I have a different question. Right now, would you agree turkey hen's are plentiful compared to Tom's?

What would happen if we kept the Tom limit where it is, but said you could kill a hen a day during turkey season? And then what would happen if in 5 years, we changed the rules and allowed you to bait for turkeys?

Would the drop in hen kill's in year 6 be because of bait, or would it be becuase people killed a ton of them in the first 5 years of the hen a day limit?

We can't even legally kill a hen, and they have way more offspring that a doe does.

Doe days ended 25 years ago dude.......We've had liberal doe limits for a long time.......Those liberal doe limits whacked populations down to a new norm years ago compared to what we had in the 90's and early 2000's.......

Might be where you hunt, but it's not in the southwest blackbelt. Years of unlimited doe harvest, state working off of bad numbers from a really bad reporting system with virtually zero enforcement, years of GW under-staffing and thus lax enforcement, covid putting huge numbers of people in the woods, and high inflation have not done the state's deer herd any favors. The sky is not falling and corn is not the root of all evil ( I wish they never legalized it and enforced the hell out of the old zero tolerance baiting policy but they didnt and that horse is long gone and out of the barn). Here's the truth of the matter: Harvest numbers are in all probability, just returning to what they historically were before Covid, now that everyone is being forced to go back to work and arent working from home all week, every week. From the 40 page AF&G annual deer report: Deer killed in 2017-18: 212,000 Deer killed in 2018-19: 203,000 Deer killed in 2019-20: 218,000 Deer killed in 2020-21: 272,000 Deer killed in 2021-22 301,000 Deer killed in 2022-23: 308,000

The 2022-2023 season was really when the last of the COVID work from home holiday ended. You'll see the 23-24 numbers drop by probably 30% as a result of the end of Covid and most big companies requiring their employees to actually work at the office. Man days hunted this year will be substantially less than in the previous 3 years. Harvest is probably up just a shade from the pre-covid years because legalized corn has made it easier to just shoot one out your back door. Half the state was hunting over corn anyway but now they dont have to hide it and can use piles visible from satellite. The other reason for the coming drop in 23-24 is the fact that the harvest jumped up so much from the historical harvest numbers during the covid seasons. Harvest had remained and was pretty much stabilized at around 210,000 animals per year and the herd was pretty much stabilized to that level of harvest. Whenever you shoot a herd as hard as it was shot up from 2020 to 2023, and take out 25-30% more animals three years in a row, there simply are not as many deer available to kill in the 2023-2024 season. That's your drop and it's a combination of factors, #1 Covid, #2 inflation, and lastly and playing a minor part is corn making it easier to see and kill deer. I'd expect the deer harvest this year (adjusted up for Corn and inflation and down for most of the work from home ending, bumper acorn crop, and excessive harvest during covid years) to probably be around 200,000 to 215,000 animals for this year. It's just a SWAG but it'll probably be pretty close.

Covid didnt cause a three year spike in kill numbers......its the corn and what we are now starting to see in some areas is the beginning of "The Corn Crash"

We are over run with does at the two places I hunt. One is in north Marengo and the other is close to
The river in Clarke county..

Way more does than in recent years in Wilcox, Dallas, Clarke and Marengo. No corn crash happening anywhere that I or my buddies hunt.

Similar in Sumter Co. Maybe not “way more” but certainly not less, and most probably an increase in numbers.

CNC, I think you posted before that you dont have a 9-5 corporate type job, but the additional time available for most people that work full-time M-F jobs, to be in the woods during that 3 yr period was exponentially higher than you realize. I had to quarantine, due to exposure, 4 times in that 3 yr period. Since I did not have to go in to the office, I took my laptop got in the truck and spent the majority of those 40 days quarantining at the camp hunting. On a good year, I might hunt 12-15 days of the season. I still hunted my normal amount on weekends and vacation days but with the quarantine stuff thrown in too, I probably averaged 25-30 days hunting each of those years and hunted as much or more on just "covid quarantine vacation" than I would have in 2-3 yrs of regular season. Now I didnt go shoot a bunch of deer because we trophy hunt, and I'm not the typical alabama hunter that feels he needs to kill a deer every time he goes in the woods. If I was a different type of hunter, I could have seriously hurt the population on the land we hunt and corn would not have been the reason. Trust me when I say, Covid and businesses being closed, 20 days to slow the spread, etc had a much much larger impact in increasing those kill numbers than corn did. The crash about which you speak is the all the additional deer that were killed as a result of everyone having the opportunity to spend WAY more time in the woods.

Run a poll on here and lets see who on this site hunted a significantly, higher than normal, number of days during the covid years. My days that I was able to be in the woods was almost exactly double and I could have killed at least one deer everytime I hunted and could have killed both does and bucks, almost every sit, had I been inclined to do so. I also think that the majority of people had similar situations and were also able to hunt much more during the pandemic.

You can’t compare turkeys and deer from a reproductive standpoint. Not even close.

Well I believe if you used some reading comprehension skills and go back and look......you'll see that I never said it was happening everywhere in the state. I said that most of the impacted counties were in north Alabama

Well now, that just makes too much sense. It can’t be that, it’s got to be the corn.

CNC isn’t a fan of Occam’s Razor.

Were people struggling to kill does before corn was legalized?

Blaming corn for a decline in deer population is the equivalent of blaming a gun when there is a active shooter situation. It is a factor but not the source of the problem. If there is a decline in the deer population due to hunters it is the lack of trigger restraint.

I know a lot of hunters. A lot. And I don’t know anyone who kills a bunch of does/deer. Now I know some people that used to. Back in the 90s I knew a lot of people that did. I did. But it seems like now everyone I know or meet are trophy hunting. And shooting does is too much work. If they do it’s out of what they believe is a necessity and it’s 1-2 a year. I know we always talk about the “typical Alabama hunter” but I think that has changed the last 25 years. Y’all don’t think so?

Oh, I get it. Corn only works and gets more deer killed in the north Alabama counties. There arent any meth heads, black or redneck trash, shooting deer under lights off corn piles off the back of their porches down in the black belt. No small property owners or 1/4 acre trailer lots anywhere down that way. Nobody has any 2-10 acre parcels in Wilcox and Dallas counties that butt up to large well managed clubs where they can put a corn pile and bait deer off the big land owners and onto their postage stamp property. And we know for sure that nobody from the big population areas of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa drive south every weekend to hunt deer over corn in these same counties either. Yep, now I got it, you're right, it's definitely the corn.

Just had a guy call me from Tuskegee wanting me to track a deer he shot in town in his uncles back yard over a corn pile......I declined. That's how more deer get killed. Waaay more of that happening in north alabama due to the habitat fragmentation and higher hunter density across much larger areas. If you're not able to comprehend it then I cant explain any better to you

Occam's Razor would actually support it being the corn.......Baiting legalized......kills immediately go up.....

I get it…..some folks have a vested interest in convincing everyone that corn is having an impact…..Still doesn’t make it true though

What is happening with deer harvest numbers in Mobile, Baldwin, Tuscaloosa & Shelby counties? Doesnt get much more fragmented than those. Are they experiencing the "corn crash" too? If you cant open your eyes and see what is right in front of your face, I cant explain it any better to you. Sometimes you have to take a step back and look at the big picture and not get fixated on just one thing when there are multiple issues at play. Corn definitely has played a contributing part, I'm sure, but it's not the root cause of the problem. We wouldnt have an issue to even talk about, if AL didnt have a 118 day season and allow virtually unlimited doe harvest for all 118 days. That's the real root cause of the problem. We are going to settle back into that same 200K-220K range of chuckie checked deer a season, just like we were running pre-covid.