Burning for deer: Prescribed fire can help your herd

Aug 27, 2024

White-tailed deer are the most widespread big game species in North America.

Abundant populations can be found in secluded, rural woods as well as in urban areas browsing on landscaping and ruminating in the shade on golf courses.

They are the posterchild of what biologists refer to as “generalist species,” which means they can survive in a wide range of vegetation types and landscapes.

This adaptability is part of what led many landowners to think that deer are a species that do not benefit from intensive manipulation of habitat, unlike our beloved bobwhite quail which in much of their range requires an incredible amount of active management.

In addition to being widespread, white-tailed deer are also the most pursued big game species with millions of hunters taking to the woods each fall in hopes of harvesting a big buck. If you talk to almost any self-proclaimed serious “deer manager” the conversation usually begins with them detailing what they planted in their food plots or what kind of protein feed they use.

In fact, there is a multi-billion-dollar industry centered around the pursuit and management of white-tailed deer. There are hundreds of products on the market claiming that if used, it will make all your bucks grow giant antlers.

While deer certainly consume many planted crops and supplemental feed, research has shown that in most of the white-tailed deer range, including in the Southeastern U.S., 70+% of a deer’s diet will come from native plants, even when crops are present on the landscape.

Understanding that the majority of a deer’s diet comes from native plants, and that many of these native plants are found in early successional plant communities, this should tell us that managing for those types of communities should be a priority if your objective to is to produce the largest, healthiest deer possible.

Despite this being the case, many landowners with a deer management emphasis often neglect managing their native vegetation and instead elect to dedicate most of their time and resources to growing food plots and buying supplemental protein pellets.

While food plots and supplemental protein feed can be effective tools for harvesting deer, increasing carrying capacity, and mitigating natural nutritional stress periods, they aren’t always necessary and certainly should not be the foundation of your deer management program.   Those should be only implemented once the native vegetation limitations have been addressed.

Early successional plant communities are shade intolerant plants typically dominated by herbaceous species (grasses and forbs) with some component of woody species. In the southeastern U.S., maintaining these types of communities requires frequent disturbance which could come in the form of timber harvests, chemical treatments, mechanical treatments, and for much of the white-tailed deer range, especially the South, this means prescribed fire.

In this article, we will discuss strategies using prescribed fire to manage deer habitat, specifically upland vegetation communities in the Coastal Plain of the Southeastern U.S., but the techniques may also be applicable in other parts of the country.

We will discuss things to consider when using prescribed fire for deer management such as fire frequency, scale, burn unit arrangement, and timing/seasonality. For the sake of this article, let’s assume forest stands have a low enough canopy coverage that allow an understory response that prescribed fire can be effective. It varies, but canopy coverage needs to be less than 75% to see any response and less than 60% to see noticeable changes from fire management practices.

As you read this article, you may be thinking to yourself that good deer habitat management doesn’t sound drastically different than good quail habitat management in regards to management of upland plant communities. Most well managed quail properties have good deer habitat, and with a few slight tweaks in the management strategy, could have elite deer habitat.

Fire Frequency

The foundation of making management decisions for any species is ensuring that all of their basic biological needs are met; i.e., food, water, cover, and space. Deer are no different.

In fire adapted systems, the primary driver of species composition is fire frequency.

Fire frequency, also known as burn interval, is the average time between burns or number of burns over a given time period. Managers can use burn interval to manipulate plant communities to achieve a desired objective. More frequent burn intervals promote more herbaceous plant communities. Longer burn intervals tends to promote more woody species. Additionally, frequent fire can keep the parasite burden, including ticks and horn fly, lower for ungulates, including white-tailed deer.

To have an optimal diet, deer need access to a diversity of high-quality food sources that include forbs, or broadleaf herbaceous plants, browse which includes the young tender new growth of woody plants and vines, and hard and soft mast such as acorns and blackberries.

Deer will also use some grass, sedges, and even fungi at certain times of the year.

The highest quality most nutritious plants are found in early successional communities that we can often promote and maintain with fire.

In these plant communities we are striving to promote predominately forbs, as well as woody browse and some mast producing species.

