Yup, that one of the needs of proper land management.... deer need "Cover". A deer can and will vary well bed on a ridge top where he can see and hear any trouble coming.... but they do need some hideouts that are thick to really hide. Deer will travel a distance for food. If they have to travel a bit of a ways for cover they will do that too. It depends on the time of year. Right now they'll use a corn field or bean field. They don't need a big space. They'll bed in cattails, grown up grass and brush, just about anywhere. I don't think you necessarily have to make such an area but select one thats close to what they need and stay out of it. If you keep walking in they'll move to some place new, like your neighbors land. Nothing wrong with deer bedding across the fence line and coming to your side to eat.

I am converting my 5 acres of CRP(fescue and orchard grass) into Native Warm Season Grasses next spring. Thats adding some bedding area.

The farm that I hunt has easily 100 acres of 6 foot tall switch grass. It didnt use to have that and we never saw big deer. For the past couple years the deer have been getting bigger and bigger... The corn/beans have ALWAYS been there.

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Could somebody please address the HOW?

We need a separate thread about how to create bedding areas. What makes a good bedding area? Where should it be located? How big should it be? What kind of cover do you need? All that good stuff....

Without a doubt I think we all know how important a bedding area is, but whats more important is to have a balance of bedding/feeding areas if your land can accomodate. Many folks have very small parcels that they own or can hunt <20 acres. In this case I think it is more important to provide the feeding areas, because it would be very difficult to provide bedding areas on that 20 and also succesfully hunt that 20 without spooking deer too often. Of course alot depends on land placement, terrain etc.

What I have seen as a problem with many people when they aquire a piece of property is that they are just to excited and dive right in. Say you aquire 100 acres, I've seen people just dive right in and make a whole bunch of bedding areas in it. Sure thats great for a few years but then just like that everything is maturing at the same rate. As hard as it is, you're so much better off selectively cutting different areas every year as you will create a good succesion of growth in your forest and give deer a wide variety of habitat. Rarely do deer choose one habitat to live in, they love edges, transitions, etc. By selectively cutting different areas every year, you create this for them, rather than having a forest of old growth and new and thats it.

Jeff, I'm not sure how big of a tract you are hunting. but if I remember correctly from last year,IMO your main goal needs to be herd management right now. You can have all the prime bedding area in the whole county, but the facts are with an overpopulation of DOES you will rarely see the big bucks that you want.Especially with too many does and a large sanctuary that you don't hunt, the bucks will have no reason to be on the move. Not to say that bedding areas aren't important because they are vital in a well managed operation.Again I guess it depends on how much land you are attempting to manage. But to answer your original question on why land stewards rarely speak about how to increase the numbers in the deer herd, in my experience (in the south), not too many people have the need to carry more deer, or hold more deer on their property. The numbers are usually either at full carrying capacity or above. most owners goal is to improve the quality of what they have.

Without reading the entire thread, I'll give this tidbit of personal experience from a Texas ranch.

A buddy of mine had a great ranch in West Texas. It was only about 500 acres and a small creek flowed a 1/4 mile off his property. This area because it was the only location around that had any ttype of cover than mesquite thickets was the primary bedding area. We had to catch the deer coming through his mesquite thickets to eat in the crop fields on his property, this was very difficult.

So, long story short... we "created" a bedding area. With the use of a bull dozer and chain saws, we cut a mesquite about 3/4 the way through and push it over.We did this in an area that was around the only other water source than the creek, if you can imagine a C shape around a pond, this is what it looked like. It was only about 75 yards deep and the total length of the C, was about 200 yards. This area grew up extremely thick in a couple of years and now beds a lot of deer. There are still deer that bed at the creek, but this is a property that never "held" deer and it does now.

Granted, this didn't increase the population, but it did increase the number of deer that stayed on the property.

Here's a picture of my land.
58 acres with the white line showing the boundaries.
The red rectangle is bedding area. NO ONE GOES IN THERE!It consists of cut tree tops, blue stem grass and small cedar trees. It's 6-8 acres.
The green squares are my stand locations.
The food plots are labled: alfalfa to the northeast (my neighbor)
beans to the southwest (my other neighbor)
my two food plots of standing corn and buck forage oats
It's a nice setup.