OYE said:
What I am referring to is the lack of public ground for the common man to hunt (that's what I'm getting from the other posts).
I'll give you the point that in comparison to some other states, Texas has very little public hunting area where anyone and everyone can just walk out into the woods and shoot some deer. Of course, once people do some research, there actually is plenty of land available to hunt on, you just need a bit of preparation. After all, there is more military land in Texas open for hunting than some states have land total. There's also Corps of Engineers land and many of the state and national forests. There's plenty of places to go hunt in Texas if you don't want to do a game ranch type setup.
Of course, there's always the flip side. We get a lot of out of state hunters that come from states that are all public hunting land setups, and almost universally hear from them how great it is to actually see deer while deer hunting. We often times are told that they see more deer in one day on our ranch than they see all season hunting at home.
So, a little of this, a little of that, pick the style of hunting that is most appealing to you and everyone be safe in the woods.
Back to the inside secrets of how things work.
One of the biggest issues in running the ranch the last couple years has been water. Central Texas has been in a no joke, kick in the guts drought for a while now. Since the ranch started life running cattle, we have a couple of large stock tanks in place, but with the low rainfall amounts, and almost zero runoff, the last couple of years, calling them mud holes would be an insult to any honest living mud hole. During the spring, the deer do fine on their own because they get a lot of the water they need from the plants they eat. Don't be fooled by us feeding tons and tons of protein, the deer have a habit of wandering off and eating tasty growing things all the time. During the mid to late summer and fall is where the deer have problems. You can chew on sun dried plants all you want, there's no moisture in them. If deer don't get water they stop eating. If they stop eating... well, you can figure the rest out. Of course, mid summer is pretty much the most important time for deer growth because of fawns. If fawns get malnourished it will stunt their growth for the rest of their life. Mess up your water and you mess up your end product, big deer.
Now deer will drink out of the scummy mud stock tanks. I think deer could drink Mexican tap water and be just fine. The problem is we don't want all the deer on the ranch coming to the stock tanks. If you train them all to come to one point on the ranch, it makes it kind of pointless to set up stands in other parts of the ranch. So, to keep the deer spread out over the ranch, we have set up 100 gal water troughs near all the major stand locations. They are all out of sight of the stands, usually within about 200 yards and in some shade. The goal isn't to train the deer to stand out in the open and get shot drinking water, but to keep them used to being in the general area. We intentionally put them out of sight of the stands so the deer won't associate drinking and getting shot. These water troughs of course come with their own variety of problems. The first of which is obviously that someone needs to go out and fill them. We have a well head on both the north and south side, and a couple of the troughs have had pipe run out to them and have float valves. These are pretty worry free as they actually fill themselves. Hey, free work is the best work. For the majority though, the 700gal water trailer that does double duty for burn day and welding fire watch gets to go on tour. In the height of summer, these troughs will be empty in three days, guaranteed. When we go to fill a trough there are a couple things to look for. First, is the board still there? Each trough gets a 2x4 in it. This is for squirrels, mice and other small creatures that come to the trough to drink, fall in and otherwise would drown and float dead in the water until you come fish them out. That's no bueno. If you stick a 2x4 in there they have something they can grab on and climb out of. Second, have raccoons been playing in the trough? If the water level gets too low before you come to refill it, raccoons will climb right in and goof around. They bring plenty of mud and nasty with them, so the tank may need to be turned upside down and have the filth washed out. Third, is the mosquito torpedo still in the tank? These are little black fish looking things that you put in to keep mosquito larvae from growing. Unfortunately, the raccoons fish them out and eat them, play with them... who knows what else. We find them on the ground outside the tanks often enough and just toss them back in. If not, put a new one in. The troughs that run off float valves have gold fish living in them to keep the mosquito population down. Well, they were gold fish when we put them in years and years ago. Now I think they are some fish shaped variety of terminator robot. Their troughs have frozen over several times through the years and the fish come through it just fine, only a little larger the next time we see them.
Between the time it takes to fill the trailer, empty it into the troughs on one side and repeat for the other side, watering the deer is usually a half day job.
