Buck Survey: Wet/Cold Snap Killing fawns

[S.T.Fanatic]

I have been wanting to do this myself and just haven't. This is interesting to see and may just be the push I need to get going on it. I am actually a bit jealous. I would love to get the neighboring landowners in my area to do something along these lines.

To me it seems like the scores are very low from 4.5 and lower. I know every deer wont grow large antlers no mater how old they get. Not all dirt has the same antler building potential either. Going off your spread sheet there are nearly twice as many bucks being harvested as doe. If you keep this up year after year your area is going to be "shot out".

I firmly believe that if the doe harvest increased by 3-4 times you would see the average score per buck increase a eye opening amount. You would also be making more room for dispersed bucks to find your properties.

 

[CedarSwamp]

I completely agree with all of your statements.

Our crew of 8 hunters shot one 4 1/2 yr old buck last year and 2 does. We have people in the area with 500 acres shooting 1 deer of their property and two groups who each own 160 acres who both shot 10 deer of their land. It varies a lot! The people who shoot a lot of deer seem to be able to do that year after year and still get mature bucks every year. Not what we'd expect to see.

Our county always shoots more bucks than does and obviously our immediate area does so as well and by a significant amount! We do our best not to get frustrated, but like last year when we had 4 nice bucks that we were passing up for next year and all four get shot that is tough not to get disappointed. But the other hunters were very happy with them so that is good and hopefully we build some momentum towards more management focused on population and age structure.

We'll see if we find additional information to add for keeping statistics, but for now probably just the buck survey and keeping track of mortalities. I find it really hard to figure out how to do a reliable population estimate or buck to doe ratio with having to actually identify individual does.