I would say we have less than 15 per square mile and would like to see it double.

The place we hunt in Kentucky is probably 50+ and I think it may be a bit much but its some fun hunting and keeps things interesting.

When my kids get big enough to hunt that is where I want to take them starting out.

Nope. If you're looking at a field full of does you probably won't see any bucks.

I think we are at 20-25 with almost a 1:1 ratio. This is based on actual camera pics and boots on the ground. 4 years ago we were at 12-15 with the same ratio. In 5 years on this property we have shot a grand total of 2 Does. M Brock has been on my place several times and i am curious if he agrees with my assessment.

I would love to have 50+. Bow season is great for seeing deer but I have only seen 3 does while hunting since gun season and 2 bucks that I jumped walking in. I think another couple of years of NOT shooting does and we may be able to get to 40/sq mile

I just want to see a deer, hear an owl, smell the pines.

This pseudo management concern takes all the fun out of it.

BFD

I don't know why, but I've always thought around 40 deer/Sq Mile was about the right number, depending on habitat, of course. I know you want it to be under the carrying capacity of the land and a growing herd is typically a healthy herd.

If you are seeing 20 does every sit you don't need to worry about killing them I would focus my efforts on figuring out who is shooting all the young bucks.

You can't effectively manage your deer herd with your trigger finger. If you want the proper balance, buck doe ratio, whatever that is... stop shooting them and within 5 years you will have it.

I have a place I own that nobody shoots anything because everyone shoots everything they see around me. That situation is you can't beat them so you might as well join in the fun and blast everything you see.

I have another place nobody shoots anything that isn't worth mounting and I can take a kid out there and kill a 120 inch deer this afternoon - no lie. When you are seeing multiple small bucks in your plots early your numbers are about right..... and your odds of seeing something worth killing are good and only going to get better But you can't see a bunch of small deer if you shoot all the does. Every doe you kill is 2 deer you won't have next season and possibly (likely) 1 buck that will never be born.

You just have to exercise trigger control. That ain't happening with most of y'all.

I only want to see one.... The biggest buck, in the daylight, while I'm there.

My current place is low, probably less than 20 DPSM. I wish I was like some of yall and had to kick them out of the way to climb in a tree.

The vast majority of those, we're kicking out the way, are does, yearlings and basket rack bucks.
I'd rather have low density and bigger racks.

As many deer as the land can hold at it's worst. So best year good summer rain lots of AG field and food plots do great with bumper acorns so the green fields grow throughout the winter and deer have food all year is awesome. And that year you can hold a ton of deer. But what about the years of summer drought terrible crops that get cut early. No acorns and plots get flooded in December rain. Those years the deer will suffer and bucks won't reach full potential. So personally I want as many deer as the land can hold on a bad year. And on good years with more food than deer then we will have major growth. They way to check for density is to do a camera survey and have a cage in the plots. If the caged area is significantly taller than the outside you have too many deer in the area for the food available.

I wish the doe days were back down to 2 weeks, we have plenty enough food for them!

So you’re saying that its not ok for deer to have any noticeable impact on the forage? Are you talking about baskets in food plots or exclusion pens for natural forage?

Yeah, cause killing all those does and basket racks magically make racks grow bigger.

What people in Alabama need to figure out is that it don't matter if it's only one deer (a buck) PSM, we don't have the soil and ag to grow big bucks like other states. Knowing this, I want as many deer as possible

Our land is just like yours. We have some decent bucks on camera nothing huge. The lease holder of the property told us to shoot some does but it’s kinda hard to shoot when just about every doe or every other doe has fawns with them. Then we see a few small racked bucks in the afternoons but every year it’s the same way. We will see two year old and occasional 3 year old bucks in the food plots every single year. For all the bucks we let walk to get bigger where the hell do they go the next year.

Enough that if you look real hard you could possibly see the beginnings of a browse line about the end of Feb begining of March.

Noticable and significant are different things. I mean if you have fully grown plot in a 3 foot circle in middle of plot and bare dirt outside, then you have too many deer for that plot.

How big is this plot we’re talking about???..... One acre?......Three acres?......Why is that small area used as the measuring stick for how many deer you should have?? Aren’t the other 100’s of acres surrounding that plot more important than that one small area? Shouldn’t that be taken into consideration? Are you basing your deer density goals off of what a small food plot can keep up with?

Doesn’t matter if they have fawns. The fawns will be fine. That’s an emotional decision. Not a biological one.

A lot of those bucks aren’t getting bigger. They’re as big as they’re going to get. I met with a guy not long ago who had several hundred acres, bordered by a thousand acres, and between the two of them they didn’t kill more than a couple bucks a year. He asked me where all their young bucks were going. After looking at his trailcam pics he had quite a few 4,5,6 year old deer but didn’t recognize it because he was only looking at racks. There’s a whole lot of bucks around here that are never going to score more than 100-115”. 115-125” is where most of them will top out. The 130”+ is a rarity and only a small percentage will ever get there.

They also roam a long way at times. Deer die off the property and you never know it. Natural mortality is also higher in areas with a higher Buck density. Lot of factors at play.

No, I don't. We did the, "Go easy on the does because they will be bait during the rut", thing for years. Once I started doing what my daddy always said and tried to get the ratio as even as possible we started seeing a lot more bucks. I have been a lot more heavy handed with the does than most would be comfortable with. I get a lot of guys shaking their heads when we get to talkin' about it. Most will disagree with it but that's okay, I reckon. To each his own.

^^^^^^^This new hunter recruitment is down because thanks to State's liberal doe harvest / the push for too many years to kill does far too many kids go hunting and sit in the woods for days without seeing a deer.