Grass is an important part of early successional plant communities for providing cover and fuel to carry fire, although it is less important in pine stands that provides needle cast that can help carry fire.

Most grasses are not heavily used by deer for food, therefore, strive to keep grass composition less than 30%. Forbs are the highest quality of all plant categories are an important food source for deer in spring and summer. Some of the native forbs such Desmodium spp. (Beggars’s lice), Ragweed, and Pokeweed meet or exceed the protein content of soybeans.

Woody browse from shrubs and young hardwood saplings is the most used category of plants in a deer’s diet and is used heavily 12 months a year but can be especially important in the late winter months when other food sources are limited.

With average rainfall exceeding 50 inches a year in most of the Southeast and a long growing season, frequent fire is required to maintain these plant communities in a state accessible to deer within their reach at ground level, as well as, comprised of species nutritious enough to meet their biological requirements.

To maintain early successional plant communities, for most of the Southeast, this means using a fire frequency of 2 to 3 years. Extending your burn interval beyond 3 years on most sites will likely cause decrease in forb composition and reduction of forage quality and quantity.

In general, in the Southeast, a 2-year fire return interval will likely optimize the amount of available high-quality forage while maintaining a diverse species composition of both herbaceous plants and young woody vegetation.

Although deer can thrive in the early successional plant communities with vegetation that is 2 to 6 feet tall like what is maintained on most quail properties in the Red Hills, maintaining some patches of denser cover can provide benefit.

Deer managers often refer to this as “bedding cover,” “holding cover,” or “concealment cover.”

A common example of this type of cover is a young pine plantation with optimum cover occurring when pine plantings are between 3 to 8 years old. As pines mature, the quality of the cover quickly diminishes due to the shading out of understory vegetation that occurs until the first thinning.

Another way bedding cover can be created, and perhaps more sustainably, is by extending your burn interval to 3-5 years on some portions of the property. This will allow the groundcover to advance to a community dominated by woody plants and vines.

Ideally, managers should strive to maintain variability in the structure of the cover throughout these bedding blocks. Envision clumps of brambles, sumac patches, small thickets of hardwood saplings and pine regeneration with scattered openings of native grasses and forbs.

This type of cover has many benefits for deer.

It can provide thermal refuge during hot summers. It’s excellent fawning cover. These patches can also improve the huntability of your property.

Deer will often select this type of cover to bed in making their location more predictable, allowing hunters the ability to use the wind to their advantage to access hunting locations undetected. By encouraging deer to bed in certain locations, it makes their movement from cover to food more predictable which helps hunters be more successful.

Some things to consider when extending the fire frequency is the herbaceous plant component will diminish the food value of this community. Also, extending your burn window beyond 3 to 4 years, especially in highly productive soils, it’s likely that vegetation may become too large to be top-killed by fire and over time the canopy closes and the ground cover declines.

Because of the reduction of grasses and more flammable fuels, it may be difficult to carry fire altogether.

In this scenario mechanical and/or chemical treatments may be the only way to reset these stands which can be expensive and impractical to do on a regular basis.

If saplings are allowed to advance into the midstory, the quality of cover value can also quickly diminish leaving virtually no cover at ground level which may leave fawns vulnerable. It is also detrimental for ground nesting birds like quail and turkeys.

To understand what this would look like, envision a pine canopy with a pine and hardwood midstory. This tends to happen around 6-8 years post fire. Unfortunately, forest stands in this stage is what many hunters are accustomed to and may attribute to the misconception that it’s quality habitat because they think it’s “good thick deer woods”.

In reality, it may provide some cover value but overall is very low-quality habitat. Managing units intended for bedding cover with a 3-4 year burn interval may be the most sustainable strategy to maintain these units with limited need for mechanical treatments, but there is a trade-off if too much of a property is managed in this way such as a decrease in deer forage quality, as well as, quail and turkey habitat

The fire frequencies mentioned are general recommendations for the Red Hills and Southeastern Coastal Plain.

It’s up to the manager to determine the proper fire return interval for their property to achieve their desired objectives which may differ depending location, soil productivity, and competing objectives.

