Back in the not-too-distant past I thought all land-clearing was detrimental to deer and wildlife populations. No doubt I inherited some of this attitude from my father, who took a natural approach to land management. He figured wild animals prefer wild habitat, and so, with the exception of mowing trails from time to time, he never touched it. For 20 years, neither did I.
But then after finding an aerial photo of our family land from the early 1980s, I realized it was almost unrecognizable from what it is today. Back then it was broken ag land: crop fields with brushy draws running alongside them and hardwoods in the creek bottoms. There was good deer hunting