Truth. Last fall I had a doe with triplets on the home place. I didn't say anything about it on here cause I would be branded as a liar.

3 ain't something most of us haven't seen.

Many times

Coyotes are likely taking out any weak, wounded, sick deer in the population. I've seen enough now through tracking that I'm certain they target the wounded deer hunters shoot that are marginally hit. It took me a while to put two and two together and but now that I know what I'm looking for......I see a lot of evidence of coyotes getting to the wounded deer before us and taking it on out. They aren't doing it by just jumping on it and attacking it when they find it. They get it up and push it just like we do when I'm tracking if we jump a wounded one. They just follow along behind trailing it until the injury or ailment wears them down to the point of exhaustion. I see it commonly on leg hits for instance. The buck can run fine to start with....but then after awhile that one good front leg starts wearing out of him and suddenly he can't climb that ridge or cross that steep creek bank. I've watched my dogs track one partially up a ridge and back down....up it again...and back down....before finally just staying in the bottom. Once the deer reaches the point of exhaustion then that's when the coyotes....most likely in packs....take it on out. Probably without to much of a fight at that point.

I've even seen though where they attacked some straight out of the bed. The evidence was big wads of white hair leading in a bread crumb like trail away from where the deer had initially bedded. I also commonly find deer that should have never went as far as what they did on their own and they'll be eaten up by coyotes once we do find them. I've seen them have green gut matter blown out at the hit site the size of a paper plate and when we get to where they bedded at 300-400 yards, no deer to be found....where did we find it??...Over a mile away with nothing left but a skeleton and rack. One of the last deer I tracked this year was shot in the hind quarter and up into the back of the guts with a 7 mag. It ran to a prime spot for one to bed up...wet and thick along a small creek. He left from there though and continued down the little creek for 1100 yards....moving through prime bedding cover the entire way. He didn't go that far on his own will....the coyotes got him up and pushed him....he was eaten up too. I can give you one account after another of situations where I'm just about positive its happening. Wounded deer don't want to go any farther than they have to. I'm sure there's some exceptions but you're just not likely to see one travel these long distance without being pushed.

I wonder if this is the same thing the red wolf did as well. It would only make sense that a predator like this would choose the less risky method of taking a deer out. I'm not sure how big they are but it would hard for me to believe that they attacked and took down full grown deer with any regularity. I would think they likely targeted the weak and injured as well. If so that means that the coyote is replacing them and the population could be controlled by them. Just a thought anyways

I have watched a perfectly healthy 2 1/2 year old buck run by with it's tongue hanging out wondering why because it wasn't near the rut, only to see a large black coyote following it 10 minutes behind without breathing hard. Then another just like it 2 minutes after that. They do run down healthy deer. It might be rare, but I saw it.

When we jump a wounded deer my dogs don’t take out after it like a walker hound. I’ve trained them to stay close to the handler so it kinda limits us to what we can deal with on the ones that aren’t dead….I’m good with that though. What we do is once we get it up and it takes off….I let the dogs get in behind and continue to track it at however fast they want to take it. Otis is about like a beagle running a deer on a deer drive. I do this so that we can assess how injured or weak the deer might be. If we go 600-800 yards or something and we haven’t once seen the deer or heard it jump out in front of us….then we make the call that he is still pretty lively and going. However, if we get up on him several times and hear him struggling up ahead then we know that if we continue to push him there’s a good chance of him baying up.

I believe the coyote is doing the same thing….and that’s likely what you saw. I think when they come across a deer that they perceive to be a target for whatever reason they push it a little to test out the potential of taking it down just like we do when blood tracking. I’ve read a study or experiment that talks about the impacts of coyotes on deer behavior and I believe this is where its occurring. The more times a deer is pursued in order to check it for weakness…..the less they move and the more wary they become. It has the same impact as hunting pressure.

I’m guessing that this has been a learned behavior by coyotes and something that they only started doing during some time frame along this progression of them moving east. It may very well just be within recent times of the last decade or so that this behavior has really ramped up. From what I see they appear to be heavily targeting the wounded. A pretty high percentage of the live wounded deer that we get on the next day have signs of yotes getting them up and pursuing them in some form or fashion. There’s times when a wounded deer goes off script so bad from what they typically do that it leaves you scratching your head and wondering if coyotes were the culprit. We tracked a gut shot one day that the hunter and myself agreed to call off because of how far we’d gone. It didn’t make sense and I think it was likely the yotes on that one too but I can’t say for sure.

