WHACKFACTOR OUTDOORS
Calendar
The Whackfactor Outdoors Team hunts or works in some way toward hunting 12 months out of the year! Follow this calendar to see what we are up to...
January |
February |
March |
April |
May |
June
July |
August |
September |
October |
November |
December
January
The beginning of the calendar year marks the beginning of the end of Whackfactor Outdoors operating season. Most of Maryland's fall hunting seasons wrap up in January, giving us time to work on other things until spring gobbler season in April.
January will usually find Whackfactor Outdoors catching up on some late bow season whitetail action. In January, throughout most of Whackfactor country, the deer are worn out from the rut and simply try to pack on enough calories to make it through the rest of the winter. This makes deer vulnerable to food sources in a way we haven't seen since October. January and February are a hungry time for the deer—most of the warm season plantings, such as corn and sorghum, are long gone. The best of the acorns have been picked through, and no new spring growth has began yet to provide browse. By the end of January, many deer are eating "sticks and dirt", so any remaining cool season food plots, such as clover and turnips, really get hammered. Winter wheat fields and late season food plots are areas we pay close attention to through the end of bow season.
January also provides the Whackfactor Outdoors team with outstanding late-season waterfowl hunting. Duck hunting in off-shore blinds in the Potomac River keeps our barrels hot when the divers arrive, and lay-out blinds in cut corn fields and cow pastures provide some hot action on the migrating geese.
February
By February, most of Maryland's hunting seasons have come to a close, but the Whackfactor team is still working hard to improve hunting conditions on our properties. Whackfactor Outdoors has several orchards of fruit trees to provide wildlife with quality food sources throughout the year. February is a time for us to maintain our orchards, pruning trees for maximum fruit production and mulching to promote health of our trees.
During February, many of the bucks in our areas have begun dropping their antlers. Whackfactor Outdoors pro-staffers spend a lot of time in February looking for sheds. This allows us to feed our antler addictions during the off season and start dreaming about the bucks of next year that survived the fall.
March
Southern Maryland in March is still pretty gloomy. The weather can still be chilly, the trees are still just in buds, and though the sap is running, they haven't really greened up yet. This is a time for us to get into the woods and pull out the many lock-on deer stands we have hanging on private land, to prevent damage to the stands or trees throughout the growing season.
March is also tree planting time for Whackfactor Outdoors. We order trees and seedlings in the Winter months, and they normally arrive in March. Tree plots are laid out with a variety of considerations including: deer access, ease of maintenance and mowing, soil qualities, sunlight, and water/irrigation options.
April
Spring Turkey season in Maryland opens in mid-April with a Saturday Junior-hunt day, followed by the 5-week regular season. The youth hunting day is a great opportunity for the Whackfactor Outdoors team to invest in the future of the lifestyle we love and to teach younger brothers and sisters the ways of the hunt. Early in the season can be challenging since many gobblers are still with hens, but patterning feeding areas during the day and roosting gobblers in the evening can lead to some exciting hunts!
May
Whackfactor Outdoors uses the first half of May to turkey hunt with cameras rolling! By the end of the season, many hens are already sitting on a clutch of eggs. This makes for lonely late morning gobblers. If they won't cooperate at fly-down, they often will later in the morning when all the hens are busy and not receptive to their advances. The second half of May will find us on a tractor, disking ground for warm season food plot planting. We plant sunflowers which provide exciting September dove hunts, and soybeans, corn and sorghum for deer.
June
When June rolls around, you might find the Whackfactor Outdoors team fishing for catfish in the Potomac and it's tributaries in the morning, and frying fish fillets in the evening and shooting bows. We practice all summer long, so when September rolls around, there will be no surprises!
Whackfactor Outdoors practices year-round herd and habitat management on many of the properties we hunt. With the natural bounty of our properties, combined with the supplemental food plots, orchards, and habitat management we have created and maintained, our properties often have the ability to support a large number of deer. In many cases, the biological carrying capacity will exceed the cultural, or in our case, Agricultural carrying capacity of deer. Most of our properties are farmed for grain production, and unmanaged deer at the levels our properties can support really decimate the farmer's production. To mitigate these damages, we work with the farmers, and with Maryland Department of Natural Resources to secure crop-damage kill permits. Kill permits allow us to remove antlerless deer from crop fields with firearms during the summer months. We butcher and use the meat from summer killed deer just like we would in the fall and winter deer seasons.
