Kentucky Private Land Habitat Management

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Kentucky Private Land Habitat Management

KDFWR provides information on how to manage the habitat on your property to meet your wildlife goals.

This page is managed by KY Department of Fish and Wildlife's Private Lands Management Program. The programs goal is to provide technical guidance on habitat management to landowners across the Commonwealth. To learn more about the program please follow this page and visit https://fw.ky.gov/Wildlife/Pages/Improve-Your-Land-for-Wildlife.aspx. To learn more about the Department’s mission and programs, please visit https://fw.ky.gov/Pages/default.aspx.

05/31/2026

One key component of habitat management is creating disturbance. Some of the most easy and cost efficient ways to do that is to do seasonal timed sprays or letting annual food plots go fallow. A seasonal timed spray is designed to target cool season fescue in most cases. Which in turn creates bare ground for ease of wildlife movement and growing space for more desirable forbs (flowers/broadleafs) and foraging of seeds/insects. Allowing annual food plots to go fallow (leaving unplanted for a year or more) can provide more benefits than trying to reestablish that annual food plot. Again the spraying and ground disturbance stimulates native forbs (weeds in a food plot) that can be more desirable to wildlife and provide better nutrition. Ragweed, asters, wild lettuce, and goldenrod are just a few beneficial forbs that are most certain to appear in any situation. The forbs in return attracts native insects and bare ground allows foraging on seeds as well as for easy access for smaller mammals and upland birds.
This is just a quick reference for these types of management and may or may not suit your management goals. However having a biologist make a free visit to your property would be a good way to start.

https://app.fw.ky.gov/WebContact/

The pictures below show a portion of a field sprayed in late March to target fescue that has allowed for more broadleaf growth now. Another field sprayed in April that has created a lot of bare ground with a hen and poults using (video in comments).Final two pictures are a food plot that was planted last September and will now be left fallow.

05/26/2026

I went on a site visit earlier and saw the perfect example on the possible effects of timber stand improvement. These woods were dominated with American beech and maple trees with a few oaks and hickory trees scattered through the property. The American beech and maples took up so much canopy space that there was no sunlight and the forest floor was a biological desert. Very little regeneration of any vegetation.

In one of the central most portions of the wooded lot I came upon a large dead tree that previously competed for canopy space, directly below it where the sunlight could reach the ground was an influx of Pawpaw tree saplings and other young growth while directly around this area there was little to nothing!

The landowner goals for the property were to improve overall wildlife habitat and health, so I recommended they do TSI within these wooded acres on their property and identify the oak and hickory trees to remove any competition directly around them ultimately to help promote their growth and regeneration through the property! For this specific situation a combination of hack and sq**rt as well as girdling will be used.

Check out the pictures below to see the change a little bit of sunlight can have on growth within a forest!

05/22/2026

One of the best things you can do for wildlife this spring is also the easiest: put the bush hog away and leave it there for a while. Field edges, fence rows, and open areas that look "messy" are exactly what nesting turkeys, grassland birds, and newborn fawns need right now. That tall, uncut cover is like a wildlife nursery. The urge to clean things up is understandable, but holding off on mowing until August or later can make a serious difference in how many young animals make it through the summer. Sometimes the best habitat management is knowing when to do nothing.

05/20/2026

Itching to get started back in those forest management units you have been working on? While many try to avoid managing habitat in the summer due to the heat and influx of ticks, you can expand your management window by doing so to create more time for other activities throughout the year. After being on a hiatus due to sap flow from the spring, June is a good rule of thumb timeframe-wise to start back on techniques such as the cut-stump method and forest management techniques such as hack-and-sq**rt and girdle-and-spray. If you can spare a few early mornings on the weekend to beat the heat, you will be surprised just how much you can knock out.

05/18/2026

It’s the best time of the year: NO-MOW SEASON! The primary nesting season for ground-dwelling birds, such as wild turkey and northern bobwhite quail, is May 15th – August 1st. During this time, adults are nesting, chicks are hatching, and the next generation of birds are scratching out a living – literally. Between April and June, bobwhite quail build nests in clumps of last year’s native warm season grasses. They do this by scratching shallow depressions into the soil, then lining it with dead vegetation. When chicks hatch, they are approximately the size of a bumblebee and eat mostly insects. Having plenty of vegetation to act as cover and attract insects is crucial, but so is bare ground beneath. This allows the birds to move freely and scratch for bugs efficiently. Avoiding mowing helps to protect young birds, their nests, and the crucial vegetation that brings in a buffet of insects. So, rest assured that a lack of mowing is NOT a lack of productivity – it is you investing in the next generation of gallinaceous birds.

If you would like to meet with a biologist to discuss habitat improvements for your property, reach out to your local Private Lands Biologist:https://fw.ky.gov/More/Documents/privatelands_biologists.pdf

05/16/2026

Removing oaks for increased wildlife value?

