I don’t think people are shooting the does like y’all think they are.
Not in my circle of hunters anyway. We’ll shoot a doe or two early then buck hunt from early December to the end. MIGHT shoot another doe for jerky late jan. I don’t know anybody that shoots does just because they see one. Maybe I’m not in that loop. This is a large sample of hunters right here. Would most people on here shoot a doe just because that’s what they saw on any given hunt? Idk
Time for a poll…..😃
We’ve killed
2 does
7- 8 points
5 people
My daughter missed a huge 6 point.
Actually I had a friend bring his wife and she killed an 8.
So 8- 8 points

I'm a public land hunter and most of my year has been where I think you are talking about. I've seen more deer this year than ever. They are there. But you really got to ambush them. Lots of thick cover for them to bed down in so I notice they don't have to move as much during the day where you can see them. Personally the ones I see there on the WMA are better quality than anything in the NF so far.

Tex, I know the deer are there and I love hunting the place. I killed two bucks out there this year. My point is that with only two days to rifle hunt does there should be deer running around everywhere but the population is average at best.

I agree, but that doesn't seem to be the issue where Southwood is hunting - there's only 2 days a year when does can be shot with a rifle. Whatever the problem, it doesn't seem like hunting is causing it.

I know nothing about the area he is hunting, but we saw something similar on the Coosa wma in the years before most of the land was removed. Places that were loaded with deer in the 60s and 70s had very few left in the 90s and the 00s. And it wasn't that hunters were killing the does; doe days were very limited. I eventually gave up deer hunting on it, but one of my best friends hunted it just like he always had, and he was probably the best hunter I've ever known. He could find a big buck to hunt when nobody else could, and do it in the pre-camera era.

The Coosa had very poor soil and didn't grow a lot of ground cover. My friend's conclusion was that most of the fawns were being lost to coyotes, though all the biologists told him he was wrong. The accepted belief back then was that coyotes had little effect on a deer population. That might be true in a lot of places, but my friend decided that the lack of cover on the Coosa made the fawns easy pickings for the coyotes. RIP, Bill Connelley, they are finally realizing that you were right.

I often noticed the difference in ground cover on the Coosa vs the land in Perry county where I grew up. A 7 year old cutover in Coosa was easy to walk through, mostly just rows of pine trees. A similar aged plantation in Perry was all but impossible to get through without a machete. I was hunting there last week and coyotes started their dusk howling. It was the most I've ever heard in one place, with 6 or 7 different groups and no telling how many individuals. Yet our deer population is as good as ever. I think the difference is the ground cover.

Southwood, I don't know if that's the problem where you hunt, but it's my theory. The bad thing is there probably is no practical solution.

Once you kill your deer off.... at some point the entire herd can't recover and has a very hard time. This was studied at Fork Rucker was it not? Kilt all the deer off and coyotes were determined to be the reason that the deer population couldn't recover. .