Personally, I kill them. Hate how beeches keep their leaves throughout the hunting season and block the view. I still keep some really big, mature beeches for beechnut production, but all the little ones that pop up once sunlight gets under the canopy... Bye bye
Ha! Personally, I have more a "love" than a "hate" relationship with the beech trees!
My perspective here is coming more from a "hunter" than from a "hunter-manager's" perspective.
Let me explain.
Over many years of deer hunting, I often observed zero deer movement on so many those "perfect" seeming mornings. You know, those cold, clear, frosty mornings when you could hear a pin drop?
But, there was one thing about deer movement I started correlating, and it was with wind, and small beech trees. Have you ever noticed that sometimes, typically around mid-morning, the wind begins picking up a tad, and
some rattling leaves sound very much like walking deer? The sound I'm referring to has most often been beech tree leaves!
It's uncanny, just how often older deer, particularly fully mature bucks, will take off on a journey across rather open hardwoods, often within seconds of those beech tree leaves starting their "deer-walk-rattle". I'm typically talking about a timeframe between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 Noon, when most hunters have already given up on their morning hunt.
About half of the fully mature bucks I've killed have been between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 Noon, and I give much credit for the "deer-walk-rattle" of beech tree leaves contributing to that particular deer movement.
As a hunter-manager, my strategy with the young beech trees is to leave many, strategically, where they help camouflage me on stand,
AND, stimulate mid-morning to mid-day deer movement.
Some have asked me what's my "secret", as though I really have much beyond persistence and stubbornness. I've told many what I believe is the very best deer call, particularly on the type morning described above, and nearly always employ this call mid-morning, then stay on stand a minimum of another 30 minutes after "calling". But the next best thing may be the "deer-walk-rattle" of beech leaves, something you can often create simply by not cutting them all down.
Much, perhaps most, my mature buck hunting is hunting saddles on high ridges, often in hardwoods. (Gee, I just described most of LBL and most of BSK's ridge & hollow hunting lands.)
This is the type environment where rattling beech leaves are most likely to help you connect with an older deer, not just mature bucks, but mature does as well.
It's my belief that older deer use sound as a way of camouflaging their movements. On many those cold frosty mornings, deer seem very aware of their vulnerabilities, and often remain bedded (or simply move only very short distances). But once the wind picks up, just enough to rattle those beech leaves, that's when older deer often rise from their beds and take a long hike through the hardwoods, often traveling a considerable distance. After all, most hunters have now left the woods.
. I don't think we killed a tree and there was sap flowing out of the tree a week later. This was in late August. I plan on starting over in those areas again in the next couple weeks
