Now is about the time of year I start thinking about my mineral licks. I’ll start refreshing my licks as soon as the ground begins to dry out, and I’ll keep this up until mid-July.

First, I buy a bunch of bags of rock salt and some di-calcium phosphate. I’ve got about 5 salt licks that I refresh every March with a 50 lb of rock salt buried about a foot down. The salt dissolves into the soil and the deer spend all summer chewing on the dirt. About this time of year, I start doctoring the licks with ever-increasing amounts of granular dairy cow mineral — about 5 lbs per lick per month. It helps lactating does and also helps antler growth in the bucks. You have to be sparing with this mineral– too much and the deer stop liking the taste and go elsewhere. You can go to Walmart and the sporting goods store and buy deer mineral, but the stuff from the feed store is cheaper and works just as good.

A lot of guys use blocks. I use rock salt. It lasts longer and makes the deer work a little harder to get it. In the process, they get a lot of trace minerals mixed in with the dirt.

Lay off the heavy magnesium blocks. Stuff like Mega-Mag is good for dairy cattle, but not deer. One guy I read even links CWD with the ingestion of magnesium. Deer need mostly calcium and phosphorus. Standard dairy mineral also gives them a lot of other stuff that helps them shake off the winter, metabolize their Spring graze better and helps them grow big antlers and give birth to well-developed fawns.

You probably will not see a lot of action at the scrapes until June. That’s okay. In our part of the world, the action peaks in late July and trails off until October. By the time bow season is in full swing, they’ll be hardly visiting the licks themselves.

So Shaman, are you trying to say licks don’t attract deer?

One of the goofiest things I ever saw was early on in my deer hunting career. A neighbor to the plot I was hunting had an elaborate ground blind on the end of a ridge, overlooking a pasture trailing off into the creek bottoms. This was Ohio, so shotgun season was set in the first week in December. This guy set out 1 lb blocks every 25 yards in a fan shaped pattern all the way down the hill in every direction. He was going to use the blocks as combination deer magnets and yardage markers. He must have had a hundred or more scattered in the grass– utterly useless.

If you go throwing out salt blocks on November 1, don’t expect deer in December. The process is far more subtle than most guys think. The time to start a lick is now, March and April. You want to get them habituated to the spot. The deer will shift their trails and move past the lick on a regular basis, whether they are actually licking there or not. This process of habituation, especially with the does, is important. The does will come by all Summer, and the bucks will follow those same trails in the Fall. This doesn’t mean you can just put a salt block out in the middle of a field and be certain deer will be there either. What it does is allow you to bend the path a little, and adjust the trails to suit your needs.

In one case, I was able to take a major highway that followed a creek bed and shift it up the hill about 75 yards and bring the deer into closer bow range. In another, I deer to shift from using three parallel trails and habituate on only one– the one that went past my stand.

Is this baiting? Is this unfair?

Teddy Roosevelt was about as down on salt licks as you can get. He thought hunting in raised blinds over salt licks was on a par with shooting game that had been tethered. He was probably right, but then he could hunt deer all year long. In his day, there were no modern seasons as we know them. Teddy saw no sport in hunting over salt licks. It’s true. Salt licks will make deer go crazy– but only at the peak in early to mid-Summer. After that, deer could really care less about salt. They will visit occasionally, but not like the peak. If we had a season for deer in June, we would be talking about this in far different terms. Modern seasons in the
Fall are after the precipitous drop in the deer’s interest in salt. By the time most hunters take to the woods, deer are far more interested in acorns and other fat-producing mast.

Here’a a link to the KY Fish and Wildlife site. This is from their collection of “Habitat How-To ” documents:
Mineral licks

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