Corn! Wonderful, wonderful, wildlife enhancing golden kernels of CORN! I gotta tell ya, this simple grain brings me so much indescribable joy, happiness and supreme quality of life, I get a little emotional just talking about it.
By Ted Nugent
I’ll never forget the very 1st time corn came into my life. I had just bought my 1st little chunk of American deerhunting dream wildlife paradise in 1971, and was struggling, as I had been for my 1st 20 years of deerhunting to ambush a whitetail with my trusty Bear recurve bow.
I hunted hard every day I possibly could, and never seemed to nail down that ever mystical always elusive “right place right time” thing.
On numerous occasions I would see deer movement off in the distance right around dusk, but never in range of my chosen tree. And if you can believe it, astonishingly, treestands were illegal in Michigan back then, so I would settle into a slightly elevated crotch of some big old oak tree where I thought I could get a shot.
Scouting one day in my ever increasing frustration to kill a deer, I wandered down to the edge of a cut corn field where I had seen deer move on several occasions. As I rounded the bend where the wide, thick fencerow opened up into the field, there at my feet was a half-moon shaped scattering of shellcorn where I figured the combine had spilled some as it made the hard loop out of the field.
I knew that there was spilled kernels here, there and everywhere throughout every harvested field, but I had never seen an accumulation as apparent as this scattering.
Why a more concentrated accumulation would attract deer more than random spillage didn’t make sense to me at the time, but the proof was in the evidence, so I figured I would improvise, adapt and overcome.
There was no good ambush setup where this corn had spilled, so I scooped and scraped up a bunch of kernels and relocated them to a good spot.
Well, suffice it to say, I had struck real gold with this revelation, and from that point on, with many other lessons learned about getting in bowrange of crazy spooky Michigan whitetails, suffice it to say that the backstraps started flowing!
Does or bucks … doesn’t matter, because both are fun to hunt and provide food for the table.
Each day here at home in Texas on our SpiritWild Ranch, I load up my mighty Labradors Gonzo and Happy into the Polaris with a Harvant electric feeder on the back, and we make our daily run scattering corn here, there and everywhere across the property.
By spreading corn outside the back windows of our home, my life is immeasurably enhanced by the regular sightings of deer, turkey, squirrels, rabbits, waterfowl, songbirds galore and the occasional visit of exotic critters and even the rare sighting of wild hogs.
I don’t know about you, but the incredible healing powers of nature are at their best when in the presence of wildlife, and there is no question that the spread of corn maximizes those soul cleansing encounters.
It is a real shame that some states have absurd laws against feeding wildlife, and I feel very sorry for anyone that puts up with such arbitrary, punitive and capricious bureaucratic nonsense. I don’t seem to recall the part in our U.S. Constitution that says the government can forbid feeding wildlife. Weird.
If such goofy laws exist in your state, by simply galvanizing and uniting like-minded wildlife lovers to change such silly laws, it has been proven to facilitate this upgrade and your year round wildlife joys will happen overnight.
I’m not even talking about baiting deer necessarily, even though the method is one of my favorite hunting systems. But by just spreading a little corn around, it will dramatically increase wildlife encounters regardless of the end game you have in mind. Just seeing and being around critters is one of life’s highest of highs and good old ubiquitous corn is all we need. I suppose that makes me a corndog.
Ted Nugent is an award-winning musician and writer, with numerous best-seller books including “Ted, White and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto,” “God, Guns and Rock ‘n Roll,” and “Kill It and Grill It: A Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish” with his wife, Shemane, among other books. Be sure to check out his website here for more news on his latest music, thoughts and upcoming shows in 2015, and also at World News Daily, Newsmax and Daily Caller for more insights.
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