I think a lot more deer are being taken out this way than what is realized. Keep in mind things may have changed a lot in recent times if this was indeed a learned behavior. I imagine the “rigors of the rut” cause a lot of bucks to become targets…..maybe a doe has complications during birth…..maybe a deer gets sick and weak…..maybe they get hit by a car or break a leg….These deer are all candidates to be targeted and taken out. A coyote doesn’t have anything else to do but to trot around behind that deer until its injury or ailment bring it down. Coyotes don’t have property lines or boundaries to stop them either. I wouldn’t be surprised if some pursuits lasted for a day or two….the yote probably just lays down to rest from time to time and then trots on….he doesn’t have to run them just keep pushing.

A deer’s natural defense to it is to go to a body of water which could very well be just a detrimental to it. We jumped a 3 legged high fence deer this year that had one leg completely disabled. Otis got after him pretty hot and took him about ¾ mile. I saw they were headed for the big lake so I toned him off so I could catch and make sure he didn’t get in trouble. The hunter and guide were coming around in the truck and saw him cutting across a field. They said he was starting to struggle at that point. When I got there the deer had gone off into the lake but was nowhere to be seen. I could hear something that sounded like a deer bellowing 7 or 8 times the direction he had gone in then it went quiet. I just talked to high fence guide a couple weeks ago and he said the deer hasn’t been seen again. He may have very well drowned not realizing he couldn’t swim with 3 legs and his only good front one being worn out. I’m sure this happens with yotes too.

I dont shoot more than I can eat.

Y’all give that yote stuff some thought…I believe there’s some merit to it.

But back to the doe discussion….I think too many people are ‘managing does’ just because they’ve been told or believe that it’s a part of any proper deer management program and they would do it no matter the club or property. I think many time its being done with no real gauge as to if it needs to be done or not. Its more less based on campfire discussions so to speak. At the risk of certain members nutting up on me when I say this….I wonder sometimes if the biologists are just more less taking a wild arse guess…..An educated one now don’t get me wrong….but WAG still the same. Its more like…”Well your property looks like this or that so I think you should take out….maybe…..ehhhhh…..let’s say.... a little more” That’s not meant to offensive. I’m just saying that its still just a really ballpark guess. The same with reading the condition of the habitat....Long term weight trends maybe I could see being more telling.


Something I see that makes me question the whole need for doe management is that I go to some high end properties where you might have lets say 9 members on 3000-4000 acres or something like that. Alright these guys tell me that its routine to see 30-50 deer in the evenings in certain fields….sometimes they’ve seen as many as 60…..Well, these guys don’t shoot chit loads of does or anything. Their mostly buck hunting and bow hunting them a lot of times on top of that. By the way….this isn’t just one place or anything. There’s a good many examples. So what I’m getting around to with this is that they’re not “managing the does” on that place. At best they’re just skimming some off the top. So how is it that the deer herd flourishes from year to year just the same without someone thinning down all the does that they’re overrun with as some would say?? There’s so many folks that would look to that situation and say boy we need to shoot some of them….a bunch of them….but why?....These folks aren’t and I don’t see anything collapsing. Sure, the habitat is being managed well but that still doesn’t dictate the deer growing over its capacity. How is it that its held in check without seeing negative impacts? EHD? Coyotes? …..All I know is....they're loaded with deer year after year. I think if we were able to see the real truth it would be that very few people actually "need" to shoot does....and I actually think there's a real possibility that we could hypothetically just walk away from all together and nature would take care of it at this point just like it once did,

I was in a club for 10 years that killed a pile of does. The last 2 years I was in it a man was lucky to see double digit deer in a day or week. This was on 4900 acres.
They have a full time trapper now, and people are reporting seeing 10 to 20 deer a day. The last 4 years I was in the club, you could put 6 cameras on 600 acres and get the same 6 deer on every camera.

The club I am in now quit killing does in a mass quantity 3 years ago. I've only been in the club 2 years, and I think there have only been 12 does killed in the last 3 years. This is on 2800 acres.
I don't hunt much, but I see anywhere from 6 to 12 deer every morning I hunt.

The 4900 acre club I was in had some incredible genetics. It was nothing to put a camera out and get a 125 to 140 inch deer on camera. Every 4 to 5 year old buck we killed was in the 180 to 200lb range as well.

The 2800 acre club I'm in now, I don't think anybody has ever gotten a picture of a deer over 140. I've killed 2 bucks and both weighed over 200lbs, great racks, but nothing high scoring. I can put 1 camera out on 2800 acres and get 5 or 6 does, and 5 or 6 bucks on the same camera. These 2 properties are 7 miles apart divided by an Interstate.

There is no doubt coyotes are killing a mass number of deer. I've seen them chase what looked like healthy deer, and I've had many cameras out in August and September and seen 2 fawns with a doe>>> coyote pictures the next night >>> 2 days later same doe with 1 fawn >>> after that, same doe with no spotted fawn day after day.

