Kentucky Private Land Habitat Management

06/22/2026

Happy pollinator week!

This week is all about awareness of our pollinator species! Pollinators facilitate roughly 90% of the world’s flowering plant reproduction. Kentucky is home to a variety of native pollinator species such as bees, moths, butterflies and hummingbirds! You can do your part to help our pollinators by planting native flowers that support our pollinator species. Some great options are common milkweed, butterfly milkweed, brown/black eyed Susan, coneflowers, and wild bergamot. There are many more options when it comes to great pollinator species to plant so try to find what plant works best for your land and soil type!

06/20/2026

Recently, a concerned landowner reached out to help identify the causal agent(s) leading to bark sloughing on a nearby white oak.
What was it?
Here are the facts:
1. Incident occurred within a confined timeline of 1-2 days in mid-May
2. Tree was growing well, appeared healthy and no living wood was exposed
3. Exfoliated bark was well distributed around the oak’s base and extended outward 6-8 feet
4. Area directly beneath the tree and surrounding yard showed no signs of mechanical damage
5. No indication this site was contaminated by chemicals, including herbicides
6. No obvious signs, including claw or tool marks, indicating how the bark was removed from the tree
7. Bark loss appeared evenly distributed from the oak’s main trunk to its uppermost canopy limbs
What was responsible for debarking this white oak?
A. Lightning
B. Insects
C. Squirrels
D. Weather-related expansion and contraction
E. Birds
F. Pathogens (Viral, bacterial or fungal)
Answer: E. Birds




When foraging on live, healthy trees, the pileated woodpecker employs highly specific mechanics to extract insects. While they prefer dead wood, they frequently target healthy trees with scaley or plate-like bark such as white oak.
The Mechanics of Bark Sloughing and Flecking
• Bark Flecking (Shallow Prying): Woodpeckers scale the trunk and use angled, sideways bill swipes to flake off superficial layers of bark. This reveals surface-dwelling insects, spiders, or early-stage larvae hiding in the bark furrow crevices.
• Bark Sloughing (Deep Stripping): To access deeper wood-boring pests, the bird levers its chiseled bill beneath large chunks of bark. It pops entire plates of bark completely off the trunk, causing them to slough to the ground in large pieces.

06/15/2026

Have you been lucky enough to stumble upon a fawn this spring? We know that fawns are often stashed in tall grass or shrubs while their mothers look for food, but what is on the shopping list?

Since we’re in peak fawning season, both fawns and their lactating mothers are needing high protein intake – with anywhere from 14-22% being ideal. Native plants such as greenbrier, pokeweed, goldenrod, ragweed, and blackberries are nutrient-dense, preferred by deer, and thrive under disturbance. Well-time management practices – such as disking, prescribed fire, and timber stand improvement – can encourage fresh plant growth to offer an abundance of food and cover in fawning season.

If you would like to find out how native vegetation can better fit into your management goals, reach out to your local Private Lands Biologist:
https://fw.ky.gov/More/Documents/privatelands_biologists.pdf

06/15/2026

Join some of our private lands biologist next Monday night in Hopkins County as they discuss wildlife habitat management and cost share programs to help fund some of these projects on your property!

RSVP by end of day today to save your spot!

Session 3 of the Wildlife Management Series is coming up June 22nd. Register for this event to learn from Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources Private Lands Biologists and cost-share opportunities from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Meal will be provided! Call the Hopkins County Extension office to RSVP by June 15th.

06/12/2026

Love is in the air for the bobwhite quail. Mating tends to begin in April and carries on through summer with peak times typically in June/July. This is a excellent time to start listen for quail on your property or your neighboring property or all around. Male quail begin searching for females with the classic “bob white” whistle and will find elevated places to make the call like fence post or shrubs.
For a fun activity try cruising down backroads in the mornings listening for the calls. Look for areas that are grassland/pasture or crop fields that have some sort of shrub cover nearby either in fence rows or drainages.

