If you’re experiencing that then you’ve likely got an imbalance of cover to food occurring. In other words, you’re providing far too many deer with cover for the amount of food you’re producing. Check out the last few posts of this thread……..


http://www.aldeer.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=3958363#Post3958363


All of those does you see feeding on the side of 29 and 82 in the winter are doing so due to expansion pressure pushing them outwards and forcing them to feed on the perimeter of their bubble. Notice they don’t do that all year long……only when they’re forced to…..The next step beyond that if pressure gets high enough is for them start venturing back and forth to the other side of the highway…….Too much of that back and forth for very long and it results in getting whapped by a car.....which moderates pressure and expansion

They’re doing so because the state highway dept has planted crimson clover and rye grass along the highway. It’s not due to being forced to. Deer are incredibly loyal to their home range areas, even under pressure from limited resources. I’ve seen that repeated my entire life. All this talk about pregnant or nursing does shifting home ranges due to resource allocation, do you have anything to substantiate that, or is it speculation and theory? There’s lots of theories out there. Fact is deer are individuals. Some choose to stay in a tight core area, some a larger home range, and others are roamers. It all depends on their individual characteristics more so than resource availability. If it was resource availability, or lack thereof, you’d see mass exodus of deer from areas of high populations and degraded habitat, into areas with better habitat, and you do not see that on a large scale. What you actually see in the real world, is deer choosing to continue use of the same areas (with seasonal shifts), even if it ends up costing physical fitness to do so.

Real world facts

vs.

Deer are forced to new areas to eat interstate greens


I'll stick with what Grumpy Grampy Bham Fredo said.

If that were true then you would see more of an even distribution of locations where deer are feeding on the side of the road everywhere you go…..but you don’t……The only spots where you really see much roadside feeding occurring is in the higher density areas where they have to utilize that food source…..The ones that don’t have to don’t feed on the side of road….they feed somewhere in the interior of the bubble.





On the doe movement………

Several years ago I had a pretty good stockpile of does using my place……One winter they just about all got themselves run over and by Feb/March I only had 1 doe left that I was getting on camera……That rocked on for several months until the end of the summer rolled around when suddenly I had a couple new doe groups show up and start hanging around again. Where did those new groups come from if some does don’t shift their core area during fawning???......Do you think a matriarch doe is gonna tolerate competition for her fawning cover from subordinate group when its time to start dropping fawns?? “Cover” is only going to get so full before it reaches a social capacity where the subordinate groups are forced to seek another spot.

You need to call in more back up.......

Somebody go ahead and cue up the real personal attacks instead of this ol passive aggressive BS.........

I looked back at my pictures over the last 5yrs or so of when we killed our biggest bucks. I hunt both private land inside Bankhead and some Government land. My daughter shot her 8pt chasing does on Nov.15th on a youth hunt, and another 8 a couple yrs later on the same week. I have killed 3 good deer in the last 3 years. 2 were shot from Nov.20-27. The outlier was a buck following a doe Dec.20 but that was on a property south of 278 at Natural Bridge. Weird thing is that same property is where she killed on Nov 15th chasing. Bankhead is a different animal. I have helped drag out some mighty fine bow kills the last few years and those were from Oct,20-31. I know 2 of those were killed off scrapes. All things considered If you give me only 2 weeks to hunt that area I would be there from Nov 15-29th. I personally think it should be shut down completely to all hunting for the next 3 years while it gets some desperately needed restocking efforts. I think they should go with say an Iowa bloodline, or maybe Kansas. No hunting for 3 years, except for private lands inside the forest of course.

It’s really not though…….It fundamentally functions no differently than all of these other bubbles on the map where the dates inside of one bubble differs from the area next to it or around it. Keep in mind this map is far from incomplete…..It just brought things into focus enough to understand what was happening. If they had continued on making it more and more detailed over the years then what you would eventually end up with a state full of small, medium, and large bubbles all bumping up against one another…..except none of them are actually round…..the real shapes depend on the roads and major habitat breaks. That’s the reality of what “full resolution” actually looks like. If that isnt true then someone needs to talk the state about the rut map they put out representing “bubbles”.

