Yup. GPS collared studies amaze me just how far they do travel. The technology was a game changer for biologist I bet. Used to read studies done by radio telemetry and man that was good info for the day but I bet the doors opened with GPS collars

It's deceiving to hunters because deer spend a LOT of days throughout the year moving around on small scale movement patterns……..Bed here, move a few hundred yards to feed and back……Many hunters don’t recognize the extent of the shifts and reshuffling that occurs periodically though…..the late winter expansion…..the fall dispersal……the late summer fawning……the rut....etc….It’s almost like breaths being inhaled and exhaled the way they concentrate and disperse……concentrate and disperse……concentrate and disperse….over and over through time.

And any spot that stays too concentrated for any length of time in comparison to the rest of the area, draws in the yotes to bust it up. They recognize where the higher density stands are occurring.

I knew several of the scenarios fall shifting and so forth but when it became concrete that numerous bucks use the same rub and or scrapes it became clear that there was a lot more going on than hunters thought. I still hear hunters say that buck and that scrape or rub. We had a guy in the club that watched numerous yr old spikes wear out a cedar as big as your upper leg. Said they were done because that’s what made those rubs.

Early day QDMA had videos of numerous bucks using both rubs and scrapes. I’m sure there are circumstances outside of that being the case.

I think I became a little disillusioned big buck hunting when I realized many of those big bucks I was hunting had actually just showed up in the area. I can think of only one mature buck I had a history with.

A good friend does that with his neighbors. He did have a bad neighbor for a few years but last time he mentioned they were all on the same page for the most part.

There should be a reshuffling of does occurring right now according to the amount and location of fawning habitat. This is one of the times when doe groups move around within their bigger home range or expand it/shift it. They spread themselves out according to the arrangement of fawning cover on the landscape and the amount of competition for it……which forces some to search for new spots….. to the extent to which females disperse anyways. They basically start practicing a little bit of social distancing from one another as the does isolate themselves to give birth. This seems to be when some groups or individuals find the holes to fill in left behind by the past years female mortality and they end up with a more permanent shift in their late summer and fall range. Something to this effect is happening with doe populations anyways.

An easier way of imagining this might be to think about if we went back to when restocking occurred and there were 10 does released in one spot……How did those doe populations expand from that point??.....They didn’t just stay in that one spot getting more and more dense within a single 500 acre woodlot, right?……They expanded and shifted outwards from the "higher concentration" into the open spots. The same type of process is still occurring now each year as the higher concentrated areas push outwards during these reshuffling and shifting events. That’s assuming that the population and reproductive rates are high enough for there to be competition that pushes that expansion.

This “rate” of doe expansion and replacement over the larger area is what is really being affected by properties that are doe whacking. Property lines don’t exist to the deer population….It’s all one big space to them. There are some nuances caused by man-made and natural boundaries though.

This rabbit hole goes pretty deep………

A good example to use here would be Goatkiller’s situation he described. He hasnt been shooting hardly any deer since he took over and has gone from seeing 5 or 6 deer to 10-12….to 20+…..which shows that his property has the resources to support more deer than what it was running with before…..At some point though he’s gonna hit a plateau with these sightings ……..because when the doe groups begin to max out the resources then competition will kick in and that inner growth he’s experiencing will shift to expansion.

Now at this point if Goatkiller decided to go in a start whacking “X” number of does annually……he’s basically just whacking the expansion were talking about by preventing the competition from occurring. You COULD do that or you could just allow the expansion to help prop up doe populations in the bigger area around you…..which long term would be better for Goatkiller IMO rather than doe whacking…..as those expansion does hopefully help to produce more bucks out around him in the future.

“Herd management” occurs on a bigger scale than our individual properties and we are all in a cooperative together already whether we formally acknowledge it or not

I’m pretty sure that’s why I’ve never witnessed overpopulation. They aren’t bound to a certain area. If forage becomes scarce they will go somewhere else. Quality of forage and lack of availability are two different things.

Yep, not unless they are hemmed in by some kind of barriers.

There IS a dynamic at play with balancing cover and food though. These quail plantations are a good example to use here. In some situations what you have occurring is dormant season fire being applied year after year causing an overabundance of grass. Let’s say we’ve done this to the point that our understory is 75% grass and 25% forbs/legumes……In this situation we’ve created boatloads of cover that’s capable of holding way more deer than what we have food. The problem here is that all of those deer arent just going to abandon the cover when the primo food runs out…..They’re going to utilize EVERYTHING down to the sweetgums….and its only after they’ve fully exploited the food resource that they’ll abandon the cover in search of new ground.

Now, an expert might come in and look at the situation and say…”Wow!.....Y’all need to start slaying the does to help correct this issue!”…….But in reality what they likley need to do is correct the habitat management that is taking place that’s causing the imbalance of grasses……They need to reduce grass down to 25-30% and bring forbs up to 70%........This creates a situation where cover becomes a limiting factor that starts driving expansion well before the food resources are so heavily exploited. This dynamic between cover and food is at play everywhere to some degree.

Something else that can be done in the above scenario to help balance the food/cover dynamic……is to simply convert some of the cover into open field……Some of the best places I’ve ever been had big 10-20+ acre fields everywhere……That doesn’t mean that they all have to be managed as a traditional food plot. It just means the area needs to stay in short plant structure less than knee high…….It represents food but not cover. Having big chunks of acreage in that type of situation really helps balance things out when there too much cover.

This idea of having to whay lay a bunch of does like its a chore in order to grow good forage is not really the right way to go about it if you have control of the habitat. There's also a soil "richness" factor at play in producing high quality forage but that's for another post.

I'm pretty sure this doe expansion concept is also the foundation for why the rut plays out the way it does across the state. Its the basis for what's defining the separate areas.