Description
http://StrategicHabitat.com - Habitat Plans and Hunting Setups
Randy VanderVeen - 616-560-7488 - randy@strategichabitat.com
I really like the turkey foot design for larger plots and a simple V shape for smaller plots.
On this plan I have two turkey foot plots that are each about 1.5 acres in size.
The advantages of a turkey foot is that there are blind spots preventing bucks from seeing the whole field.
This also isolates competing doe family groups from social stress.
The only spot with 100% visibility is near the blind.
So it makes bucks search with their legs instead of their eyes, increasing the chances of them walking within bow range. That means the end of these corners, or barricades, have to be within bow range of the blind so that deer have to walk around them.
So when you’re clearing the food plot, you can dump some tree debris in these areas to prevent deer from cheating and cutting through.
So you have to figure out what your comfortable bow range is when hunting, not target practicing, and then measure and mark that out with ribbons or paint.
You can see there’s a little more planning and measuring involved when creating these designs, but the payoff for years to come for you and your kids is well worth it.
After I design a food plot like this on a habitat plan, I then copy that design over to OnXmaps with the area polygon tool, and can adjust and tweak the distances from the blind to these corners. I take a screenshot of those measurements and give that to the landowner so he can bring that with him in the woods.
What I’ll also do for the landowner is save the new food plots and trail markings in a new folder in OnX so that they can share that with whoever is running the equipment so the operator can pull it up on his phone while in his cab to make sure he stays within the food plot boundaries or stays on course when opening up trails.
So you might be wondering what I do with the 600 hi-res photos the drone took while flying the grid pattern. Well I upload them into a program that processes all the photos into one big seamless hi-resolution aerial photo, also called an orthomosaic.
This allows you to zoom in close without losing clarity like you do with satellite images on Google or OnX. That’s because these photos are taken from only 300 ft up instead of 300 miles up.
And since it’s an up to date image, it makes for a much more accurate and nice looking canvas on which to draw up a habitat plan.