I’ve got an interesting document to look at that shows the fetal study data for each county but its in a pdf form and I’m not sure how to link it to the thread.

What interesting to me is if you look at ALL the deer sampled in the southwest counties…..there are zero December outliers….Clarke Co for example has the earliest bred doe at Jan 12 for one property and the 19th or later for the other 4……In Marengo Co you have 6 out of the 7 locations with the earliest bred doe being Jan 14-19……One location had a stray outlier on Jan 2……..but still no Dec outliers in ANY of the southwest counties……

Yet in Macon, Bullock, Barbour, Russell and Lee……..You have outliers on Dec 5…..Dec 10……another Dec 5…….Dec 24…….Dec 18…..Dec 10…..Dec 27…..You have multiple early to mid Dec outliers at multiple locations in areas that have peak rut dates of mid/late Jan……Those have to be native descendants or another stocking source……which would mean that to some degree these folks are seeing “two ruts” or possibly even three which would probably seem like one long drawn out trickle in some spots

I do recognize that nature can shift the timing of the rut…..or shift the bell curve……It tends to do that across large areas though and it shifts the curve by the ends of the bell curve being more successful than the middle or by them surviving a bottleneck event, etc….You don’t have individual does that radically shift their estrous timing from one year to the next……or at least I don’t think you do and that’s what I was wanting to verify with the original question in the first post.

What we see happening on the ground across very short distances doesn’t point to anything that environmental factors have adjusted over time…..When you have a majority mid to late January rut with Dec 5 outliers, that’s not a shifted bell curve…..If you look at the southwest counties where nothing has really been tampered with, you can see a “normal” range of outliers……They arent occurring 6 weeks out ahead of the peak. The bell curve is about 18 days wide with 7-10 days on either side for anomalies.

Now, nature may eventually indeed smooth all of this back out over the next couple hundred years because the way nature wants to deal with it is by picking off the outliers…..For example, the coyotes are more likely to find and kill the majority of the individual fawns that hit the ground way out ahead of the main drop…..The ones most likely to make it are the ones born when there are the most fawns are on the ground. The idea that they can only catch so many in that time frame…..That’s how the bell curve gets tightened. However, it may be that the stage of vegetation growth when that outlier is born is much more suited to hide the fawns and those outlier have far higher success rates than the ones born in the middle…..That’s kinda the concept for how things should shift with environmental changes.

I think we humans have had so much of a hand in manipulating the environment and the conditions though that we arent seeing the same natural shifting…… or maybe we are but its just way, way slower.

I question the assumption that does only inherit their estrous timing from their mother. Why wouldn’t the father’s genetics also influence this just as equally? I also question the idea that the same lease could continue having two distinct strains of genetics at this late in the restocking process. Sure in 1970 you might have a buck with Michigan genes on the same lease as one with Clarke County genes but for those two lineages to remain distinct today on the same property would mean that the Michigan deer were only mating with other Michigan deer snd vice versa. That seems extremely unlikely on the same 1,000 acres.

The only way we could see what we see occurring today with different rut dates across short distances is if estrous timing is something strictly inherited from mother to daughter without the male impacting it……If males had any impact on this then the whole state would be the same random hodge podge from one side to the other……

Just take for example the map Lonster posted a pic of in the Bankhead thread showing a where a Bankhead buck was killed 35 miles away……Bucks are dispersing and moving around across large areas all over the state…..If they were carrying a gene for estrous timing with them then you would have Nov ruts all over…..Dec ruts all over…..Jan ruts all over……as that gene spread 35 miles with that buck……Another 10 with his male offspring…….10 more with that ones male offspring and so on…..You wouldn’t have the confinement of the estrous timing occurring like we see happening…..In order for it to stay confined it pretty much has to be passing down through the female lineages

I mean if you think about it…….how would a female inherit a heat cycle from a male anyways??

Same way a buck inherits half its antler potential from its mother.

Copy/paste the article into a Google doc or just upload to Google drive. Click share and post the hyperlink.

There’s some things that you can deduce as pretty much having to be true or false by what we know is occurring. How could a November rut stay confined to Bankhead for a 100 years if bucks are carrying the gene that influences it 35 miles away in one generation?? You would have Nov rutting in Mobile by now.

