Water inside feed pen

[qzilla]

Anyone ever experienced putting water inside the feed pens or near the feedpens?

Did it change consumption?

How exactly did you do it?


Any if would be appreciated.

[Snakelover]

Being a pool owner, I know how much water is lost daily to evaporation. (It's a lot more than most people think.) Unless you are using a float valve to feed this thing from a larger water source like a well, windmill holding tank, etc., you'd be forever hauling water just to keep up with evaporation. Also, most of the water that you might think was being used by deer would probably just be evaporation in reality. You'd probably want to set up a game camera to know whether it was being used by deer or whether you were just working your butt off to provide a bird bath.

[Deerhunter30]

On our 6000 acre lease in San Angelo, we had water at most of our 22 feeders. We had these large plastic water troughs. They were about 3' in diameter and two feet tall. We were lucky enough to have a man who kept the feeders and water troughs full. We had a ranch truck with a 500 gal water tank in the back. The ranch manager used to back that thing up under the discharge of a windmill operated water well and let it run for a day or two to fill up.

Those things paid off big time from what our game cameras showed. The deer and turkeys both used them a lot.

[cosmiccowboy]

We have hard piped watering stations every hundred acres. The ground around them is bare from all the foot traffic just like at the feeders. When the deer start moving in the afternoon they go to the water first before feeding.

["DOC"]

We've had water in our feeder pens for 10 years, all the pens except the ones by windmills or dirt tanks. Like DH30 said, game cameras show deer, turkey and all other animals really using it. I definitely think it's worth the cost and effort. We have 400 gal. tanks feeding small horse troughs with float system, ($20.00 at tractor supply) keep the tanks covered, some of us have 10' X 30' metal rain catchers with gutters to dump the water into tanks. 1" of rain = about 185 gal. Sorry guys, can't find my pictures, I'll keep trying. I know this is worthless without pic's.

[Luck_of_the_Draw]

Here's mine. The traffic more than doubled at this feeder.

[qzilla]

I was told that water placed right at a feed station would increase consumption by 20-30% which is a lot to me.

I would probably just pipe water to my stations instead of trying to haul water. We are debating installing concrete troughs right now.

Thanks for the help guys.

[mesquitecountry]

i know that the areas where we have water troughs within a 1/4 mile consume a lot more protein than others. So yes i would have to say it would increase consumption imo.

["DOC"]

Okay, found a couple of pic's. 1st try at downloading, so bear with me.


[ATTACH]21448

1st pic is the catch system and 400 gal. tank.

[ATTACH]21449
2nd pic shows water trough in feed pen and rain catcher in background, works great

[JeffJ]

we have three troughs on our place and two pipes that run to to a pond and creek. All of the troughs are with 25 yards of a free choice protein feeder. We have observed deer eat a little, then go get a drink, then head back to the feeder. FYI we stack flats rocks in the middle so that they stick out of the water a little. The birds can also get a drink really easy.

[Mike D]

As others have stated, we kept water in troughs at our lease last year and have lots of pics of deer and turkey using them. Our deer sightings increased dramatically during season as well. This is of course dependent on how much natural water you have available for them to use. We have absolutely no natural water on our lease. We set ours away from the feed pens by a couple hundred yards and had no hunting pressure at them at all. Not sure how they would work if you were hunting them. I suspect you would see less traffic or most of what you did see may be at night.

[ArtisticWildlife]

This is what happened when I put a water source near my feed pen...

[TxTechBowhunter]

You must have been watching that Quality Deer Management show on TV last night. They were talking about this exact subject.

[JeffJ]

...also, we put our troughs in during the worst of the drought last August. The deer were hitting it before we even got the trenches covered back up. Now that we have gotten the rain and all of the ponds and creeks have good water in them the trough usage has really dropped off. Dad considered the project a rain dance...sur eenough it started raining!

[qzilla]

No, I did not see that but, my buddy might have? He is the one that called me and asked me if I ever thought about it.

The good news is that I tivo almost everything so I can probably go watch it tonight!!


Thanks for the tip!

Oh, are you still looking for an internship TXTecBowhunter?