Ah, it’s that time again when our thoughts turn toward the Kansas State Fair, high school football — and deer feeders.
Yes, for those of us who don’t keep our feeders going year around, it will soon be time to fill em’ up again for the coming season. Having decided to build another one ourselves this year, I’ve recently spent a lot of time researching our options, so by sharing some of the fruits of my research, perhaps I can help those of you wanting to buy one or build your own.
The first step is deciding whether you want to feed any other wildlife besides deer. For example, do you want to feed turkeys too? And how about raccoons; do you want to feed as few of them as possible, or don’t you really care? This all helps in determining what style feeder is best for you.
Your choices:
One style of deer feeder that seems to be very popular on Internet sites these days is made from a four-foot long piece of six-inch-diameter PVC pipe. A cap is put on one end, the other end is cut at a 45-degree angle then it’s simply stood erect and fastened against a tree with the beveled end on the ground. The pipe is filled with corn, which is accessed from the beveled end of the pipe like a self-feeder. This simple design can be made from larger pipe, but the bigger pipe probably would allow raccoons to crawl completely up into it. Another feeder along these same lines is a simple trough that is kept filled with corn. While these designs are ultra cheap to build and maintain, the deer and any other critters for miles around will eat you out of house and home and you’ll get little else done but refill the feeder.
Another style of feeder employs a large container of some sort with a section of four-inch PVC pipe fastened beneath it. The pipe forms a 90-degree angle below the container and allows corn to flow down into the pipe. The container is either held up or suspended at the right height to allow deer to eat feed through the end of the pipe.
Another take on this style uses a hole in the bottom of the container with a large wooden dowel sticking through it that must be moved from side to side to allow corn to fall through the hole.
Deer soon find jostling the dowel around with their heads rewards them with corn. These are fairly cheap to build and at least make raccoons work for any feed they get, but they still allow deer to eat all they want and probably will have to be refilled pretty often.
The third style of deer feeder, and probably the most common, uses a battery-powered “slinger” unit hung beneath a container of some sort. The container can vary from a simple five-gallon bucket to a plastic 50-gallon drum. Commercial units are available with five-gallon buckets that are meant to be hung or with large plastic drums suspended on pipe tripods. I’ve found the bigger purchased ones in my price range to be terribly wobbly, so we built our own using a damaged poly cart trash container mounted on top of an old fuel tank stand.
The slinger units can be purchased alone at major sporting tores and come in various shapes and brand names, but all use a battery or batteries to power a set of blades that throw corn in a circular radius each time it runs. Most units allow you to program different feeding times, different lengths of time for it to run and for multiple feeding times each day.
The containers can be hung from a tree or mounted on some sort of platform. Remember, the larger the container, the less often you have to fill it, but also allow for a way to either get up to the container to dump in corn, or be able to lower the container to the ground. We fill our homemade rig by standing on the pickup tailgate, which is fine as long as we can drive to it.
This style makes it devilish hard for ‘coons to eat much, plus it feeds turkeys, too. Keeping the battery fresh is the downside.
My brother has wild hogs where he lives and had to be creative in building a feeder they wouldn’t tear up. He drilled the sides of a 50-gallon plastic barrel full of holes, fastened a chain to one end, laid the barrel on its side on the ground, chained it to a tree and filled it with corn. The hogs merely roll it around on the ground, spilling corn out the holes as it rolls and feed both themselves and the deer in the process.
A company named Day 6 Outdoors makes a nifty deal called the Flat Out Feeder that resembles a large version of those collapsible plastic camping cups. When it’s full of feed, it stands three or four feet tall and, as the feed is eaten, the top collapses down to about 12 inches. This enables you to tell from a distance when it needs filled, making for fewer trips to the feeder and less human scent left behind.
I’ve mentioned all the different styles of deer feeders I’m aware of and tried to give you some pros and cons of each. If you deer hunters out there have some homemade rigs you’d like to share with our readers, please contact me and e-mail me some photos and I can devote a future column to those. In the meantime, continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors.
Steve Gilliland is a syndicated outdoors columnist, and can be contacted by e-mail at stevegilliland@idkcom.net.
