Peplin Creek
5 year old buck +
so I have seemed to notice a trend out in my general area. I have been hunting on this property for about 10 years now. I have been running trail cameras for all of those 10 years. When I first started hunting out there, our group and most of the neighbors groups would shoot pretty much anything with horns. So there wasn't much managing going on at all. We still had nice bucks on camera and I would be willing to bet that the top end of those deer scored 130 - 150 inches. I would get about 3 bucks like that a year on camera. Probably another 3 or 4 in the 110 -125 inch range. Well running a camera or two and seeing these deer convinced a lot of us to let little bucks go and now I would say the average buck that is harvested on the property or around it (600 acres) is probably 2 1/2 - 3 1/2 inch 8 pointers. 115-125 .It does seem like that's all we ever have on camera now, every once in while I'll get a picture of a buck that pushes 150 but it's middle of the rut, never to be seen again. It also seems like we went from having 5-10 different bucks to hunt to 3-5 different bucks and sometimes lower quality.
So that leads me to my question. I feel like there is almost no chance of changing genetics in a wild herd and maybe all of this is just a cycle or just pure coincidence. But with everyone letting little bucks walk, is it possible that we have somehow been passing down inferior genes of spike bucks and small forks and indirectly having "smaller" shooters than what was around when people took whatever buck they felt like?
I struggle to keep bucks on my property during winter and summer months so maybe some or most of the bucks that we let pass never come back. But that leads me to wondering if we aren't the one growing the bucks, there's really not a downside for others shooting small bucks around us because they are coming from someone else. I don't know... I'm probably just over thinking all of this.
So that leads me to my question. I feel like there is almost no chance of changing genetics in a wild herd and maybe all of this is just a cycle or just pure coincidence. But with everyone letting little bucks walk, is it possible that we have somehow been passing down inferior genes of spike bucks and small forks and indirectly having "smaller" shooters than what was around when people took whatever buck they felt like?
I struggle to keep bucks on my property during winter and summer months so maybe some or most of the bucks that we let pass never come back. But that leads me to wondering if we aren't the one growing the bucks, there's really not a downside for others shooting small bucks around us because they are coming from someone else. I don't know... I'm probably just over thinking all of this.