 A
BUCK PICKS HIS CORE AREA
Discovering the Core Areas of Southwestern Deer
Editor’s Note: If you can find the core of a
buck's home range, you'll enjoy much-better odds of
taking him, since he'll spend most of his time in daylight
hours there. But what does the core of a buck's home
range look like, what ingredients must that core area
have to hold a buck and how can you find or create a
core area to take more big bucks each season? To learn
the answers to these questions and others, we've interviewed
some of the nation's leading biologists and deer hunters.
Forrest Armke, the manager at the Ford Ranch near Melvin,
Texas, where hunters bag 100-trophy bucks a year, explains,
"In our part of the  country,
trophy bucks will have a core area that contains a river
or a creek bottom that produces some type of forbs they
like to eat. They'll bed in a higher elevation region
with dense brush to be able to smell danger coming from
a greater distance than they can in low-lying places.
They'll also browse in these high points where they
can hear a hunter approaching and have plenty of escape
cover they can run through without anyone's seeing them
because of the very-thick brush. Also in a core area
in the Southwest, a big buck generally will have three
places where he can go to water. He'll alternate between
these three watering holes and never consistently go
to any of the three. He'll water closest to where he's
feeding on any given day -- often only at night during
extremely-dry periods. Young bucks tend to set up their
core area close to water, but older bucks will have
their core area away from the water -- perhaps 1-1/2
miles away.
 "Because
we have almost a one-to-one, buck-to-doe ratio on our
property, when the rut arrives, generally most of the
bucks will have one core area during the rut so they
don't have to compete so often for does and a different
core area throughout the rest of the year. After photographing
some of the biggest bucks on our property, we've noticed
that their core area during the breeding season may
be 3- to 4-miles away from the core area they use for
the rest of the year. When the rut ends, then those
big bucks will move back to their other core area. Maybe
they move their core area because they start trailing
a doe out of their core region and continue to pick
up does as they move further away from that core area.
Then the bucks tend to stay in the area where they're
doing the most breeding. Perhaps because they're so
big they can move the smaller bucks out of the new place
 and
return to their own home after the breeding season.
I believe that a large number of big Southwestern bucks
have two core areas like I've described, but I also
know that there are other bucks that have only one core
area and will stay there all season. I've made these
assumptions based on aerial surveys that we fly every
year over our entire 30,000-acre ranch."
TOMORROW: FINDING THE MIDWESTERN
CORE AND USING A TACTIC THAT ALWAYS WORKS
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