, but I like to pump the brakes and take a step back before making major decisions and its no different with altering the land for whitetails. Luckily there are tons of items you can check off your new property list without making sweeping changes you may regret. Sit down, come up with a plan, and set yourself up for long-term success by following some of these conservative task list items regarding your new hunting property.

1. Don’t Go Wild

It’s easy to talk yourself into quick decisions after your first weeks of gaining access to a new property. After years of waiting to buy or lease land, pent up excitement can get the best of you. Try not to make 65-year mistakes you may regret when you lay your head down at night. Mainly, I’m talking land clearing or chainsaw work. It takes about 60 seconds to cut down a tree and maybe half a day’s work to clear a food plot, but a whole heckuva lot more time for areas to regrow.

To avoid rash decisions, sleep on an idea for a while and include a friend on a quick walk of the property to talk about your plans. If need be, hire a professional land consultant for peace of mind. Better yet immediately deploy some trail cameras and let technology help teach you as you learn about the property as you can before inserting large changes into your game plan. You’ll want to know how deer are natually using the landscape before coming up with a plan.

If you’ve gained access to permission ground or found a lease, be sure you fully understand what you can and can’t do on the land. Can you manipulate the land or your set ups with food plots, tree plantings, or permanant blind placement? Don’t assume you can hang stands or trail cameras wherever you please - this is especially true for permission properties. Being up front with a landowner granting you permission will go a long ways towards building trust and will likely open up new opportunities to control what happens on the land.

2. Meet Your Neighbors

Shortly after acquiring new hunting ground, you should try to meet your neighbors. Stopping by if you see them out and about would be an ideal scenario. This would allow for a low-key introduction and give you a chance to make a great first impression. Adding a neighbor on social media as a way to introduce yourself isn’t the way I would go about it. In an age where we’ve lost some of our in-person communication skills, making an in-person introduction holds more value than ever before.

Unless they bring it up, I would avoid talking about deer hunting when you first meet your neighbors. In the end, it’s really none of your business and could get your relationship off to an awkward start even if how they manage deer is information you desperately want to get from them. Talks of how they manage deer can happen later after you’ve established yourself as a trustworthy neighbor. Remember, some neighbors and deer hunters don’t live and breathe this thing quite like us, and could be annoyed by talks of big deer.

You could end your conversation with “well if you guys are deer hunters and ever need to track a deer, here’s my number.” This accomplishes two things. First, they may give you their number and it leaves the door open to striking up a small hunting conversation. Secondly, it will signal to them you’re looking for an open line of communication when it comes to your hunting adventures. However it can get accomplished, meeting your neighbors is an important check-list item when you acquire new ground.

3. Two-Year Plan

Your first few weeks or even months of landownership, leasing or permission has passed. It might feel like you've accomplished nothing at all and have a long way to go in developing this property into a whitetail mecca. Hold tight. One of the best things you can do for a new hunting property happens behind a computer screen.

It’s important to make great notes during the hunting season when your memory of what is happening is fresh. It’s not fun to return home and take detailed notes after a long day of hunting, but you appreciate looking back on your information when its time to implement plans.

To ease the overwhelming feeling of implementing plans, start a document and write down a two-year plan for the property and use mapping applications to save drawings of where you want to implement plans. If you look ahead past two years, you’ll feel overwhelmed.

You can’t start dreaming of having the best property around if you don’t start somewhere. Start a document and begin writing down your plans by priority. If you have an excess of mature timber and could make yourself some cash to help pay for your recent land purchase, then you need to begin the process of researching and vetting loggers and foresters.

Maybe you see a no-brainer two-acre food plot location or an area where installing a small wildlife pond makes sense. You should mark waypoints and save a drawing of future food plots. Then hunt the areas you have marked off this fall to see how wind and thermals work in the area.

A two-year plan for permission or leased hunting property could include a large fencing project and maybe your permission or lease is contingent on you helping to complete it. Looking ahead just a few years is wise when it comes to Timber Stand Improvement and other habitat wishlist items so you can prioritize, but still see your goals. Think of your two-year plan as a way to snowball yourself into attacking larger scale projects.

4. Low-Hanging Fruit

This may seem counterintuitive to my two-year planning argument, but once you’ve been on the property several times you should take the opportunity to knock out some easy chores right away. A careful and well-thought-out plan of attack doesn’t mean you can’t design your hunt just a bit right from the start. Things like clearing logging roads, downed trees, or creating a simple trail system that will benefit you for the upcoming fall would be wise. Installing a few hidey-hole food plots in openings already established could be just what your new land needs to bring in a November stud.

If your new ground has tucked away field corners or slam-dunk areas you can sweeten, add a mock scrape and non-treated cedar rubbing post combination to direct buck traffic near your stand. Be sure to think about the best wind directions for hunting the mock scrape and set up accordingly.

Hang tree stand setups around obvious terrain funnels or near food sources for your first year of hunting on your newly acquired land. You can treat these initial stand locations as observation sits, just be sure to keep a mobile hunting or saddle kit at the ready for quick adjustments.

If you’re eligible for enrollment into a governemnt program to reduce taxes or receive payments for land you’ve purchased, your local NRCS office is a great place to start.

5. Fulfill Needs, Enjoy It

In the end, setting up a new hunting property that you purchase, lease or have permission on is about filling the lowest hole in the bucket in terms of what deer need and desire.

Trying to provide everything whitetails need within a short window could lead to imperfect improvements or flat-out mistakes, not to mention stress. Remember to enjoy the process along the way. Habitat improvements and working on the land God blessed us with is full-circle deer management at its finest! And, it's likely you’ll have more fun managing the land than actual hunting!

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