Steve Pollick: Baiting issue for deer a hot topic right now in Ohio – Outdoor News
That “baiting thing” in Ohio deer hunting has resurfaced as hot-stove league fare this post-season, and it prompts sharing some perspectives from the past 70-odd years of my association with the noble and ancient pursuit.
It begins when I was a kid, listening to The Old Man’s colorful stories of hunting in the Yoop – Michigan’s fabled, remote and rugged Upper Peninsula, accessible back then from “Down Below” only by car ferry across the storm-tossed Straits of Mackinac. Dad hunted up there in the wild and woolly late ’30s, carrying his spanking new Model 70 Winchester .30/06 with an early Weaver 4X scope. I still have his red-and-black plaid wool hunting coat and cap. Alas, not the fabled rifle.
He was a hard hunter, savvy rifleman, a good shot, and the Model 70 was ahead of its time, unheard of when most Yoopers carried lever-action Model 94 .30/30s or .32 Specials with open sights. Dad was the envy of deer camps with that big rifle, especially after making some long kills on clear-cuts.
The U.P. was cut-over brush country back then, filled with browse and brushy cover as the land slowly recovered from the timbering butchery of greedy turn-of-century lumber barons. They leveled and plundered the virgin white pine forests to the last clear-cut stump. By accident, that recovering land gradually became ideal deer habitat.
(Aside: I always have wondered why that mindless lumbering era was so nostalgically celebrated when its impact on the land was so ugly and devastating. Good-bye forever, the grayling).
Since the early and mid-1900s, the forests have grown tall, so prime deer habitat has diminished. The once-isolated Upper now has easily been accessible for decades by interstate highways and the Straits easily crossed on Big Mac, the famous bridge.
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Legions of boom-era auto workers and others from the southern Lower Peninsula began buying up vacation-home plots. Seemingly everyone wanted his own “forty” – 40 acres. My late Uncle Al, who ran a motel in Munising and sold real estate, used to say that half the U.P. was for sale at any given time. No-hunting signs blossomed like spring wildflowers as each new forty-owner strived to keep deer for himself.
Along the way it was found that maintaining piles of sugar beets, carrots, apples, and to a lesser degree, corn, was a good way to “bait in” and hold deer on your forty. About every gas station sold bait.
The “deerfare” handout system worked, to the point that baiting deer and sitting over feed piles with a rifle came to define deer hunting in Michigan’s U.P. The old way of hunting deer on your hind legs, matching your wits and stamina against the quarry, all but faded away. Still-hunting – moving slowly as molasses in January, fully alert, through prime cover on vast gamelands – likewise slipped into the dark of the woods-work.
The foregoing is a mite simplified for space’s sake, but you get the idea. I outline it here to illustrate the way Ohio fast has become “Michiganized” in deer hunting.
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Bags of corn fly off pallets in Tractor Supply and Rural King like they are on fire. Ohio, so lacking in public lands as it is (ranked 41st among 50 states), is no stranger to chopped-up land-parcels. And all but gone are the days of knocking on Farmer John’s back door seeking polite permission to hunt.
My son, in canvassing the area around the family’s 50-odd-acre hunting grounds in southern Ohio, was told by rural neighbors that “everyone around here feeds deer corn.” The trail cams prove it. Not to mention that agriculture is the state’s No. 1 industry, and leftover grains in cropped corn and soybean fields are one big de-facto feed plot. No wonder Ohio whitetails are so drawn to yellow kernels.
Now, too, it’s mostly all about leasing to hunt private land. Big money talks; average and less well-heeled guys walk – on the relatively small acreages of public land available here. And those public lands that we can hunt have re-grown from grasslands, brushlands, and young forest into semi-mature or larger forest. In other words, poorer deer habitat.
Sure, there are thousands of acres of Wayne National Forest and some state forests in southern Ohio open to deer hunting. But while these “open” woods with little cover are lovely to walk through, try finding deer there. The Wayne’s parcels, moreover, are often poorly marked and are interspersed with off-limits private land like a checkerboard or crazy-quilt.
So, hunting opportunity, yes; chances for success, pretty low.
Along with the foregoing land and real estate changes has come the blossoming of archery hunting. It is a gadget-crazed industry nowadays, a long departure from the Fred Bear recurve days of simple barebows and turkey-feather fletching. Bowhunting, moreover, admittedly the art of the ambush, also is primarily sedentary. It dovetails perfectly with baiting.
More deer are killed now in Ohio by bowmen, especially crossbow shooters, than with firearms.
The “big season” now is bowhunting the November rut, when deer are active all day and more careless.
So, no wonder the rise of baiting here. The growing popularity of planting deer-attractive food plots on those private holdings is just baiting by another means.
Too, urban sprawl over the last 60 to 70 years has eaten up former potential game land as suburbanites have spilled out into more distant bedroom communities. Oddly, deer have grown increasingly attracted to these ’burblands, where they are less harassed and conveniently find plenty of nooks and crannies to lie up in, and gardens and landscaping to browse. Not to mention ’burbland parks and nature preserves (no hunting, thank you) to hole-up in.
These factors all add up.
They do not encourage more deer hunters to head afield. On the contrary, they are discouraging – even without diving into the graying and fading of the older hunting generations and poor recruitment of the young, social-media-distracted “indoors” generations. Baiting lurks in these shadows.
You do not need to bait to kill deer. In neighboring Pennsylvania, for instance, where the game commission has staunchly resisted allowing hunting over bait for deer, the all-seasons kill for 2023-24 was more than 430,000. That is about double Ohio’s best deer seasons, where a 200,000-plus season is noteworthy.
In bait-crazy Michigan, the all-seasons ’24-25 kill as of Jan. 10 was posted as 292,000-plus and it has at times over the last 60 years exceeded 400,000. Of course, both neighbor-states have a lot more public hunting land as well. All this matters.
In any case, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan today have oodles of deer – just maybe not enough in the right places to satisfy many hunters. So, baiting does not seem detrimental to deer populations, though it decidedly may be a big problem when it comes to deer distribution. Your hunting grounds may have a dearth of deer if your neighbor lays out more and better feed piles.
Me? I have hunted deer successfully over bait, including sometimes using a recurve bow and those turkey fletchings. It’s ok. And for handicapped hunters, well, no contest. Baiting surely produces deer, if not a deeply satisfying hunting experience. It may be a question of whether results are all that matter. That seems to be the modern obsession.
I long have hunted big country on foot, covering many miles a day and slowing to a crawl to still-hunt when finding good cover. In the end, that is where and when and how my hunter’s heart shines, whether I trudged to camp at night with blood on my knife or not.