These areas where bubbles meet and intermingle are not 100% lines in the sand for doe herds. There’s buffer zones of a mile or so width (give or take depending on the scenario) around the perimeter of each bubble where you’re more likely to see some stray spill over mixing in if one bubble is trying to expand. There's the possibility for a lot of different scenarios to play out over time depending on how management changes. The further you get away from that edge though the more uniform its likely to become…..especially if you have a high density interior…. There may be a good deal of interplay between bubbles or there may be virtually none just depending on the doe management at play within each and whether or not herds are “burgeoning” outward.

That’s why even though my main rut in always Jan. 19 – Feb 6……….every few years I see a stray hot doe around Jan 7-9…..That doe was most likely from one of the other South Alabama stocking source that exists to the north. If you look back at the original stockings you had some does that came from Sumter and some does that came from Clarke I believe it was……The early Jan does are the doe lines that came from the Sumter releases and the late Jan are the does from the Clarke Co line……The Clarke Co line dominates my bubble pretty dang uniformly because that’s was what was released on the big dog interior property owners and they’ve been reproducing that line at a pretty good clip…..

I say all that to explain where you’re stray Nov doe likely came from.

I’m just trying to figure out that if deer are not natural expanders then how we accomplished restocking this state.

CNC serious question. Have you ever seen the Bankhead forest in person?

In my opinion, the low density in Bankhead is due to very poor habitat from old growth forests rather than hunting pressure. Therefore I don’t think surrounding high density January rut deer are going to move in rapidly as CNC suggests.

Second, I agree with others that deer are wildly loyal to home ranges, especially does and their female offspring. I have hunted most of my life in areas in southeast AL where deer were never restocked in the 60s and 70s and the population was extremely low and confined to river and creek bottoms. As surrounding ag and cattle fields began to be planted in pines, it took decades for deer to move just a mile or two from those core ranges into just as good of habitat right next door to them. Still to this day there are pockets in Houston and Geneva County where deer in one square mile are extremely overpopulated and a mile away the same habitat type will barely have a huntable population.

I don’t believe any one is arguing that deer have a preferred home range. It’s the though process that they won’t seek out better forage, or better living conditions I can’t get behind. GPS collar data in deer shows that.

This.
I live maybe 10 miles north of the forest. There just isn’t enough habitat in the forest to support a lot of deer. I have some deer here at my house but not a lot. Different story where I hunt on the Marion - Franklin county line. Plenty of deer there. In Bankhead the best week to hunt is the week of the muzzle loader hunt. At my house it’s mid December to Christmas. At my lease in Marion co it’s January 1 till the end of the season. I disagree with CNC the Bankhead is a very different animal.

90% of Bankhead has no cover and near zero food except for early fall when acorns are falling. Deer can’t survive in that.

Yes, I grew up in north Alabama…..I’ve seen pretty much all of our state at one time or another. I’ve actually tracked deer and talked to hunters first hand from Anniston to Selma to Abbeville to Dawson, GA……….Bankhead really isnt as unique as you think it is.

Here's Abolt's Bankhead Prediction: there's gonna be some studs killed in Bankhead, starting 38 days from today and continuing until about the first week of January. I'm 99.99% certain that this prediction is 100% correct.

Exactly……this is its downfall. There’s only “X” amount of Nov does that exist inside of that Bankhead bubble….It’s not an infinite number of them……And what your telling me is that this number isnt really that high despite that being a big chunk of ground. There really aint that many Nov does that exist. That’s why it wouldn’t take much for a burdeoning herd from the west with triple or four times the density to replace them.

All that really has to happen is for hunters inside of the forest to knock back the doe population to lets say 5 deer psm when carrying capacity could actually hold 10 or 15……If that type setup occurs and you have over flow from this other stocking source pushing toward it from the west due to private landowners not shooting does……then over time you’re eventually going to start getting some infiltration occurring from the other line into this low density area. If that starts occurring and continues a little more each year…… then every time you go through another cycle of public land hunters shooting does and them “restocking”……you’re going to keep cutting out the Nov lines a little more and a little more….from 90% of the herd……to 50% of the herd……to 30%......to 15%......... until they eventually fizzle out. Right now its likely the private landowners around the perimeter are propping things up and preventing it from happening…..IF……IF……they’re actually preventing it.

Then how is it putting out such large deer?