06/11/2026

What are “growing-season” prescribed fires? Typically, these are conducted in late July-September, but can also be executed in the spring depending on objectives. If conducted too early in the spring, the fire may act as a “dormant season fire” and promote grasses and only top kill woody stems. Often at times, land managers have the goal of setting back grasses and woody stems to promote more broadleaf plants (i.e., forbs) which are often times lacking in management units.

Growing-season fires are conducive to promoting plants such as ragweed, partridge pea, fleabane, wingstem, pokeweed, beggar’s lice, goldenrod, asters, and many others. While areas dominated by vegetation such as this are oftentimes viewed as “weedy” or “snakey”, these plants play a key role in life history stages among various wildlife species. But what about burning just before or during these life history stages such as nesting and fawning windows? Wouldn’t it destroy the habitat and young wildlife? This is a common concern among folks, but it is not as much as a concern as one might think. There are multiple research studies that would support this. A 2017 University of Georgia study found that female turkeys “selected mature pines burned 0-5 months prior” when laying their eggs and avoided stands with increasing fire-return intervals. Another turkey study stated, “Although approximately 20% of the study area was burned concurrent with nesting activity, only 3.3% of monitored nests were destroyed by fire, and we calculated that no more than 6% of all turkey nests were exposed to fire annually on our study site.”

Read these studies here: https://wildturkeylab.com/prescribed-fire-influences-habitat-selection-of-female-eastern-wild-turkeys/

https://fwf.tennessee.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2020/07/Wild-turkey-nest-survival-and-nest-site-selection.pdf

In general, the key when utilizing fire is to keep units on the smaller side (

06/08/2026

This time of year, native flowers can be seen in fallow fields, edges, and in ditches. Native plants have coevolved with native wildlife. Both are suitable and provide all needs for each other. Forbs can give nectar for pollinators while pollinators help plants reproduce. Some even acts as host plants for various insects such as caterpillars of butterfly and moth species. Seeds are a great food source for birds. Native forbs are also adapted to our region. Many grow well in most soil conditions and root deeply which can reduce erosion. You may have some natives growing in your old fields or in your ditch that you can keep around . Here is a list of flowering species that are currently blooming that you can look for.


Blackeyed Susan

Butterfly milkweed

Common milkweed

Common yarrow

Narrowleaf mountainmint

Eastern purple coneflower

H**p dogbane

American vetch (vine)

Trumpet creeper (vine)

Some management practices can help forb growth. Restoration of prairies or native plantings are also options! Reach out to your local private land biologist for more guidance!

06/06/2026

Last fall KDFWR private lands program funded experimental drone flights spraying invasive kudzu patches on 8 pieces of private property over 6 counties totaling 100 acres. As we are now actively in the growing season for kudzu, we revisited these sites to assess progress made.
We are really excited about the coverage and treatment of these areas to this point. We significantly set this invasive back with our applications. Achieving, at this point 90-95% control in some patches. Even more exciting is the native vegetative response in these patches. By doing this treatment we have released elderberry, dogbane, geranium, perennial ryegrass, yellow buckeye, ironweed, wingstem, pokeweed, common milkweed, and ragweed among many others. Also, we prevented to this point, in having any negative effects on trees within the units and outside.
Additionally, wildlife continue to utilize these areas. A suite of songbirds including towhee, tree swallow, yellow breasted chat, cardinal, wren, wood thrush, sparrows, indigo buntings, cedar waxwings among others have been identified in the patches. We have also seen white tailed deer, chipmunks, black rat snake, and cottontail rabbits running/slithering through the sections.
Although we do recognize this isn’t a silver bullet. Kudzu has persisted in these areas especially along the edges we couldn’t spray. Follow up treatments will be required for years to achieve eradication. But we do believe at this point this is a viable tool in the toolbox for control of this overwhelming invasive species to native diversity.
We will keep you updated on this project as we progress through the growing season and determine the next steps.
Below are before and after pictures of some of the different sites.

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!