How to Attract Deer to Your Property (Legally and Well)

Deer need four things: food, water, cover and quiet. Most people trying to attract them work hard on the first and ignore the last, which is usually why it does not take.

Start with the law

This is not a formality. Feeding and baiting deer is banned or restricted in a large and growing number of states and counties, mainly to slow chronic wasting disease, which spreads between animals brought nose-to-nose at a feed site.

The rules commonly differ between:

• Scattered feed and bait piles — most restricted
• Mineral licks — often separately regulated
• Planted food plots — usually treated as habitat, not bait
• Hunting season vs the rest of the year

Check your state wildlife agency’s current rules rather than a forum post. They have changed recently in many places.

What actually draws them

Food plots that work

Clover is the default recommendation for good reason: perennial, green across most of the growing season, fixes its own nitrogen, tolerates being grazed hard, and deer prefer it over most alternatives.

Brassicas — turnips, rape, radish — are the late-season complement. Frost converts their starches to sugars, and a brassica plot that deer ignored in September becomes the best thing on the property in December.

Longer-term, plant the things that need no annual work: oaks for acorns, apple and crabapple, plum, dogwood, sumac, raspberry and greenbrier. Mast and browse from established trees and shrubs carry a property through the years a plot fails.

Do deer like carrots?

They do — roots and tops both. That is not the same as carrots being a good idea.

• Expensive per pound of feed delivered
• They spoil, and a rotting pile draws rodents
• They concentrate deer at one spot, nose to nose, which is exactly the transmission route CWD uses
• They usually count as bait under state rules
• Sudden rich food in winter can cause digestive problems in animals whose gut flora has adapted to woody browse

A clover plot delivers more nutrition, across more of the year, for less money, spread over enough ground that animals are not crowded together.

Water, cover and quiet

Water. A small pond, a dammed seep, or a sunken stock tank with a sloping exit. Site it near cover — deer will not use water where they feel exposed, no matter how thirsty.

Cover. Let a corner go to dense brush. Leave downed treetops where they fall as instant bedding cover. Resist mowing everything to lawn: the edge where thick cover meets open feeding ground is where deer spend most of their time.

Quiet. The one that gets ignored. Keep dogs out. Stay out of bedding areas entirely. Site trail cameras and any viewing spot so that you approach with the wind in your face, and check cameras sparingly. Deer will give up good food for peace and quiet without much hesitation.

Minerals. A salt block draws deer reliably in spring and summer, when they are short of sodium — though it is regulated as baiting in a number of states, so check before putting one out.

If you do set up a feeder, raccoons are the animal that will empty it — see raccoon proof deer feeders for the designs that actually exclude them.

Before you do this near a house

Attracting deer to a far corner of acreage is a different proposition from attracting them to the back garden. Close to a house they bring:

• Ticks, and the diseases they carry
• Vehicle collisions on the road at the end of the drive
• Browsing damage to ornamental planting, hostas and young trees
• Disease concentration wherever feeding is concentrated

If the goal is watching them, put the plot and the water out at the boundary and watch from the house — which is better viewing anyway.