The most agricultural deer country in Michigan. Corn, soybeans, and sugar beets run to the horizon and the woods come in small pieces: fencerows, ditch banks, a five acre swamp behind a barn, a strip of poplar along a drain. Deer here are cover limited rather than food limited, which is exactly why the corn harvest matters more in this region than anywhere else in the state.
Bay, Saginaw, Tuscola, Huron, Sanilac, Midland and surrounding country. Observations from MBS International Airport (station KMBS).
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Through summer and early fall a section of standing corn is functionally a woodlot. It holds deer all day, it lets them move without crossing open ground, and it makes the small permanent cover look empty. When those fields come down over a few weeks in October, the security cover in a township can drop by most of its total volume, and deer relocate into whatever is left. That relocation is the whole game here. Hunters who know which fields are still standing, and which came down last week, are hunting a different property than the one on the plat map.
Agricultural weight: high. The corn harvest is a primary driver of deer movement in this region.
In heavy ag country the travel network is linear. Drains, fencerows, and ditch banks connect the isolated woodlots, and they carry most of the daylight movement once the corn is off.
The first cut fields in a neighborhood pull deer to waste grain while the surrounding corn still gives them cover to approach in. That overlap is short and it is the best of it.
Small woodlots do not forgive a bad entry. One wrong approach can push the resident deer to the next block for a week.
Michigan deer country changes a great deal over a few hours of driving. If you hunt more than one part of the state, the plan that works here may be the wrong one an hour away.
Rich ground, long growing season, and the best nutrition in the state. Southwest Michigan grows heavy corn and soybean country broken by hardwood lots...
The transition. South and east of here the country is farm ground, north and west it turns to state land, swamp, and second growth. Central Michigan g...
Big woods, national forest, orchards, and openings. There is far less row crop up here than in the southern and eastern parts of the state, so the cor...