First Habitat Project about to begin

chadsbritt

chadsbritt

New member
I just received a seed shipment from Pheasants Forever. I am pumped! We are attempting our first habitat improvement project. We don't have many birds in the area, and are hoping this helps out. Nebraska PF has a great website with an unbelievable seed catalog. It has tons of different mixes. Unfortunately for us, most of the mixes are for areas that actually get a decent amount of rain. Not the 15 inches of annual precip we're used to hear at the base of the rockies. So a biologist from PF put a custom mix together for us that is a combination of grasses, forbs, and legumes. He said it should do well in our area. We'll see.

We also ordered a few bags of PF's western food plot mix. It is formulated for drier climates and is what the biologists recommended. So, we'll see how it goes. Hopefully in a couple of years, we have beautiful nesting habitat. I can only hope the birds follow shortly after.

I am so jealous of you guys in the heart of pheasant and quail country. I would love to be able to complete these projects where I know birds are already sustaining a good population. A project like this would merely be icing on the cake.
 
Congrats on getting the seed. I hope it works out very well for you.---Bob
 
Seed

Chad, you might try proso millet mixed with German millet some time. The proso is very drought tollerant and, if you get more rain, the German will produce more seed.
 
Prairie Drifter said:
Chad, you might try proso millet mixed with German millet some time. The proso is very drought tollerant and, if you get more rain, the German will produce more seed.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice. I really appreciate it. Here's what the western food plot mix consists of:

Black Oil Sunflower 6.00
Hegari Forage Sorghum 5.50
Hybrid Grain Sorghum 5.50
Sudan grass 4.00
White Proso Millet 1.75
Sweet Clover 1.50
Foxtail Millet 0.75

Each bag = 25 lbs

It has a little bit of proso in it. I'll have to see which of these takes off best. Right now for me its a trial and error thing. Sure, I've done research and taken advice from people, but you never know what's going to happen until you try it. Once I start to figure things out, I'll adjust my plan accordingly.
 
Food Plot

The foxtail millet is German millet. Looks like a very good mix. The sunflowers should also be fairly drought tollerant as well as the Hegari. I've used both. I just find that the "special" mixes carry a special price. If you know what to mix together, it's often cheaper to mix your own. If your site is small, you can go together with some fellow hunters or neighbors and cut costs.
 
It does sound like a good mix. This year I went with production seed from the Dekalb dealer.

6 bags total. 3 grain sorghum 28E and 3 forage sorghum fs5. $520 worth. Add in 3 bags of proso millet at $12/bag and we'll see what comes of it.

There's a lot of value in a good food plot coming in strong. The wildlife value over fall and winter months can be tremendous.
 
Chris, if someone has a small ownership adjoining good habitat on the neighbors, you can pull birds off of their habitat during the season if you can provide a better buffet on your side of the fence. If you have deer problems, the millet and Egyptian Wheat tend to not be ravaged as badly as the milo and large headed forage sorghum does. You fellas in the north also have to consider growing season length. It does you no good if you plant the best producing cultivar only to have it frost kill before putting on seed.
 
Prairie Drifter said:
Chris, if someone has a small ownership adjoining good habitat on the neighbors, you can pull birds off of their habitat during the season if you can provide a better buffet on your side of the fence. If you have deer problems, the millet and Egyptian Wheat tend to not be ravaged as badly as the milo and large headed forage sorghum does. You fellas in the north also have to consider growing season length. It does you no good if you plant the best producing cultivar only to have it frost kill before putting on seed.
Click to expand...

PrairieDrifter, so true. One year I think I planted food plots about april 1 before I knoew anything about soil temps. I broadcast and disked in and they actually came up pretty good. Now I just wait until Memoriail weekend when friendlier soil temps wait for sorghum.

We have a problem with deer on renters corn but not milo. We find they like to bed in milo and use them for travel corridors. We planted a new deer plot to see how that works (chicory,clovers, burnett and alfalfa, etc). The egyptian wheat sounds like a good tool to employ.

When I famr for food plots now I farm to attracts and hold birds in fall for hunters whose skills may not be expert and they can have success in these plots. After season closes these plots provide critical cover becuase of food value and stalk strength. When CRP flattens and faisl as roosting cover these plots will also roost birds, especially in worst conditions.

We opted to not disturb nesting cover with burns this year but try to implement smaller scale rotational buring as needed (couple patches per year). This would work well with CRP mid-term mgmt requirements too.
 
Well, I think we picked the right weekend to plant. We had a nice rain last night that turned into 2-3 inches of wet snow. It should melt very quickly and will provide the moisture I was hoping for. In addition, we aren't supposed to get too hot over the course of the next week and have a good chance of additional moisture.

I'll keep everyone posted on the progression of everything.

Chad
 
Sorry its taken so long for me to get back to you. The project is going really well. The food plots didn't really come in, but a lot of the other seed is coming in. This is on top of all of the grass and alfalpha that was already on the property. The existing plants are doing great, but I expect it will take a couple of years for the new seed to really take off. Luckily, we've had much more rain this summer than usual, which has really been a blessing. I'll try to post pics soon.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top