Please understand that is only one project. Several have been conducted across the whit-tails range and vary from the low teens to 70% predation rates. Too much at play to take much from any one study. Just understand that coyotes impact deer numbers. Sometimes greatly, sometimes very little.

I have gotten two, my wife has gotten one, and my SIL got one.

I think the biggest thing is people with Life Time licenses move a few times and don't update their address and email with the DCNR. I have asked them about this and they tell me that they get tons of return mail each year when they mail out these surveys. You dang sure won't get one if they can't find you. AND yes I know, some of you haven't moved in 400 years and you still haven't gotten one. I also know from dealing with the public that some folks think the items are junk mail and trash them.

We have had 11 members in our club since it started. They are all experienced hunters. They know what a fawn is.

I don’t really question the survey participants being randomly selected….Wouldn’t they be selected by a computer using something like a random number generator??? Surely they're not hand selected or anything......The one thing I could see that may not be completely random is the segment of the hunting public that chooses to mail them back. That really doesn’t matter though as long as that bias is relatively constant from year to year……We’re just looking at the trends over time to change in that group and signal to us that something may be changing amongst the entire group. I don't think it would matter a whole lot anyways though because the variance in what we kill is so small between hunters. Pretty much 90% of respondents in our mock draft picked 0, 1, or 2 for an answer.....

I can't argue with that.
My experience, with hunter logs, has mostly been pay hunters.
Their observations really told me more about their habits.

I believe you…..but even if they weren’t experienced y’all would still likely estimate changes in fawn recruitment fairly accurately. They become the most easily visible deer in the group as the season progress. You’re also not trying to count any kind of real total but rather just get an average. You’re really just taking a sample similar to the hunter survey we’re talking about. You don’t have to count them all to get an idea of that seasons fawn recruitment. Y’all could only see and count say 50% and still be pretty accurate. That’s a lot when talking about sampling.

If the survey was really that accurate, all these years, then you must believe that the GC compliance is closer to 8% than 30%.

We report observations by these categories. Branch Antlered bucks, spikes, doe, fawn, and unknown. We don't estimate or record %. At the end of the season, I compile all the data at the end of the season in a spreadsheet. We also record data like did the hunter hunt on a food plot or the woods. Turkeys, hogs, predators, area hunted and morning or afternoon are also collected.

We have been very aggressive in our hog and predator controls. We are letting tons of young bucks walk.

All of it combined paints a pretty good picture of what is going on.

I might have seen 3 people last season fill out their harvest sheet after we found their deer. One of them I specifically remember was the dog hunters recording theirs. I thought that was funny since they get called out as the biggest outlaws most of the time. Now many hunters may have very well recorded it later at home and called it in to GC……but that being said, I don’t have a hard time believing that participation in GC is very low.

Bingo, it isn't the poor, the illiterate, the children, the older people, the dog hunters that alone are not reporting. It is spread across the hunting community as a majority thinks it serves no valid purpose that could not be handled in easier ways.

The last survey they released, for 2015-16, estimated 295,000 killed. GC is running roughly 25% of survey estimates. However, since GC attempts to record every deer, including those by unlicensed hunters, the GC figure should be considerably higher than the survey estimates. I don't think anyone has any idea of how many unlicensed hunters we have, so there is no way to tell from those figures what the true GC participation level might be.

But I agree with you that it is likely lower than the dcnr estimated %.

One thing that the survey definitely showed is that the trend is down. We went from pre buck limit estimates of over 400,000, to estimates 10 years later that are under 300,000. I think the low GC numbers are probably a combination of a low % of hunters reporting, and also a constantly declining harvest.

The buck limit, along with so much encouragement for hunters to kill does, are the biggest factors in the decline of our deer hunting. GC is insignificant compared to those factors.

Outback, you fail to realize the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours AU, MSU, OM, UGA, etc... and other universities put into studies. Whether it's human or medical studies or biology or wildlife, it's all done with very much considered variables!!

I $%%^& hated my class in statistics but I'm here to tell you that studies are done with a VERY stringent awareness of... well, everything. To think that any university study is conducted without appropriate guidelines is ridiculous. I promise you that Dr. Stephen Ditchkoff or Dr. Karl Miller or any other university sponsored study had it ducks in a row and they if they assume something, the assumption is labeled an assumption.

In this case, what you don't know causes you to question but wildlife mgmt is WHAT THESE FOLKS DO and they're not dumb. It's what they do for a livin'!