I killed the two biggest bucks i ever killed there on Jan 25th . That was always the day the big bucks were moving . Not sure about the breeding dates though .

It’s one property, or collective of properties with similar objectives and interests. It includes heavy timber harvest, lots of burning, invasive species management and deer harvest strategies that meet the objectives.

Before you backtrack...

If you think within a few years that you changed the Rut dates by a week on a specific piece of property.... this would be some groundbreaking stuff that nobody has ever achieved anywhere else that I have ever heard of in the wild.

Appears this is what you are suggesting.

Better let everyone else know you've figured out what to do. There is going to be a LOT of hunters interested in this and you've allegedly got a Biology Degree so they'll likely believe you.

You are a friggin pro at being a peckerhead

It's a target rich environment

Expert level.....

And you would be 100% wrong.

I’m not entertaining a fool so those who are interested can read it I guess.

It is a fact that the presence of mature bucks in a population is an important factor to initiate estrus cycles in does.

It’s also a mathematical fact if you remove outliers on both ends of a bell curve you move the average into a tighter window. By correcting sex ratios, there are far fewer does having to go into estrus a 2nd or 3rd time to get bred. By removing those from a data set it does in FACT shift the average breeding date to an earlier time frame.

If anyone wants to argue that I don’t know what else to say. There’s nothing to argue. It’s only proving ignorance and unwillingness to accept truth at that point.

Matt just out of curiosity, what is the preferred buck to doe ratio on a property? I know a lot of factors go into that but what is your opinion?

In an ideal world 1:1. In reality 1:2-1:3 is more realistic on most properties, and acceptable.

👍🏻

I guess it depends on what your management goals are.

Blasting the chit out of does might improve the “rut”, but at what cost?

Nothing is gained without something lost.

And absolutely nowhere in this thread has that even been alluded to as an objective or practice implemented on any property.

So how many properties do you manage that have required killing more bucks than does to correct the balance?

Yes, it’s absolutely about killing does as well as managing habitat.

There’s a difference between an educated decision to kill a certain number of does and “blasting the bleep out of does”

So what is lost when you kill a doe that needs to be killed?

It can be but not always. Some properties need to kill does. Some do not. It’s very site specific.

Killing more bucks than does has never been on the table on any property I’ve managed.

It’s about improving habitat condition and keeping a deer population within a reasonable level within whatever habitat condition you have. That’s different depending on objectives and the habitat types there.

So is this a great reason to NOT shoot mature bucks with undesirable antlers and leave them in the herd?

If they are the only mature bucks you have it’s best to leave a few. Their presence in the social structure is more important than their antler characteristics, which you will not change.

Uh, I don’t know, maybe deer? For every doe you kill, you kill every fawn she will ever have. Some of those fawns are bucks.

I guess I’m just saying it’s a fine balance in my mind. And typically, unless you have 1000s of acres or a high fence it will never be close to an exact science.

What does needs to be killed mean, what happens if it's not killed. And where do you get this education, to make these decisions?