Need Advice: Setting Up a New Property

Hey Folks,

Looking to get some guidance/advice on how to setup a new property. My buddy just got access to a family property (100 Acres) that has never been hunted (in the past 10 yrs) on or rarely gets visited by the other family members (maybe once every 2 years) in Duval county. We have been going every weekend since the first weekend of January to scout the place, setup feeders/cameras to survey what frequents the property. So far we've setup 2 feeders/cameras labeled 1 & 2. Within the 4 weeks we have seen hogs, javelinas, does, a single 10pt, a 6pt, and a few young bucks.

The bucks have only shown once at different days so we are assuming they were just cruising by. The javelinas are the only consistent animal that shows up during the morning/evenings, where as all other animals only show at night.
What improvements would you advise we could do to: 1) improve the layout of the property 2) keep the bucks around 3)have the animals come out during daylight hours?



Just a little background, all surrounding properties are low fence, the circle in the middle of the pic is deer bedding area that we found, and the "big dipper" road you see was done prior to use gaining access. Our goal is to do some improvements little by little before the beginning of the upcoming hunting season.

any water on it of any kind?

The property to the south of this property has a tank (empty as of last week) near the south fence, hence why we put feeder 2 between the water and bedding area. My buddy would like to add some sort of water source. Just don't know where....

Well bedding area in the middle is good. I would probably start by walking the perimeter and scouting for the best travel routes. Look at food sources on surrounding properties that might be affecting travel and as said above water. I would then set up some protein feeders and cams on travel routes. Things to be considered: food plots, distance from boundary for stands, elevation advantage, hunter travel routes in and out of set-ups....etc. Nothing beats time spent in the woods. Congrats, sounds promising!

just my opinion but a protein feeder on 100 acres is probably a waste of money. You would be better served by making some food plots on the property and spending the money on corn or other attractant type feeds (corn/soy, which deer love but also has protein value). Chances are, you are going to fatten up your neighbors deer if you feed protein.

A food plot on 100 acres would be basically an attractant plot, but could be a good source of food for deer if done big enough. I am not from south texas, so I don't know what grows well down there, but I know rain is a big part of it. If you could figure out a way to make a small "kill plot" with some meager irrigation using 250g totes or something similar, you would be in business.

Agree with above about spending time out there, see where the trails are, etc. Staging feeders along trails could keep things around more, but seeing where deer come and go from during day and night is helpful to staging approaches and stands.

Good luck!

If they only visit the property every two yrs then someone is or has most likely hunted it. Doesn’t take poachers and tresspassers long to figure out when nobody is ever around

1.Are you simply going to hunt it or set up a camp also?
2.Do you have multiple ways of entering the property either by foot or driving, if so where on the map?

As far as getting the deer to feed in the daylight, what works for me in trying to train the deer is to set my feeder to go off twice a day. What I would do now is the morning is set to go off 30 minutes before shooting light for 8 seconds, the evening is set to go off 30 minutes before dark for 3 seconds. You will need to adjust feed times by the number of deer/hogs showing up. But what you are doing is not putting so much corn on the ground in the evening so that they can eat all night. But by June you adjust the feeder to go off 15 minutes before shooting light and 45 minutes before dark. September the timer is set to go off at shooting light and 1-1/2 hours before dark. You will have to make adjustments all year long as sunrise and sunset time changes. My advice is worth what you are paying for it....which is nothing. But this has worked for me a couple of times when I have gone to new places. I would forget protein and just feed corn with a $5 salt block by the feeder. If you are down there often enough, try to get some type of water on your place it you can. If not, then hope that your neighbors tank fills up. it's not bad having a stand between your feeder and some water. As others have said, walk the fence line looking for where the animals are traveling.
Good luck with being successful

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trespassers can avoid game cameras and don't always disturb belongings.
you can bet that on any property that someone isn't living on full time
gets a visit from neighbors or neighbor kids. on my place the giveaways
have been footprints, lost empty cases, toilet paper and cigarette butts.
you can bet everyone living nearby knows every time somebody comes and goes.

I have 40 acres and I see much better results from a Protein feeder than a 10 acre food plot imo... I still run them both though the two put together is ideal.. Protein just dosnt have to rely on weather...

Digging two wells and setting them up on solar would be were i would start if $ was there

Where is the entrance to the property? If you are going to set up a camp, were do you plan on it being? I am guessing, but a 100 acres is about 600x800 yards, from the pic is it basically scrub mesquite? Can you see the feeders from the road?

Is this mesquite? It’s tough to say from the pic. Is that heavy cover? I’m a bow hunter and am paranoid about pushing animals. It doesn’t matter where you put anything if your pushing game every time you come in or leave.

