Bowhunting........

Or you could cut down on members and pay more per member. The largest problem is everyone wants to keep doing what they want to do and make everyone else comply.if you need 5 deer to feed your family for a year shoot em. If you need 10 member to pay for your lease get them. But don't complain your not seeing any deer..and your solution be state who you've already said can't manage deer should make everyone else do what you want to do to manage deer.

I want to cut my members, but that still doesn't solve the problem. My lease for example, just to use round numbers is 1/3rd pine thickets, which are unhuntable. It's 1/3rd pines that need to be cut/thinned, with nothing growing under them, so its useless to hunt, no reason for a deer to be there, except to travel to a better place. The other 1/3rd is huntable, and thats where the food plots are, and guess what? All the huting pressure. So I basically have half a square mile of huntable property, and the density in Shelby Co is 30 to 60 deer per sq mile. If half are doe's and half are bucks, that means I have about 7.5 to 15 doe's that the guys can hunt and shoot. If we shoot 5, that leaves us 3 basically to repopulate on the low side and 10 on the high. Half the fawns will be bucks.

You don't have to be a math whiz to figure out that is not a recipe for increasing your deer herd when you have a daily doe limit and 3 buck per season limit. It won't work. So say my lease is 12000. 10 guys are paying 1200 just for the lease. That doesn't cover seed and fertilizer. So I am gonna ask for 1400 a year and tell them, hey you can't kill a doe????

Who will sign up and write me a check? I will put you on the list for the 2022-23 season.

The problem is no one wants to pay money and not shoot deer.......the only solution is to pay more money and shoot less deer. My point is no one can fix this. Most especially the government

We aren't killing to many deer. What we aren't doing is killing enough bucks. Since I basically have 2 square miles, I can "carry" 60 to 120 deer on my lease, based upon the last denisity data for Shelby County I have found. We have killed 7 deer this year. That's not to many. Only one was a mature buck. My son killed a 2 year old 8pt while I was with him. I haven't even seen a rack buck this year, except the one my son shot. All my camera's show more bucks than doe's. I have 7 or 8 out, what are the chances that I managed to hang 8 camera's in various places on the property, and ALL of them are in buck rich area's, not doe rich area's.

The problem is the buck to doe ratio is way off. The only way I can keep my population where it is right now is to kill an equal number of bucks and doe's. We have killed 4 doe's, 2 bucks and a button head. Last year we killed I believe 6 doe's and 3 bucks. All I know of the prior year was 3 doe's and 2 bucks.

Since the limits have been heavily skewed towards doe killing and heck even the biologist I had come out suggested we kill 15 doe's, its creating a system where I am "carrying" more bucks per sq mile than doe's. I don't need 30 bucks to breed 30 doe's. And we don't see bigger bucks chasing doe's. Why? Well I would say because we have to many bucks.

And based upon the useage of my green fields, I am not on the high side of the denisity curve. So for me the solution is a couple years of very limited doe harvest, and way more buck harvesting, even immature bucks, to bring the ratio back into one that is better suited for deer movement. Then deal with the doe situation differently.

The only doe's that were killed on a green field this year were killed by kids. Most of the guys have let them slide. So I am part of the way there. But your average hunter in a club doesn't even own a climber. The come out and sit in shooting houses or ladder stands. The main climber hunter in my club is me.

And I can't hunt the pine thickets. I can hunt the edges, but there are trails coming out of them everywhere. I would need 50 camera's to monitor those.

I have everything I can plant planted pretty much. I can carry way more deer than I have, based upon my utilization and lack of a browse line. I just do not see a way to fix it except to not shoot any doe's for a while, or kill off some of the immature bucks until I have a larger resident doe population. It probably needs to be both.