60 deer per square mile, or one deer for every 10.66 acres is considered a very high density and habitat will suffer at this density in most of Alabama. A good population number would be one deer per 20-30 acres. I think this is where CNC is coming from. Lets say you're in a good area you have 40 deer per square mile. That's 1 deer for every 16 acres of land. Now lets say you have 100 acres of land that you and your 2 sons hunt behind your house. If you've got a buck to doe ratio of let's say 1:3.5 (probably about right for most of AL). Assuming an even dispersion of deer across surrounding areas, that means your 100 acres of land can sustain and be home for 6.25 deer. Using the B/D ratio, you've got either 4 does and 2 bucks or you've got 5 does and 1 buck. You've got yourself and two teen age boys that hunt the crap out of it because you love to hunt and like to kill deer. Y'all each shoot 2 deer. You just killed everything being sustained on your property and are now impacting all of your surrounding neighbors. The smaller the property, the worse it gets. With 10 acres, you'd clean it out with one single shot. Same with 20acres. What happens when the guy with 3-5 acres kills 5 or 6 a year. The more fragmented the area, the more damage a single or multiple actively harvesting property owners/hunters can do to everyone around him or them.

When Matt says the bucks are being severely overharvested in a lot of areas of the state, here's a way to look at that. State says there were 1,300,000 whitetails in Alabama in 2023 (whether or not this is correct who knows but lets assume it is). Using that same 1:3.5 buck/doe ratio, that means that there "were" 288,000 bucks and 1,012,000 does making up the Alabama deer herd at the beginning of the season. There were 104,986 bucks Chuckie checked just this past season. That doesnt include any of the bucks killed illegally, by cars, poached, natural mortality or killed by the other 40% of hunters not participating in Chuckie check etc. It's reasonable to assume that somewhere around 140,000 bucks (or more) were harvested this past season. That's almost exactly 50% of the total number of bucks you entered the season with, that are now dead and no longer on the landscape, and will not make it to older age classes. Raise your hand if you think that is a good thing and if you think that this sounds like a sustainable long term management plan for the state to continue with.

The above is based strictly on the math and published numbers. Fact is, we really dont know how many deer were in the herd to start with, we dont know how many were actually killed, we dont know what the true buck/doe make-up of the deer herd is in the state. The powers that be are just guessing at all of these numbers, and they certainly are not setting season dates or limits based on anything scientific and for the good of the wildlife because when you apply basic math and statistics to the numbers they put out, and you think about things rationally, it's not a real pretty picture for long term deer hunting in the state.