Those feeders in the middle wouldn’t work for me cause your scent is going to be blowing into your property that way. On 100 acres the location of your feeders doesn’t matter..the deer will come to either of them. So what does matter is where your scent blows and how you come in and leave.

There are two of you so I’m guessing two feeders. Are you always hunting at the same time? Rifle hunting?

I’m guessing rifle hunting...
I’d put one blind on the east perimeter and put the feeder as far in as you can see. That way you can hunt most winds.
N,S,NW,SW,W.

The other blind would be on the west perimeter. Same thing as deep into the property as you can see. Hunt that on
N,S,NE,SE,E. Drive and park off that North road and walk the fence line down to your blind.

Park off the roads and walk quitely to your blinds. Never drive through your property. Only to the feeders to fill em.

I like your thinking DC

If there are lots of tanks in the area I wouldn’t worrry about water so much...your not going to contain those deer so it’s not worth the work. They will be moving in and out anyway. An easy water solution if you don’t see many tanks nearby is a 50gallon drum stashed in bushes and3/4in pvc running to a small troth with a float switch. You can build that for around a hundred bucks and it’ll be fairly reliable even around hogs.

I enlarged the map as large as I could, the only places that looked like trails are places people have driven are the blue lines. What are these trails?

Gillium


You asked for help but you are not responding to questions that probably will help

My apologies for the late responses. I was in meetings all day yesterday

I am going to try to answer most of your questions so please let me know if I missed any:

1) Rifle hunting or Bow hunting? Both, my buddies is avid bow hunter and prefers this over rifle hunting. I might pick it up as well but he will be bow hunting and I will be rifle hunting. It will mainly be just us 2 hunting the property.

2) What is the landscape? You are all correct, the thick cover is all mesquite/thorny brush/cactus. The weird part about the property is by the gate and the entrance road is sandy, the area near the south fence by feeder 2 is soil/high grass, and the east end of the property is very rocky....

3) Is there any water sources? After looking at the surrounding properties on google maps last night, it only looks like the neighbor to the south with the tank has water but I could be wrong.

Below I made some additions to my original picture that I posted. The green star is where the entrance gate is and the green outline are the roads (needing major trimming/clearing) that are narrow but can be driven on. The rest of the property is only accessible following game trails is on foot. We pan to clear a spot for camp a little more to the right of where the "camp" is picture in the pic. So far we have not walked the perimeter yet just where the green outline is and to the south fence where we could see the neighbors tank. We have not explored anything east of green "big dipper" as this seems to be the thickest. Also, we setup one blind about 30 yds from feeder one facing south (red arrow). This is the area where we see the javelinas the most. Based on time stamps it looks like all other animals hit feeder 2 first and then make their way to feeder 1.



As for trespassers/poachers, yes we understand that people may have hunted before my buddy was given permission to it however when we first went to scout the place we did not see any carcasses or spent casings on the ground (not to say they couldnt have picked them up). What we did find was that the gate was broken and someone was driving in the property, we only saw tire tracks and no footprints. My buddy was able to talk to one of the neighbors and he said the area used to have a major problem with illegals but not so much anymore. We saw evidence of this as well but nothing to really say if people were poaching the property. We since have fixed the gate and have made our presence known to the neighbors as many have stopped by while the gate was being worked on.

To me that entire property looks like a bedding area... and a feeding area. Your not going to be able to find things like the always mentioned "pinch point" or bedding area. You have what looks like a relatively flat square piece of property with what looks like unchanging terrain.

Feed them and keep the pressure down and they will come. The heat of your rut will come between Dec. 15 and Jan 15.

If the light areas on the map where I outlined in yellow are sort of open areas, then If possible I would move my camp on the other side of the rode (blue empty box). Setup blinds at the top of the outlined yellow areas ( black box) and have my feeders on the south end (red box) Moving the camp would create less intrusion on your east hunting area (by the panhandle) and more equal distance to the blinds. Orange lines are travel path to blinds. Everything shown is an approximation, would actually have to put foot on ground to evaluate effectively. The east setup hard to tell if it is open a little further down towards the south if so move the feeder further away.

Good luck

That was our guess as well. Since no one would frequent this property, the game were probably using this piece of property as a bedding area/safe haven from surrounding properties. We are hoping to setup it (with the advice from you all) before it really starts to get hot and not visit but once a month or so to fill feeders and check cameras. Its about 2 hours away (one way) to this property from us.

feed them corn and they will come. If you can rig up a small water source it will help, but don't panic if you cant.

I feel your pain for not being able to pattern deer. Our property is a little bigger but is pretty void of land/cover change. Deer wake up in the morning browse for a few hours and then lay back down all within 20 yards of the same exact spot. We have a tank and we have water stations, but they really don't seem to be that big of a draw unless things really get dry. In the last drought years we had new deer coming from all directions to drink out of one trough on a float.