Managers should evaluate their property and the surrounding landscape to determine the primary limiting factor of their area, whether it be availability of high-quality food or quality cover, when making management decisions on what proportion of the property should be dedicated to a specific objective.

Oftentimes both categories could be enhanced. As previously mentioned, across much of the Southeastern U.S. which is predominately forested and often unmanaged, the primary limiting factor for many properties is the availability of high-quality food.

The Southeast is also susceptible to having exceptionally high deer densities which put even more strain on food resources.

If this is the case for your property, managing most of the property for high quality food maintained by proper timber thinning and a more frequent fire interval may be best. Then strategically placing patches, or “islands” of denser cover dedicated for bedding adjacent to other food sources like food plots is an excellent strategy when setting up your deer property.

Burn Unit Scale and Arrangement

You have likely heard biologists say that wildlife need diversity. Well, deer are no different.

Managers should strive to create a mosaic of cover types with their burn units.

Maintaining a diversity of vegetation types in smaller patch sizes of 10 to 50 acres adjacent to each other will help meet all of the deer’s biological needs and increase the likelihood they spend most of their time on your property.

If burning at this small of a scale is not feasible, arrange larger burn units as irregular shapes or more linear shaped as opposed to square.

This will create more edge and better interspersion of cover types. Having burned patches adjacent to unburned patches with varying fire return intervals in a checkerboard pattern across the property is ideal; similar to how we manage for quail (you may be seeing a pattern here).

Recently burned patches provide a flush of high-quality food that deer can use. The unburned patches provide nearby escape cover. Maintain denser bedding cover blocks in patches 10 to 20 acres.

Patches this size will allow multiple groups of deer to use them, but they will be small enough that they will remain somewhat predictable locations for deer to bed, improving huntability.

Maintaining larger patches of the same cover type requires deer to travel further for resources. It also makes deer movement less predictable and hunting more challenging.

Strategically place these bedding cover blocks adjacent to or in close proximity to food sources such as food plots. This will help ensure deer that are traveling from a bedding area to a food plot are able to make it there before dark.

If you have a large property with the opportunity to have multiple bedding blocks, arrange bedding cover blocks in multiple directions relative to food plots to have the ability to access and hunt on various wind directions.

Burn Timing

In the Southeast, burning between February and April during the dormant season or early growing season can obviously provide major benefit to deer.

It stimulates the seed bank to provide a pulse of high-quality nutrition when spring green up occurs to help their bodies quickly recover from the stressful winter months. During this time, does are in early gestation, bucks are trying to restore their body after the rut and beginning antler growth.

Spring is a great time to be a deer.

As spring progresses into summer and summer into early fall, this can be exceptionally stressful for deer in the South. Does are lactating, fawns are growing, bucks are growing antlers and there is high nutritional demand and environmental stress from excessive heat.

As plants mature, they become less digestible, nutrient content declines, and they tend to become less palatable to deer.

By mid-summer, the stands that were burned in early spring have declined significantly in nutritional value.

Managers often use warm season food plots or supplemental protein to help mitigate this natural stress period. While both food plots and protein feed can useful tools, they have their limitations.

Warm season food plots are sometimes unreliable due to summer droughts and depending on the crop and size of the field can be susceptible to over browsing.

Many landowners do not own enough acreage or are limited for one reason or another in the amount of food plot acres they can grow and often do not provide enough forage to measurably influence the nutritional plain of a deer herd.

The combination of drought and browse pressure can cause plots to fail altogether.

Supplemental protein does not rely on rain; however, it can be expensive but more controllable than a food plot. Like food plots, its often difficult to deliver at a scale that is large enough make it effective.

Conducting growing season burns during mid-summer can provide a major benefit by shifting the timing of when native plants are vegitative providing a pulse of high-quality nutrition at a large scale at a critical time for deer in the South. Native plants are more adapted to the local climate making them more reliable and less susceptible to droughts.

Conducting growing season burns may not be feasible for every property. Hot temperatures, high relatively humidity, summer drought, or fuel types that simply won’t carry a fire may present limitations to conducting growing season burns.

