when the dept preaches killing does, sets the limit at two per day, and season long doe days.....wth do ya'll think is going to happen. Don't recall the dept doing ANY workshops on how many is enough or too many.

Yes. I think too many does are killed. I would not limit the days. I prefer a limit on the number of does you can kill per year with the same rule as bucks they must be checked in,

I concur. If coyotes killed as many fawns as some studies suggest, we wouldn't have any deer. Yesterday I saw 4 different fawns in a 4 hour sit. Why is it that apparently in some area's coyotes must kill damn near every fawn and every hunter must shoot every doe deer they see? But in my neck of the woods coyotes don't seem to kill all the fawns and we don't shoot every doe deer we see. We have plenty of deer in our area and I hear a pack or 2 of coyotes every night. BTW, if coyotes rely on deer so much for their food, how is it with deer being almost non-existent in some area's( according to some of you) that coyote numbers are still high? Everything in nature runs in cycles. A lot of game equals lots of predators. Low game numbers, low predator numbers.

Yes you can I have seen it happen personally witnessed it myself twice.

Here is something for y'all to chew on.

1) This season we shot about a 140 inch deer in a food plot running around a few does (early rut)....

We had pictures of this deer on another piece of property 5 miles away as the crow flies.

Never had a picture or seen hide nor hair of him on the place until he was killed.


2) On another place we hunt I have seen at least 6 deer within the last 2 weeks that I have ZERO pictures of and have never seen before on the property and we feed year-round. They are small bucks and not what we want to shoot but they showed up. And these are not mature deer you would assume could be shy of the feeders. If they were hanging out around there 24/7 I would have pictures of them.


What happened?....The deer were/are there because of the does.

We don't shoot does out of the food plots and I could very easily fall into the notion that I need to thin them out. We will see 15-20 does per sit on this place. You want the does. When the rut gets going our place will be ground zero for about a 5 mile wide radius around it. Folks around this place blast a LOT of deer. A lot of our small bucks are going to get killed cursing the countryside looking for their own piece of the action.....

Either way we will probably see and shoot a good one or two over the next couple weeks. The bucks are on our property because we've got the does.

Goat, the new yearling bucks that you are seeing, are probably the ones the momma's run off of other properties.

Very true. .

But, I'm not talking about yearlings - 2.5 year old 8 pointers.

That's small bucks in my book. But that is a pretty good one for many hunters just a nice ear width symmetrical deer.

I saw 2 myself in 2 sits. Never seen them before and have zero pictures of them. Wish I had a kid with me they would have made a very fine first deer.

I have also witnessed this first hand.....I promise it can be done and it takes a LONG time to recover.

Hell Yes! Deer numbers are bad low across the river from you DW. On the other hand, turkey numbers are damn good.

Wish we would go to tags. 2 bucks and 4 does per person. Get the tags mailed to you once license is purchased. BIG fines for deer found with no tags. Works in other states where the hunting is much better than ours.

When I hunted in Iowa years ago, our hosts were insistent that we put on the tags before moving any deer. Doe, buck, didn't matter. Make sure the tag was filled out appropriately and affixed.

They didn't want us to get into trouble and they didn't want to get into trouble for not letting us know. Said they had good relationships with the game wardens, worked with them on poaching issues and trying to maintain that good relationship, and they wanted us to know what to do and that failing to do so wouldn't be shrugged off as a first-time "they didn't know" or "they don't do it like that where they live" kind of thing.

You really wanna get some some Fudd's wrapped around the axle tell them that would include keeping proof of sex with the meat when transporting. I'd expect some actual heart attacks.

Does any state require that now? Which ones?

Absolutely required in Colorado, and that is what you tag as well. Antlers do not count as proof of sex either. Too easy for someone to shoot a male and then claim the meat is from a female or vice versa.

Interesting. Didn't know they did that. Is that for all big game animals, or just elk and deer?

All big game.

Id be fine where I hunt if season didn't open till 15 Dec. and the limit was 2 bucks and 2 does

There are a lot of good posts and opinions in this thread.

You can definitely overkill does.
That is proven fact and you can wipe out a deer herd by doing it.
And that is what happened all over the Southeastern U.S. with all the QDM "you can't kill enough does" bs.

We basically stopped killing does in 2007 when we had a regional population collapse that resulted from killing too many does
coupled with a coyote explosion.

Now we just kill 2 for the freezer each season - one for me and one for my brother who lives out of state.
I kill his early and save it for him and he kills a doe on his last day of rut hunting in late January for me.

Fewer does = fewer deer = fewer bucks = fewer mature bucks.

Ok, we have 6 pages of opinions from a bunch of rednecks, me included. Now I would like some of our biologist to weigh in with some actual data.

Aren’t biologists some of the ones who pushed blasting all the does?