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Tiger Ridge Experiment - All Good Things Must Come to an End |
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“All Good Things Must Come to An End”. This old cliché couldn’t be more true as the curtain falls on Deer & Deer Hunting’s Tiger Ridge Project this fall. Many of you have followed the 5-year journey thru these pages, watched Tiger Ridge develop on DDH TV and followed the updates on our web site. Tiger Ridge has been my “hunting life” for the last 5 years. TR is like a child I have raised and am now ready to send off to college. TR has grown and matured from 200 acres of poor deer habitat into over 2,000 acres of the best this country has to offer!
How did it happen? How can someone who has had the luxury to hunt all over the U. S. say this is some of the best?
Five years ago DDH wanted to find a piece of property we would hopefully take from poor to great to show our readers “it can be done”. We purposely chose a piece relatively small (200 acres) to illustrate you don’t have to own thousands of acres to make deer / land management work. The property we chose was owned by a lumber company and consisted of open hard-woods and a dense swamp with very little food. Add to this the fact that it, and 1,000’s of surrounding acres had been open to public hunting for decades and, well, we had something pretty poor to start with….an overly mature forest with little to no food and a low deer population.
Lead by example! Our goal was to make our 200 acres the best whitetail habitat in the area and our hope was to convince the surrounding land owners to follow-suit. We knew it would be a tough battle and that we would have to prove what we were doing was going to work. Maybe the toughest thing we agreed to do was not hunt the property for the first year, let it develop into a safe haven as we focused all of our efforts on improving the landscape vs. harvesting any deer.
Select cuts, clear cuts, food plots, sanctuaries. We accomplished all of these in year one of the project and never hunted the property. We created food, water, safety and added one year to the age structure. Would it work? I am a huge fan of food plots and with the help of Whitetail Institute we planted 5 separate plots each over 2 acres in size along with several smaller “kill plots” and honestly we never dreamed what would happen next was possible. Each plot was armed with a CuddeBack in the summer and lets just say the photos blew us away. We didn’t have lots of deer, but the age structure and genetics of the bucks was phenomenal. The first trail camera photo we captured was a 160” (harvested that fall by a neighbor) 8 point and the first buck we harvested at TR in year two was a 156” 9 pt with a 20” inside spread.
Word spread fast, and we weren’t trying to keep any of this secret…we wanted the deer hunting world to know it can work! This may have lead to the single most dramatic change / benefit at Tiger Ridge. Greg Duerr an Appleton area business man who owned 1,000 plus acres to the north of TigerRidge purchased the 200 acres we were leasing and approximately another 1,100 acres that bordered TigerRidge and made all of the land available for lease under management guidelines. Tiger Ridge just grew from 200 acres to over 2,000 acres! We had demonstrated our plan would work, and convinced this business man that what we were doing was working….now we had to convince those that leased around us.
Duerr organized several “meet and greets” of the surrounding lease holders and additional land owners from the area where we told our story and stressed the benefits of a quality management program.
Neighbor participation in a management plan is important, but not essential, and no matter where you own land there will always be a piece of property where your management guidelines stop…accept that and continue to work hard and try to demonstrate what you are doing really works. Deer management is not, and never will be a “one size fits all” plan. The more people you can get involved the better, but don’t ever expect everyone to play by your rules…WONT happen, and that is OK!
Tiger Ridge certainly benefited when it grew to over 2,000 acres. There was a tremendous amount of quality food plot work done on the property. TR is now home to more then 20 quality food plots. Most of the neighbors set up sanctuaries, and the management guidelines which DDH helped write for the entire area allow for young and first time hunters to enjoy success while providing more experienced hunters the chance at the deer of a lifetime.
Tiger Ridge grew into a place where whitetail deer never feel the need to leave. We have benefited from this and harvested several quality bucks on our 200 acres, and missed some good ones too! The quality of deer harvested on the 2,000 acre piece, and those taken by close neighbors has been nothing short of unbelievable (go to www.hunttigerridge.com and click on photos).
We’ve worked very hard trying to demonstrate “it can be done” even when you start with next to nothing. It is time for us to move on and we’re going to do it again. We are in the process of looking for another piece of property that we can develop (if interested in working with DDH please contact us at 715-570-4844 ). We truly believe TR has turned into some of the best big-woods whitetail hunting you will find anywhere and while the fall of 2009 will be our last at TR it could be your first. Nearly 1,300 acres of TR is currently for sale. It can be purchased in pieces as small as 80 acres and up to the entire 1,300. Details of the sale are also listed at www.hunttigerridge.com web site.
One more cliché, “One man’s loss is another man’s gain”. If you can, go hunt Tiger Ridge!
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