If you have enough room around your feeders to at least put 8 but preferably 10 hog panels do it. If you have a lot of hogs in your area, once the hogs find the corn they will deter deer from coming to it.

Ill second this. And if you don't have at least that much room then clear at least that much and more. Some of our sets were poor performers from day one. Simply clearing a little more room around the feeders mad a big difference, they didn't like being that tight in the cover.

Just for reference - the road closest to Feeder 2 that runs west to east is 100yds. The northwest corner to the south east corner is roughly a mile long.

So If I am hearing correctly, it would be best to seperate the property (given its size) into two main hunting areas, an east and a west? My orginal thought was maybe to break it up, at least with roads, into quarters. Thoughts?

It would be good to add a water source but not mandatory.

For my blind/feeder setup I was definitely going to implement a feeder pen with hog panels, not sure if my buddy was going to do that with his.

What do you think is a good number of feeders/blind setups to have on 100 acres?

If you do more than 3-4 setups, probably overkill plus you and he will only be covering the two at a given time...

Hate to say it but that place/deer has been hunted in the past due to its size and location. Deer were pulled off it by the neighbors due to its size and deer home range size. You have prevailing SE winds and then north winds in the fall/winter. I would make all roads around the fencelines and then put blinds/feeders inside the property. Leave the middle area of the pasture as bedding cover with no traffic. If you are only seeing deer at night then they are not living on the place. They are traveling in from somewhere they are bedding. Also that place is not going to hunt 2 people due to deer density numbers for that county if all the places around this one are hunted and the same size or bit larger than this one. Two people hunting it will push deer out depending on your travel route to the blind with the wrong winds. Throw in buck to doe ratio and there just is not going to be enough bucks to support two hunters unless you can live with one hunter not getting a buck.

Barring a rut slip up of a couple of lovesick bucks, I'd tend to agree with the Ranchman here...

To be honest, we aren't out there to hunt antlers. We just enjoy being out there, as neither of us have had this kind of opportunity before, plus it doesn't cost us nothing to hunt there except gas, corn, feeders, cameras, etc. At least the initial setup of the property. And the hogs could keep us entertained as well.

Thinking 2 setups for deer (feed pen) and 1 for hogs/javelina (no feed pen)

"Thinking 2 setups for deer (feed pen) and 1 for hogs/javelina (no feed pen)"

That's what I would do.

yep, or 2 of each so you can both hunt off season easier.

This would be my choice.

The only issues I see with the camp and the east setup is that it is very close to the county road. The brush is thick but not very tall.

Being near the road is something that you may just have to live with.

I agree that placing the camp near a public road isn't optimal, but if you move very far into the interior it looks like you could interfere with your future hunting set ups.

Since you only have access to a 100 acres, your options are limited. As to the camp, I would get one of the shipping containers so that I could seal it up tight when I left. Any additional doors, windows etc., would have security bars on them and be on the side facing into the property. Either that are have everything where you take it with you when you leave.

Even with water sources near you would be amazed how much deer will prefer a fresh water source and not have to stand in mud to drink

Id set the camp at far NE in the handle of the property... jmo this way one pass can be made to go to all stands

Agree with camp in the "panhandle". That way you are farther from the game, and would be less likely to spook them when you are in camp.

Sounds interesting camp in the E. Panhandle. OP was concerned about being to close to the street, also the brush looks thick as hades and the camp would be awful close to the neighbors property which is probably not a biggy. Hunter on the west would use the Orange line to get to the blind.

Nav where would you put the blinds and feeders if it was your setup? Below is a revised based off camp in the panhandle.

Thanks for everyone's input so far. I will try to keep this updated as a progress thread. Slowly but surely we will get there...

Id have one just east of the number one on that map at the 3 way... elevated blind and get some clearing done to have good shooting lanes

Second one would be a bow setup in the south west side in what looks like patchy brush area

Also would do alot of work clearing out the perimeter fence line so I could drive all the way around to each stand without having to go through one

Last Saturday night we decided to try to get a night hunt in. We arrived at the property just before midnight, 15 minutes later, we had a hog down! We knew a pig would be shot that night but didn/t expect it to happen as soon as we got there. Walking up to the blind right in front of Feeder 1 we could hear a sounder of 10 hogs working there way down the road. Lucky for us the cloud cover, dimmed the moonlight so they could not see us standing right in front of them 40 yds away. Raised the spot light as soon as they got under the feeder and my buddy whacked one with his bow.




We stayed up all night and morning until about 9AM with nothing else showing up. Went to the back and cleared some shooting lanes to the east and west of feeder 2 so that next time we could see if there are any animals at feeder 2 (day/night) without them hearing us, all we have to do is peek around the corner.

Kill them all!

X2