Mineral Licks — it’s almost too late
Here’s a link to the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources site. Check out the PDF on Mineral Licks. It’s what I use as a guide. The biologist that writes a lot of these grew-up just up the road from me, and his father helps me with my food plots.
If you’re trying to establish a new lick, I’d go easy on the di-calcium phosphate and introduce it slowly. The first year I added it to my lick, it soured the deer for well over a month. It’s also getting fairly late in the year to be starting a lick. Around here, in the Greater Ohio Valley, the best time to start is in March and the peak of usage is somewhere in the next two weeks. It then falls off precipitously until there are hardly any visits by September.
I was out visiting one of my licks the other day, and the thought hit me that the deer had created quite a crater over the past few years, pawing up the ground. I grew up in a construction family, so estimating fill dirt, concrete, etc. comes naturally. After mentally filling in the hole with the excess dirt that was scattered, I still had a hole that would take over a dump truck load to fill back in. It occurred to me that this amount was the result of deer and other wildlife carting off the soil in their guts and spreading it over the surrounding forest by way of the natural digestion processes. Then it occurred to me that with enough salt and enough deer, I could probably excavate a basement in this fashion, and offer the ultimate in green home construction. However, extrapolating it out, I realized it would be far faster and cheaper to use undocumented workers with shovels. No matter how unique the idea, home buyers would opt for the faster illegal alien method rather than mine. Drat! Still, I could probably sell a thousand words on the idea to Mother Earth News. . .
Then I realized how low I had sunk. Waiting for deer season to start gets harder every year.
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Excavating a basement, the green/deer method…..now that is funny………and the idea that you should comtemplate that is a whole lot less scary than that you should not even think at all. (Is that how some folks survive their time on the deer stand?)