If you are fortunate enough to have the fuel type that can burn and get the right conditions, conducting growing season burns is one of the most beneficial things you can do for your deer herd.

Some common concerns associated with burning during the summer are fawn mortality and disrupting ground nesting birds like quail and turkeys.

Fawns become mobile almost immediately after birth making mortality from prescribed fire unlikely.

Waiting to burn until June, for example, is well after the average incubation period of wild turkey in most of the South.

A June burn would, however, encompass the nesting period of bobwhite quail, but there may be a limited effect on quail depending on the amount of a property that is burned.

The advantage of keeping burn units small is that conducting some growing season burns is unlikely to have a significant impact on your quail population, especially since quail will nest multiple times raising multiple broods throughout the nesting season.

Be aware that burning too late in the growing season allows less time for the vegetation to recover before fall which could cause that space to become unusable for both deer and quail until the following spring if vegetation response is not adequate. Lack of plant response can be magnified if a late summer drought occurs.

For deer managers, there are few downsides to burning during the growing season. Managers should strive to spread out the timing of their burns to help increase plant community diversity to better meet all of the deer herd’s needs.

Conclusion

Implementing a deer management plan that incorporates frequent prescribed fire to produce forage and bedding cover can have wide-ranging benefits to your deer herd. But, factors such as timing and frequency of fire can also impact other objectives such as growing your bobwhite quail population. As with anything in wildlife management, it is up to managers to decide what is important and recognize the trade-offs when focusing on a certain species.

About the Author
Josh Webb
Josh Webb is a Colquitt County, GA native. Josh serves as a wildlife biologist in the Tall Timbers Land Conservancy. He has found his niche as a habitat specialist and extension biologist, helping landowners on a daily basis achieve their land management goals while stewarding over 170,000 acres in conservation easements. In his spare time he enjoys chasing wild turkeys, bowhunting, and cheering for the University of Georgia football team.
  • Recent Articles
    Tall Timbers leading the way on prescribed fire insurance

    Above: Members of the Southwest Georgia Prescribed Burn Association conduct a burn in Grady, County, Georgia Tall Timbers is directing an innovative private market solution to deliver insurance to prescribed burners. Led by the Private Lands Prescribed Fire...

    Grant will help make improvements to unique Burn Planner tool

    A lot of planning goes into a prescribed fire long before the first drip torch is lit. To safely apply this vital ecosystem tool, burn practitioners must first know what detailed parameters are best suited for each burn unit to achieve their goals while also being a...

    Butterfly conservation initiatives flutter in with the New Year

    Brian Lloyd (left) and Dave McElveen (right) posing together during one of their long-term butterfly surveys on Tall Timbers. Photo by Lisa Mills.  The new year is shaping up to be big for butterflies thanks in large part to the dedication and support of the Stoddard...

    Tall Timber researchers study dendrochronology in Africa

    Last November, I had the opportunity to participate in the African Dendrochronological FieldSchool (ADF) in Livingstone, Zambia.  I was invited to go by Tall Timbers post-doc Dr. Nicole Zampieri, who organizes and teaches at the field school, that I work closely with....

    Smoke management and air quality in Quail Country

    Tall Timbers is working with the Georgia Forestry Commission and other partners to implement “Pilot 2.0” a project to help manage smoke and improve air quality while also maintaining the use of prescribed fire in Southwest Georgia.

    Consider conservative harvest numbers for managing bobwhite

    Quail managers spend considerable effort and expense to produce populations of bobwhite. Having large areas of habitat is critical to ensure that bobwhite populations can be sustained over time. However, since most managers are producing bobwhite for hunting, careful consideration of bobwhite harvest is also important, yet sometimes neglected.

    Livingston Place hosts inaugural Tall Timbers Youth Field Trial

    Pictured above: The winners of the inaugural Tall Timbers Youth Field Trial (Photos by Chris Mathan) First Place: Rose, Harper King; Second Place: Buzz, Kira Jenkins Third Place: May, Griffin Long   Livingston Place will host the 130th the Continental Field Trial next...

    Related Articles