July
July is spent shooting bows in anticipation of September, and helping local farmers with crop damage kill permits. While controversial, Whackfactor Outdoors feels that the increased doe harvest from summertime crop damage permit shooting, only improves our buck to doe ratio, and strengthens the health of the deer herds on our properties. Many of our families are farmers, and without the assistance from the state with damage permits, our crops would get decimated by deer during the growing season.
August
In August, though the temperatures are soaring, Whackfactor Outdoors pro-staffers are really feeling the heat of the upcoming September bow season. This is when we really step up our bow practice, shooting every day after work and collectively on weekends.
This time of year, we concentrate on cool season food plots which are a very important part of Whackfactor Outdoors wildlife management. We rely on cool season plantings, such as fall greens and clover, to provide important nutrition to our deer later in the season. Weekends will find us on the river catching a bushel of crabs to eat, then disking food plots, seeding and spraying our clover plots with grass selective herbicides in the afternoon.
August is the time for us to get into the woods and replace the lock-on tree stands we took down in March. Sometimes they will wind up back in the same tree as the previous year; sometimes they will wind up in a totally new spot we have never hunted before, based on off season scouting results. In Southern Maryland, the trees have pretty much grown all they are going to grow for the season, so this is when we cut most of our shooting lanes in preparation for September!
September
September marks the beginning of Maryland's hunting season. September first will often find the Whackfactor Outdoors team in a goose blind ambushing resident geese in the morning and shooting mourning doves over a sunflower plot in the afternoon. Evenings after work, you will find us checking fields with binoculars, checking on bachelor groups we've watched all summer, watching for them to make the transformation from growing velvet to polished antlers. September 15 is probably the most looked forward day of our calendar year, rating up there with Christmas! It goes without saying, that September 15th will find the Whackfactor Outdoors team high in a tree, bows in hand, cameras rolling! Southern Maryland deer are all about food sources in September. The acorns are just starting to drop, and apples are starting to ripen. Finding deer in September is as simple as reading sign and finding the food sources they using. September in Maryland provides us some of our most exciting hunting opportunities of the year.
October
October is one of Whackfactor Outdoors pro-staffers favorite months to hunt. Maryland's Early muzzleloader season normally falls on the third weekend of October, and this is a fantastic time of the year to be in the woods! The weather is still comfortable, and the deer are relatively agreeable. This is Maryland's pre-rut period, and while the bucks are scraping the woods up, they are still concentrating on food sources. This makes them a bit more patternable than they will be by early November. It's sort of the last big push to fill their bellies and fatten their bodies before the Rut kicks in when eating gets put on the back burner. Deer are concentrating on red and white oak acorns, as well as corn, sorghum and other warm season plantings. Having Bow hunted for a little more than a month now, being able to take that 100-yard shot is a real treat.
Early and mid-October is when the sika deer on Maryland's eastern shore begin rutting. Sika deer are basically an introduced miniature elk from Asia, that have established a huntable population in the marshes and swamps of the Eastern Shore. The Eastern Shore is laced with public land, and this is where you will find the Whackfactor Outdoors team in Early October. We have found that the sika deer are one of the most challenging and exciting animals to hunt in Maryland. Hunting on the edge of an Eastern shore salt marsh at sunset, and hearing sika stags bugle like bull elk, is one of the most thrilling types of hunting in Maryland! Plus, the sika deer meat is one of the best tasting game around!
November
November is as exciting and fast paced as the whitetail rut! Whackfactor Outdoors pro-staff try to spend as much time in a tree with cameras rolling as we possibly can, because we never know what will happen! With our management, some of the properties we hunt enjoy crazy high buck to doe ratios, sometimes with even more bucks than does. This makes for an exciting rut, with sometimes 4 or 5 bucks competing for a single doe!
December
December finds us back in the woods after deer again, but this time with a shotgun in hand! Maryland's two-week shotgun season starts the first Saturday after Thanksgiving. We find these dates to fall in a transition period in regards to the whitetail rut. We often catch the tail end of the rut, with bucks still chasing does during the first few days of the shotgun season. By the latter part of the season, we normally see post-rut behavior, with deer concentrating once again on food sources. Cool season plantings such as clover and turnips are very important food sources for deer in December.
Shotgun season is when the highest numbers of hunters descend on Maryland's deer woods, and the disturbance that this creates is very noticeable, as deer that have been carefully worked all season become pressured from every angle. Nocturnal habits and thick escape cover become deer's salvation and hunters challenge to overcome.
