Getting back to the ordinal post about natural morality. Well I have 750ac high fence with native deer along with a few bred does and two bucks we've put in over the past couple years. For the most part the Texas stats are right except for the 1% on four year olds, it's way way more. If I had to make a guess, less than 20% make it to 5 years old. Few years ago, had around twenty migrants come out after tree planting season to walk the land looking for sheds, skulls and dead deer. Took about six hours for them to do it along with three of us retrieving stuff when they yelled for back up. Found a lot of deer that disappeared over the years.
That sure don't leave many targets if you are only hunting 5 year old and older bucks. Kind of disheartening actually. I knew mortality was high for bucks but had no ideal it was as high as it is before I started reading some of these studies. If you were hunting 640 acres 1 square mile and the area had 40 deer per square mile and a doe/buck ratio of 2/1 this would be a above average area in AL. You would have 26 does if said does raised an average of 1.25 fawns which would be above average probably you would have 16 buck fawns if 20% made it to 5 years old that would leave 3 bucks. This would be on above average to excellent area of the state and still only 3 bucks per square mile on average. Most of us are hunting land that would be inferior to property with these numbers. Kind of a sobering thought. And really tells me maybe it ain't that those old bucks are that hard to kill more than it is you can't kill what ain't there.