So, trapping and predator control are great tools, but so is not shooting an average of 45 does every year. I can't control trapping because I live 35 minutes from where I hunt, and it's an hour and a half from where I hunt to where I work. Me, Myself, I, and other hunters can control what they do and don't shoot based on what they see and what they have on camera.

As hunters were just a small influence on what population does. Mother N throws curves at deer. EHD being one. Many other things. Herds mostly overcome the ebbs and flows. Lots of habitats changed in AL from N to S have added to the complexity of it all. There’s still a lot of deer in this state.

Well that's a very level headed aproach.

I went to my mamas yesterday and saw 37 standing in a field....that would be highly unusual for marshall county....it freaked me out...i went an got mama an her binos an rode back up there to see them....with the help of some high quality $3 simmons from bout 1983.... I realised...ther were exactly 37 clumps of sage grass that had been skylined by the rye grass that wasnt there the last time i was up there...what an idot i am...like to had a stroke cause i thought... Finally...theyve began to make babys again....then my soul was crushed and all was back to normal....i hate marshall county.

Why is it that Greene and Sumter counties in the 1970s had areas where you could see 100+ deer in a hunt, they killed massive bucks, and very few does were killed? The answer some will give is "they were farming a LOT more acres". But there aren't many soybeans or corn around in farming areas from December through May. I don't think more farming is the reason. I think that properties can support a lot more deer than people think.

That's pretty funny. People that have never hunted in areas without deer cannot imagine there are places in Alabama where you can hunt for a whole season and only see squirrels. And there are plenty of places like that, though.

I don't think it was a conspiracy by anyone with an alternative agenda. I think it was simply mismanagement and a failure to respond to changing conditions. Were there places in the 90s with browse lines that needed population control (primarily in Southwest AL)? Yes. But most of the remaining state was still in the process of building a deer herd when they started pushing unlimited doe killing in the 90s. Then about a decade ago we started to see a massive rise in the number of coyotes (literally 5x more or higher) and proof started to emerge that they were changing their diets to primarily hunt deer. And yet the state has done nothing to change doe killing laws after the introduction of a year round 24/7 predator population. If anything they have further incentivized more doe killing by limiting the number of bucks that can be killed with no corresponding limit on doe kills.

My theory on why nothing has changed: Your big money hunters and people with influence still primarily spend their fall weekends in the high population areas in Southwest AL. They have no first hand experience of what its like to hunt a property with great habitat and see 1 deer all season. They (including Sykes) don't empathize with the hunters in low population areas and dismiss their complaints as if they need to spend more time building habitat. Or, even worse, you get the common response of "well stop killing does, no one is forcing you." With the small acreage tracts that dominate outside of SW AL, you don't individually have the power to control the doe killing over an area of several square miles. One guy on 10 acres can wipe out the doe population in a square mile tract. The whole point of a state conservation department is to use the power of the state government to control the deer herd in a way one individual is powerless to do alone.

Bingo. If you have 12,000 acres in Dallas or Bullock county, you do need to kill more does. And that's where the rule-makers hunt, and always will.

Negative....I can take you to bunch of places in Bullock Co just like that and there's nothing that points toward them "needing" to shoot does. One of the things that opened my eye a little more to it was going inside of high fences and seeing the impact on the habitat in those places. I started looking at the habitat outside of the fence a little differently. Now I wouldn't let my property go to the extent some those have but I don't know that we really have the capability of doing the same thing without being able to restrict the deer's movements like they can.

Yep. In counties mostly made of secluded 1,000+ acre tracts the best approach is to have relaxed doe laws and let the property owner or club decide how to best manage the herd. In counties where the average wooded tract is 100 acres you need the state to manage the herd (the only reason DCNR exists) and actually enforce basic, common sense laws to guide individual owners to share a common management plan. The fewer and less complex the laws are, the better. Restricting doe killing to a few weekends a year (or eliminating it altogether) in counties where you know the herd is struggling is not a complex law and anyone who has ever been around a cattle farm can understand the logic of it.

Show me a county with low deer numbers but decent habitat (anywhere with rotational logging operations has good enough habitat) and you could have a great deer herd that is enjoyable to hunt in 4 years with just a few deer hunting rules: Only hunt in season, no night hunting, no road hunting, no trespassing (including hunting dogs), no doe killing. You wouldn't even need an app on your cell phone.

The vast majority of hunters in low population counties would support not shooting does as long as they felt like their neighbor had to follow the same rule. Instead the low population counties are where the most valuable does have a higher chance of being shot. When the average hunter hasn't seen a deer all season and a young doe walks into the plot at dusk, it is getting shot, especially if the hunter thinks their neighbor 300 yards away will shoot it anyways.

I agree 100%