WHACKFACTOR OUTDOORS
Management
Whackfactor Outdoors manages land and hunts primarily in rural Charles County in Southern Maryland. Our land consists of agricultural land interspersed with tracts of upland hardwoods, hardwood swamps, briar thickets, and estuarine marshes. We practice aggressive habitat management to achieve a balance of agricultural and timber production, wildlife habitat improvement, and recreational hunting opportunities.
Several of our properties are enrolled in state sanctioned timber stand improvement programs (TSI). TSI allows us to improve both the timber productivity and the wildlife habitat of our properties by increasing resources to trees chosen both for timber production and wildlife value.
Food plots are a very important aspect of Whackfactor Outdoors wildlife management. We plant and maintain a variety of both warm and cool season crops including corn, buckwheat, sorghum, soybeans, clover, turnips and rape. Using a variety of crops maximizes wildlife nutrition throughout the year and facilitates recreational hunting opportunities.
Whackfactor Outdoors plants and maintains orchards of tree species (apple, crab-apple, pear and persimmon) that provide important food sources to wildlife. Care is also taken to prune and release existing volunteer and wild trees that produce food for wildlife.
In addition to planting wildlife food plots, Whackfactor Outdoors implements shelter belt and hinge-cut areas to increase bedding, nesting, and escape cover. These areas also provide an important early successional browse on our properties.
While not enrolled in any official programs, Whackfactor Outdoors practices our own voluntary quality deer management. This simple management program consists of an aggressive doe harvest and a very selective buck harvest. Venison is an important part of our friends and families diet throughout the year, and our aggressive antlerless deer harvest allows us to keep our families and neighbors' freezers full!
Our buck management strives at allowing bucks to reach at least 3.5 years of age before harvest. We have adopted a self imposed guideline that antlered deer harvested should be taken to the taxidermist. If a buck isn't good enough to spend 500 dollars on and spend the rest of our lives proudly looking at on our wall, then we let it go to grow another year. We all have piles of small and marginal racks hanging or piled up in the shed from our uninformed and impatient youth, but have grown as hunters and no longer feel the need to add another young deer's antlers to the pile. This requires a lot of dedication and truly believing in the cause, but we feel the rewards are well worth the investment. We realize that our management isn't for everyone (and that's ok), but it works for us. We realize that people hunt for different reasons, and as long as they are safe, ethical and legal, we wish everybody the best.
The Whackfactor Outdoors team works with the same challenges in our management as everybody. Our properties are often too small to properly accomplish the goals of our management. Every year, pretty 2.5 and 3.5 year old bucks that have great potential are filmed in our food plots. These bucks are passed up throughout the season and, unfortunately, cross property lines and are often killed on adjacent properties. This is always frustrating, but through education, each year, we see more and more hunters "letting them go so they can grow". We are excited for the future of Maryland's deer hunting, as more and more old school hunters are seeing the light, and the younger generation of hunter is being brought up in an environment where scientific wildlife management prevails.
Whackfactor Outdoors agrees with and supports the spirit of the Quality Deer Management Association (QDMA.) For more information about QDMA, please click on their logo and visit their website.