Thinning less productive red oaks, especially scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), from a white oak stand increases sunlight and reduces resource competition, directly boosting white oak growth and acorn production. However, it’s recommended to retain a few red oaks to buffer against year-to-year mast failures. Listed below are some key differences between scarlet oak and eastern white oak.
1. Botanical Group Classification
• Scarlet Oak: Classified under the red oak subgenus (Erythrobalanus).
• Eastern White Oak: Classified under the white oak subgenus (Quercus).
2. Leaf Anatomy and Lobes
• Scarlet Oak: Features bristle-tipped, pointed lobes. The sinuses (the cutouts between the lobes) are exceptionally deep, C-shaped, and cut more than two-thirds of the way to the center mid-rib.
• Eastern White Oak: Features rounded lobes completely lacking any bristles. The sinuses are moderately deep but variably finger-like and smooth.
3. Acorn Development and Interior Hairs
• Scarlet Oak: Acorns require two full growing seasons to mature on the branch and germinate during the following spring. The interior of the hard shell is lined with fuzzy, velvety hairs.
• Eastern White Oak: Acorns mature rapidly in a single growing season and sprout almost immediately in autumn after falling. The shell interior lacks velvety hairs and is smooth.
4. Bark Texture and Appearance
• Scarlet Oak: Bark is darker gray, relatively tight, and remains smoother on the upper trunk with shallow fissures. It features flatter ridges compared to other red oaks.
• Eastern White Oak: Bark is an ashy, light gray that breaks into loose, scaly, or platy chunks. On older trees, it often peels slightly and sheds, giving it a somewhat shaggy texture.
5. Wood Porosity and Rot Resistance
• Scarlet Oak: Pores in the wood are large, open, and clear. This allows moisture to seep through easily, leaving the wood susceptible to rot and fungus.
• Eastern White Oak: Microscopic pores are completely plugged with a crystalline structure called tyloses. This creates a natural water-resistant seal, making the wood highly rot-resistant.
6. Autumn Foliage Color
• Scarlet Oak: Celebrated for its intense, brilliant scarlet-red fall color. The leaves change color late in the season and stand out sharply in the landscape.
• Eastern White Oak: Foliage changes to a more muted reddish-brown, wine-red, or tawny purplish color. The leaves often dry out and persist on the lower branches through the winter.
7. Native Habitat and Soil Preferences
• Scarlet Oak: Strictly an upland species that thrives in dry, sandy, gravelly, and highly acidic soils. It struggles significantly in alkaline environments.
• Eastern White Oak: Extremely adaptable, growing across both uplands and moist bottomlands. It prefers rich, well-drained loams but tolerates a much wider variation of soil chemistry.
8. Acorn Taste and Wildlife Value
• Scarlet Oak: Acorns are packed with high levels of bitter tannic acid. Wildlife will store them for winter but generally eat them only when other food sources run low.
• Eastern White Oak: Acorns are low in tannins and taste sweet. They are the top preference for deer, turkeys, and squirrels, which will eagerly consume them immediately upon dropping.

05/14/2026

This is a great opportunity to see habitat management in action!

05/11/2026

Fawn season is here! Cover is essential to a fawn’s survival. Several features of fawn cover include remote areas with nearby browse. A doe should be able to forage while leaving new fawns in secure cover. Hunter’s can create fawn cover on their property!

There are many ways to create safe spaces for fawns. Timber stands improvements like hinge cutting creates brushy growth on the ground. Target trees with a 3-8”diameter at breast height (DBH). Cuts are made ½ - 2/3 of the way through a tree, then pushed over. This allows the tree to continue to grow leaves while on the ground. Hinge cutting trees like maples make for good cover and browse. Red cedars can also leave dense cover. These practices also open the canopy and allow more sunlight to hit the forest floor. More browse like forbs, berries, and saplings will grow with more sunlight and serve as cover. Hinge cutting allows for early successional growth that will help other games species like turkey, quail, and grouse. Migratory birds that are declining can benefit like Indigo buntings and Prairie warblers. Other methods of TSI can create this growth as well.

Creating habitat for fawns is best done in late winter/early spring, but hinge cutting can also be implemented late summer! Other practices like planting native grasses and mowing outside the nesting season (May through July) will also help!

05/08/2026

As most of us have seen while walking around the woods during turkey season or just out enjoying the
warmer temperatures, many invasive plant species are out and vigorously growing to outcompete our
native plant species. Now that spring turkey season is coming to an end, we have taken the keys out of
the tractor to stop mowing during the nesting season, it is the time to knock the dust off the hand tools
in the shed and begin to gear up for our yearly invasive plant management. Fill up the chainsaw with
gas/oil, mix up the preferred herbicide you use in your sprayer, set a target area for invasive species
treatment on your property, and get out there to work!

If you have any additional questions about invasive species management on your property, reach out to
your private lands biologist for more information!

https://fw.ky.gov/Wildlife/Documents/hipapp.pdf

05/06/2026

What if you were told that you could save money and do less work yet make your property better for wildlife?!? It is possible. All you have to do is to stay off the mower during the spring and summer months.

The instinct to keep land looking “clean” runs deep, but in the wildlife world, a mowing pass from March to August can undo a full year of habitat investment in an afternoon. Whitetail does will drop most of their fawns in late May and throughout June in Kentucky. Fawns lie almost motionless in tall grass/weeds for their first weeks of life. Ground-nesting birds, such as bobwhite quail, turkeys, meadowlarks, etc. are actively nesting from April though July. Wildflowers are blooming all summer long and providing a necessary food source for our native pollinators.

A single day pulling the bush hog can take all of these things away. Avoid rising fuel costs and put your free time to better use! Reach out to your Private Lands Biologist to see what other things you can do to help the wildlife in your area.

Address

1 Sportsman's Lane
Frankfort, KY
40601

Website

https://fw.ky.gov/

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