Bucks dispersing and carrying estrous timing genes with them could very well be exactly why you are seeing random outliers of does being bred 3 weeks before the rest in an area. And in another 200 years we may have a homogeneous rut again due to this dispersal. But an extreme example of a buck traveling 35 miles is an outlier. Most bucks are going to end up within 2-3 miles of where they were born and the spread of outlier genes would be very slow and constantly diluted.

I'll see what I can do......Pretty sure I can email it to someone if you know how.

Why isn’t every high school in America full of elite basketball players since NBA players have been traveling and dating women all over the country for a half century? Because they are extreme outliers in a massive pool of average DNA. And so is your Bankhead buck that traveled 35 miles away.

Yeah you have a bunch, pretty much most of them, spreading out for 2-3 miles every season……with some farther…..We’re 75-100 years down the road now though cuz….2-3 miles per year travels a long ways in that amount of time, do the math……Far enough that you can go ahead and probably rule that out as having happened that way. That’s just not what we see occurring.....There arent any November outliers in Clarke Co.....the November deer are pretty confined to certain areas

Moving 2-3 miles from the mother doesn’t mean each new generation moves 2-3 miles even further from their grandmother. They might stay exactly there, or move back closer to grandmother. The dispersal isn’t a straight line. Its a constant zig zag mostly confined to a general area. And every time a buck with a unique genetic trait scatters into the edge of that bubble intruding into another dominant gene pool, his genes will very quickly dilute.

Its what you say plus a bunch more……Its out and back……its out and out……its out and over…..and over the other way…... There’s probably 400,000 dispersing bucks across the state each year randomly zig zagging in all directions to find a new home…..Not to mention the fact that they roam for miles as adults during the rut on top of yearling dispersal ….. That one buck that traveled 35 miles from Bankhead probably bred 3 or 4 does that year that had males that spread in multiple different directions. Any pattern to estrous timing would be quickly lost in a scenario like that if males were passing along a gene impacting it. There would be no defined shape to it after 75 generations of 100’s of thousands of bucks going in all directions….

Again, it’s just not what we see happening.

I wish msu would do a study on this like they did with antlered bucks and nutrition. Take three does from different rut dates and let’s see what happens and why it happens. Harold, I know your no biologist but I like the questions you ask and answers you assume based on reasonable logic. I’ve thought about these sorts of things for years.

I’m not a biologist but I actually did take several classes with the wildlife biology students while I was at Auburn……My “emphasis” in forestry was wildlife management. I think it all helped with having a base of knowledge to build on.

You know I kinda think we’ve probably had it backwards when it comes to which deer are the most important……Everybody looks at the big bucks and thinks that they are the ones dictating future big bucks but I think it’s the females that are likely the most important…….I mean, if we say that “Bankhead deer” have more potential than others and we agree that it’s only the females that have held that distinct area together to make it different…….then it’s those doe lines that are still “Michigan does” that are kicking out those better potential bucks….. If we wanted to stock an area with better potential then we would better accomplish that by stocking it with quality doe lines…..not by turning loose breeder bucks.

If you really wanted to keep peeling the layers back on why I think things are the way they are…….. then take those better doe lines and put them on great soil with high quality habitat and I think that’s how you really get some of these differences forming. If we know that’s how things work though and we’ve already made Alabama a jumbled up Frankenstein that were sitting here looking at…….then lets just go ahead and start turning loose some better doe lines in different areas and creating a higher ceiling for more places. Call it a do over or what we should have done different the first time….

I know that’s highly unlikely to happen because of politics but I still think the concept would hold true just the same if we did.

I mean as far as that goes……if we all agree that nature is going to want to try and take things back to the “natural” rut dates over the long term that are most optimal with the environmental conditions……then we could just say that us turning loose Dec does is simply helping nature to restore balance.

Well I talked to the guy keeping the data from the club I mentioned. He said the rut hasn’t changed but the rut is a secondary rut in January. He said they are wide open right now at the club. I’d had several guys that was telling me the rut had changed. I guess that further demonstrates how talk gets started.

According to the map the are of the clubs as restocked with Sumter Co deer and correlates with the same rut timing. Maybe the secondary rut is form another deer source?????? Or just does that missed being bred. One thing I’d bet on, the does outnumber the bucks by a decent margin. I’d doubt if it’s not 4-1 or more does versus bucks. We had a skewed buck time ratio when was there and harvest numbers are not any better.

It would be hard to distinguish between a secondary rut and another source in that situation.....I would guess its probably secondary rut action ....could be both though......There's areas where Nov, Dec, and Jan ruts all intermingle in very close proximity