So here is a question I have found drastically different answers to from different managers and biologists.

Should you rectify bad sex ratios by killing does and can sex ratios really get as bad as some say they can?

I’ve heard both sides. One says yes kill the does down to equal buck numbers. The other says no they will rectify themselves since fawns are born at a 1:1 ratio. And there’s no mathematical possibility of the ratio getting worse than 3:1 anyways.
What do yall think?

Unless you have a browse line and need to thin mouths, you don’t NEED to kill does.

Definitely don’t have a too many deer. So you believe the ratio will fix itself then? 10%-30% buck mortality rate?

The only time I was involved in property management substantial enough to worry with buck/doe ratio was a 6,000 acre ranch coop in Oklahoma. We shot h*ll outta does down to what we “thought” was 1:1 and hardly had a whole rack buck by mid December. Of course it was pretty darn fun hunting.

On an Alabama landscape, I’’d probably only concern myself with whether my food plots can get over two inches high and harvest as necessary.

I do not believe that 99% of properties can achieve anything remotely close to a 1:1 ratio without killing off way too many deer and decreasing deer sightings. To get a 3:1 to a 1:1, you have to kill 50% of your total deer population….

You ant quality or do you want trophy.

They are not the same and management is not the same

Folks really get those two intertwined and they are not.
Even after killing 50 does this summer I’m still seeing on camera 4-5 does per buck

The only time I ever saw a browse line was in the old T R Miller management area close to Brewton. Deer were small and overpopulated. The guy over the club next to mine said he wants to kill 40 does off his 1000 acres to get buck-doe ratio better, we are far from being overpopulated in Cleberne Co

^^^

Again, Post #2

We are definitely not overpopulated. We killed 22 does on 2500 acres in conecuh co and they averaged 118lbs.



Tell me the difference between the two so I can tell you which one we want.

Based on those definitions what we want to do is a mix of both. We want to shoot bucks 4.5+

Trying to figure out what to do with doe harvest now. I don’t put a lot of stock into any of the old QDM stuff though. After following it for almost 20 years I’ve found that it contradicts its self a good bit. And they make a lot of blanket rules that shouldn’t be made.

welllllllll first you gotta have some idea of the carrying compacity . id only kill mature buck at first , killing does would depend on what i was seeing . . see how it goes next couple years . but if you aint got a very large track of land you pissing in the wind and if you dont have that large track of land for years ,,, again you pissing in the wind . IMO !!!!!


screw qdm .

We average killing 0-4 on 3400 acres the last 25 years.

27 deer in a 4acre field. How many needs to have horns?

It depends. Not an answer that works in every situation.

Some how I knew you were gonna say that !

None. Just because a certain sex is concentrating in one area doesn’t mean you have skewed sex ratios.

79 doe does doe’s in a 100 acre stretch not a horn in sight… id say its off a little especially knowing what all is on camera. Those (27) were just the ones in my backyard

The other option is quit shooting so many bucks, you know that, right?

None. Cows and goats will ruin a foodplot.