No matter what deer habitat improvement project you decide you want to try, sometimes the scope of the work can frighten you if it encompasses an entire hunting property, even a relatively small one. I’ve found a way to tame this monster.
A couple years ago, I got serious about tracking prescribed fire on my family’s Georgia hunting land so that I could better manage the timing, frequency and location of fire for maximum wildlife benefit. I started by dividing our burnable woods into “burn units” on a map. Not only did these units make it much easier to tackle and manage my fire project, I’m now using those units for managing all deer habitat improvement projects. I recommend you carve your hunting land into burn units, too – even if you never plan to burn.
Benefits of Habitat Units
My map of named burn units, combined with a spreadsheet, helps me track the date of all burns and the results. This helps me plan future burns, so I can easily determine which units need to be burned in the coming year, and when I want to burn them. But that map of “burn units” is far more useful than just prescribed fire. You might even think of them as “habitat units” that I happen to use for planning prescribed fire. Consider these other uses that I’ve discovered or plan to take advantage of.
Forest Stand Improvement Units
Just as with invasive species control, Forest Stand Improvement can be a daunting chore if you tackle an entire hunting property. Instead, tackle one burn unit at a time. There’s a natural synergy, anyway. Prescribed fire cannot achieve much without sunlight reaching the ground to drive forage and cover production following the disturbance. FSI brings down the sunlight. Schedule your shadiest units for FSI treatment as early as possible, followed soon by prescribed fire.
War Strategy for Invasive Plants
One of the main reasons I think most people don’t bother fighting invasive, non-native plants is they survey the problem and are immediately overwhelmed by the scope of the task. Burn units can help by dividing the problem into easily conquered portions. Don’t set out to eradicate a particular species on your entire hunting property this year – set out to clear a single burn unit. Move on to the next unit as you have time. Eventually, you’ll see a big difference, not only in control of the non-native species but in the response of native plants that reclaim the space.
In fact, fire can assist. Though some of the toughest invasive plants aren’t controlled by fire, it can knock them back and force them to re-sprout. It’s much easier to walk through a recently burned unit with a backpack sprayer and spot-spray the small, new growth. This exact approach is helping us control Japanese climbing fern.
Firebreaks as Food Plots
Except where burn units border woods roads or streams, firebreaks should be the boundaries. Maintaining clean firebreaks is important, and one way to do that is to plant them in food plots. In many cases, firebreaks will be disked strips, so it’s not difficult to add fertilizer and lime as needed and convert them to forage production. Perennial clovers are fairly shade tolerant and often work well in firebreaks. If these green firebreaks accumulate leaves or pine straw that could carry a fire, you can walk the break with a backpack leaf blower to clear it before you burn.
Firebreaks as Shooting Lanes
Even if you don’t plant firebreaks, they can make great shooting lanes for bow stands, rifle stands and ground blinds. I’ve found that deer often use firebreaks as the path of least resistance through older cover. Below is a photo I took in 2024 while I was in a deer stand, looking down on two does feeding in a planted firebreak. Moments after I took this photo, a mature buck emerged at the far end of the lane and began chasing the does – until I stopped him.
Firebreaks as Hunting Access Routes
Those firebreaks are useful for vehicle access and foot traffic as you haul equipment to work in your habitat units. During hunting season, they make great walking routes for deer stands or other areas you couldn’t reach easily before you installed the firebreak. When you need to haul a deer out, firebreaks can help.
Deer Observations and Pressure
Burn units can even provide a system for capturing deer observation data. If you’re recording deer sightings and hours hunted, you can review your season and determine which units produced the most bucks-per-hour. This can also reveal which units you hunted the most and least, which equals pressure. Next season, focus on the units that got the lightest or no hunting pressure.
Shed-Hunting Map
My favorite kind of shed-hunting is right after a prescribed fire. Visibility is good, the walking is easy, and shed antlers (as well as bones) shine out against the blackened ground. The burn unit boundaries make it easy to thoroughly grid-search an area without straying or losing track of ground already covered. Even in years when a particular unit is not scheduled for fire, your unit map makes a good checklist of all areas searched.
How Big Should Burn Units Be?
There’s no ideal unit size, because it depends on a lot of factors. But in general, more, smaller units is better than fewer, big units. You want to create a patchwork of cover types with lots of transitional edges. You want short distances between young forage in recently burned units and thicker cover in more aged units. At Grace Acres, we currently have a total burnable area of 90 acres. Our units range from 1 to 10 acres, with most around 5 acres.
If you manage small acreage by yourself and don’t have a lot of help for habitat work, smaller units is the way to go. It’s easier to manage burning a small unit, you can easily finish it in a few hours, and it produces less smoke. And the more firebreaks you have on the landscape, the more likely you can stop an escaped fire before it gets too far.
Larger properties with more burnable acres and more help to manage fire could have units as large as 20 to 30 acres. Professional wildland firefighters might think of this as “small,” but remember we are working for wildlife. The larger your burn units, the more you lose the “patchwork” benefits for wildlife. Smaller units also help break up the labor involved in habitat projects. In the end, units can always be merged if you start too small, or they can be split up if they prove to be too big.
Dr. Mike Chamberlain of the University of Georgia has studied wild turkey response to prescribed fires of different sizes. “Smaller is better,” said Mike in an Instagram post on his @wildturkeydoc account. “Turkey use of burned stands decreases as you move from a few dozen to a few hundred acres.”
How to Draw the Boundaries
The size and shape of most of your units will ultimately be determined by landscape features that can serve as firebreaks. Make the most of natural firebreaks like streams, ponds and roads. Fields and food plots work well, too, because it’s easy to disk a fresh firebreak along their edges. In thinned pine timber, you can easily create new breaks in the thinned rows with a little tractor work.
Larger wooded blocks will need to be subdivided by creating new firebreaks through the woods. I strongly suggest you contact your state forestry agency for help here. Most states offer firebreak plowing at affordable rates, and these folks will be very skilled in choosing the best locations for new breaks. Summer and fall are a good time to schedule this work before forestry agencies get busy with peak fire season in winter and spring. Call early! Once these new breaks are established, you can maintain them on your own with a tractor and disk harrows.
Of course, you can install firebreaks by hand, especially in more rugged or rocky areas. You can create firebreaks using rakes, hoes, chainsaws and leafblowers. But remember these breaks will have to be maintained the same way they were created – manually. As much as you can, establish firebreaks that can be maintained with a tractor or UTV.
Like any other disked dirt, firebreaks don’t remain as clean dirt for long. Natural vegetation responds quickly. Annual maintenance with mowing, spraying or disking will ensure your breaks are easy to prepare when it’s time to burn again or use them for access.
Identifying New Ground
My initial burn-unit map created a few years ago included only the most obvious units on higher ground where we could apply prescribed fire most easily. But I feel an ongoing hunger to expand the map.
A lot of our hunting land is in floodplain swamp or other heavy thickets that haven’t seen fire in too long. I’ve had my eye on pockets of those thickets that could be captured into an adjacent burn unit with a little chainsaw work and firebreak establishment. I’ve also studied islands of high ground out in the swamp where FSI and fire could make huge improvements.
And this is another benefit of a burn-unit map: It helps you recognize neglected corners and holes that, with a little effort and planning, could be brought into active improvement. So, not only have I defeated the deer-habitat monster, I’m ready for a bigger fight!
