Originally Posted by Lockjaw
Originally Posted by Droptine-13
No doubt there was twice as many deer here 15 or so yrs ago. The state needs to reconsider the 1 doe a day all season. You can't manage the state as a whole. Each county has different deer densities, depending on habitat and food sources. Hell 15 yrs from now there's liable to not be but a few thousand at the rate we're going. I've never understood the whole blast every doe you see but you can only kill 3 bucks. Makes a whole lot of sense but that what you get when you have ppl controlling things they have no clue of. It's like engineers drawing blue prints but never put boots on the ground to see day to day operations. Everything looks good on paper till you get out on the jobsite to see things for yourself.


This is what I am saying. I have a bioloigist telling me to shoot 15 doe's this year so we can age them. She has seen the property 1 time, for a couple hours. I am on the property over 400 hours a year. I have camera's out. I am planting and maintaining. I said 15 was way to many. 15 spikes perhaps, but not doe's.

I am hunting a lease that is managed for timber production first. I have less than 1% of my total acreage planted on limed and fertilized plots. I cannot carry a super high deer density with that, and over 400 acre's of land with basically pine straw and nothing else on the ground. When they thin or cut it, then I can support more. Then I have 300+ acre's of pine thickets I can't even get into. And the Timber co is telling us what kind of buck we can shoot. The problem is, based upon the number of acre's of territory for a mature buck, I have about 4 of them. If I am 30 deer per sq mile, then I have 50 deer on my lease. Assuming 25 are doe's and 25 are bucks, 4 of which are mature, that means I have 21 bucks running around and maybe only a handful of them will be mature next season. They can be passed on. Culling some of the spikes won't hurt my numbers at all. It might deprive me of a future trophy, but so might killing a doe.

I have to keep the buck kills to doe kills even to keep the population from skewing towards having more bucks than doe's. There is no way around that. Ideally I need to kill more bucks than doe's, because I don't need many bucks to breed all the doe's.



I believe you are overthinking your situation. It seems to me you are approaching this from an accountants perspective. You're putting the cart before the horse. Until you address the overhunting situation, too many guns, you are wasting time and energy. I don't know what authority you have as president, but about 2/3 of your members need to find another place to hunt. I've been running leases for about 40 years and any member that's not an asset to the lease needs to hit the highway.