More folks are going to have to take this ^^^^ same mentality to help balance things out…..I have no illusions about corn going away……there’s too much money involved in it from the sale of baiting license to the sale of the corn itself. Corn wars and trying to out bait the neighbor it would seem is just part of the game now. However, I think a lot of folks might want to reconsider how they approach their management plans in some of these more effected areas. We need there to be some properties where folks are pulling back the reigns in these more fragmented areas especially……realizing that there are plenty of folks around you to “manage” the population.

One thing I don't get is the people saying "hunter participation is down" etc... between land prices, access limitations, development, and public land usage, I'm all for fewer people hunting.

It can’t be down. This state is hunted to absolute death.

People aren't reporting

^^^^

Hunter Numbers "Down"

“We can’t keep going back to the same well,” Sykes said. “I go to the woods because I love the woods. We have people now getting interested in hunting who want a source of non-GMO, organic, free-range protein. They want to know where their meat is coming from. Is that your typical hunter? No.

“But our tried and true recruitment methods have just about reached their limits. We have to start thinking outside the box. We have to tap new groups.”



Woods are empty baws go home. We've got about 10 hunters per square mile and 30 deer per square mile.

Pennsylvania has got to be like a war zone

No what I am saying is it doesn't take much basic math to figure out what the issue is. A deer has, in rare cases, triplets. Most of the time its either twins or a single fawn. We know from the study in GA that if you don't control yotes, the recruitment rate for fawns is 55%.
That means if you kill a doe, you need 2 that survive and have twins, to basically replace the one you killed. It's just the odds and math. Chances are the 2 doe's will have a doe and a buck fawn each, if they have twins. The yotes will kill 2 of the 4. That means only 1 surivives, which replaced the one you shot last year.

You need 4 doe's to survive and all 4 to have twins, just to gain, and the math is you gain 1 doe. Kill yotes and the recruitment rate goes to the mid 80's. Then you can start gaining a little ground.

Take your normal timber co lease. I can't bait. I can't hinge cut. I can't burn. I can't have big green fields. When they cut (thin) tree's, they just randomly cut them. If they cut them in rows like a quail plantation, then you could bush hog on a 3 year rotation and create better cover. By the time I can deal with the skidder rows, the briars are too tall. My soil is 4.6-5.2 ph. It takes a lot of lime to get it productive. And a lime truck can't get in there, and I don't have a lime spreader, so its a by hand, or by pellet lime job. Then you have to wait a while for the PH to come up.

My lease is essentially 1.75 square miles. The density for my area is 30 to 60 deer per square mile. So on the low end, I have 52.5 deer. On the high end, which I am not even close to, I have 105. I have probably 12 different rack bucks on camera. Not counting spikes, and 3 or very small 4pts. That also wouldn't count this years button bucks. So out of 42.5 deer, how many do you think are 4 pts or less, and buttons, versus doe's? If its 3 to 1 in favor of doe's, then I basically have 22 bucks and 30 doe's. If 10 members kill 1 doe each. Now I have 20. Those 20 will only replace the 10 doe's killed, assuming all have twins. Unless I somehow manage, in my free time, to kill a bunch of yotes. That doesn't count car wrecks, poaching, disease, or poor crippling shots.

You can't hold a person to 3 bucks, and essentially unlimted doe's and grow the population on a statewide level. There are pockets you can kill more doe's with no negative impact, but... not where I am. Since the laws don't look like they are changing, we have to change on our leases to help stabilize and regrow the population. And that's the direction we went on mine.

It dang sure is

Found a bunch of dead heads here in Jefferson County this year. Wonder if we had some EHD or blue tongue this year?

Absolutely. It's not the corn. It's simply ridiculous to allow everyone to kill a doe a day all season long. I know that no one will actually kill that many but it is still allowing an absolute slaughter of does. Out of state hunters flock to places like Illinois hoping to kill one monster buck. They flock to Alabama packing seven 150qt igloo coolers or a deep freezer to haul the mega meat harvest back. If you have a big enough track of land you can control your deer numbers by exercising a little more restraint. But for people hunting smaller parcels all it takes is one neighbor fully on the "If it's brown it's down" train and you are going to see a drop in deer numbers eventually. Most of Alabama doesn't have the agriculture anymore to sustain deer numbers in the face of this kind of slaughter. Also most of the acorn producing trees have been mowed down and replaced by hybrid pine trees. Pine plantations don't have much nutritional value for deer. Deer numbers are definitely down in my neck of the woods.

Zone C is the most impacted area despite having pretty limited doe days......Its the corn

It’s not the corn. On our lease we could literally kill a doe everyday easy. We don’t shoot does. It’s a choice. If you want to see deer when you hunt don’t kill does!! It ain’t rocket science.

Friend of mine and I were talking about this the other day. He brought up a good point, hunting pressure is high and more deer are getting kilt due to the fact that a pound of Hamburger is $10.00 dollars. Poor folks can't afford to buy meat from Walmarks so they are feeding their family with deer. Make sense to me. Democrats ruin everything.

This is per year

$1500 in club dues
$1000 in groceries and gas
$300 to process 3 deer per year.

$2800 per year for roughly 100lbs of meat in return. $28 lb sounds costly. But I do it every year. 🤷🏻‍♂️😁😁

And that’s not even counting everything else that goes in with it. Just bare essentials, now I’m not fussing about it cause I choose to do it and I enjoy deer camp and everything that goes along with it. But folks ain’t out here deer hunting cause it’s cheaper than beef at the piggly wiggly.

000 Buck you think poor folks that want to feed their family are playing by the rules? That kind of deer hunting is rich man's hunting.

People are still not reporting their harvests imo.
I hear shots almost every time I go hunting. It starts during bow season too.
Been a good year for us though. Thankfully.
Could easily have been one of our best.

IMO this is closer to how the math would play out for someone who lives in the country and is actually hunting for the meat.

I can speak for parts of Franklin, Winston and Marion. As many or more deer than ever in the tracts I’m familiar with there.

On one 600-acre tract where there’s only a few weeks of doe season, we’ve killed 6 doe and still seeing 20 on a heavy day.

There was an abundance of acorns this year compared to last year and the drought wrecked greenfields in NW Alabama.

Acorns combined with little to no greenfields equals less deer killing for the average Joe.

Also it seems like now that there are more deer and it’s zero challenge to killer a doe, less folks are interested in killing does. Everyone is waiting on that 2-3yr old 8pt to daylight on the cell cam at the feeder.

15 years ago when deer weren’t nearly as abundant. I would hear 10-15 shots on opening day of season (also opening day of doe season). Nowadays I’ll see 20 deer on opening day and might hear 2 shots.

The deer are still here, folks just not interested in nanny whacking anymore.

Its the corn........