You mean they had this before GC? Pffffft.

they lost that as far as population estimates go for me in 1980, right after I went to work for them. Montgomery ordered EVERY GW in the state to send in an estimate of the number of deer. turkey, skwerl, and rabbit in their respective counties. What in the cornbread hell would a GW know about population densities beyond "We have a lot of deer", or "We ain't got many deer"??????? And the state USED those numbers gathered.

So I'd say not much has changed in the way of population estimating.....

Alright, so we've banged our head against the wall for 2 years (mandatory) GC, and we can all agree that it isn't working. We don't know what dead animals tell us, nor do we have a clue what participation rates are.

Let's hear some ideas of how we can get a more reliable estimate of what the herd might be? Personally, I like the HIP reporting tool that pawpaw mentioned above. Buy a license, fill out the harvest report. Mandatory before you can purchase a license. Not perfect by any means and I know the lifetime and landowner exceptions, but that's got to be less than 15-20% I would assume. 3 questions...

1) Check each county that you hunt. Have the counties listed out with a check box beside them.
2) Average deer sightings per hunt. 1-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-10, 10+
3) Number of deer you harvested last year: Antlered _____, Unantlered _____

I never got the mail out random survey so not sure how in line the above questions run but the above seems like a pretty good, off the cuff, survey that would be mandatory before purchasing a license.

The only way to get reliable numbers is to track man-hours like they do on some WMAs. For every hunt. It's onerous, and I'd be against that. And even that doesn't count actual deer, just deer sightings.

keep it up Brandon and you will be on the same Watchlist I am on...

The HIP reporting is by far the least intrusive.

I guess there wasn't an way for you or yer buddies to make money off the HIP method.

There was a saying they had in measurements class back in school that said something along the lines of…..”You can measure a log with the accuracy of a microscope but if you cut it with an ax then the precision is no better than the ax.”…..and vice versa…… if you measure with your eye and cut with a laser……The precision is only as good as the measurement of the eye.

I think a version of that concept applies here. There’s no need in gathering intensely detailed data when the only thing we can really do on the other end is make broad general changes…or cut with an ax…Like the recent change to go from 2 does per day to 1 per day for example……We don’t need data down to the thousandth decimal place when we are just going to enact broad changes that basically equate to “give or take a few 100,000”…….

I think a survey like we had in place is accurate enough to use to make these type decisions.

HIP method makes the most sense. But you're right, it's way too easy. I think folks would actually be much more truthful about it, and wouldn't try and avoid it altogether. It would count dead deer just like game check. You could even get an estimation on man-days hunted. A guy that kills a buck that hunted one day is probably hunting a much higher population of deer than a guy that hunted 20 times.

I call that "The Navy Way".
Measure with a micrometer, mark it with chalk, cut with an ax.

I don't know if they still do this, but in the 70's on Eglin AFB they would take blocks of land and line up a bunch of people and do man drives. They would have counters sort of like a being on a deer drive and then using the deer count with the known acres and get a good cruise of the deer numbers. It would be harder to do in an area as big as the state, but it would at least be a scientific sample.

They've managed the population of deer to the point that I will be counting fish in my livewell instead of reporting 0 deer killed.

They can spin the # anyway they want to. I know very few, if any hunters who are satisfied by our thinned out deer population. I remember well when there were NO deer within 30 miles of our farm, unless very, very close to the TN river. The state allowed deer to be trapped in the Guntersville State park and released in our community. I remember it being big news with my neighbors when one of them would see A deer. It took 30 years to get a huntable population of them with very, very few people hunting them. Then the doe onslaught happened. Now people are back to talking about it when they see A deer.

I thought Dr. Ditchkoff convinced you it was legit?

At some point, they will say the GC numbers are real and set seasons and limits off them. That's gonna mean greatly reduced limits and season length for both deer and turkey. That's exactly what some have wanted, so maybe GC is actually a great success in the eyes of those who started it.

Me to.

I have always questioned in my mind the deer harvest estimates of the past when the DCNR would say 400,000+ deer killed. Even the years where it was supposedly in the 300,000s made no plausible sense to me.

Now, I am sure there is at least a million deer in our state. But I doubt it is 1.7 million as was claimed in the past.
And while there is certainly a ton of deer per square mile in large parts of the state, I am skeptical of the 1.5 to 1.7 million estimates.

Google says there are 52,500 square miles in Alabama.

If there were as many deer per square mile throughout the state as there are in the Black Belt there would be twice as many deer then people in the state. But that kind of deer population obviously doesn't exist in every part of the state as testimonies here on aldeer reflect.

The whole thing (population estimates) is kind of confusing to me.

The harvest numbers were based on the hunter survey, which did indeed have a scientific basis and we had over 50 years of records. Dr. Ditchkoff vigorously defended it's accuracy in this forum, and I never saw any reason to doubt that it was correct within the standard error. I received 2 of them through the years, so I can vouch for the fact that the numbers were not just made up.

The population estimates were never anything but nonsense. There is no way to accurately count wild animals. No state in the nation can tell you how many deer they have. Most folks that own enclosures can't tell you exactly how many deer they have.

I saw a wildlife show once, a few years ago, where they stated (matter of factly) that Kansas had xxmillion rabbits and xxxthousand turkeys. They went on number several other game animals, but I was thinking, "Who the hell is counting rabbits in Kansas"?

Thanks for that info.

I didn't remember that subject being discussed.

While I would tend to defer to Dr. Ditchkoff on that subject, I still find it very puzzling the harvest numbers in the 300K and 400k range.

IIRC, it seems that there were supposedly some years where the alleged harvest approached 500K.

I am still skeptical on these numbers.

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I would like to see what Troy and Matt have to say about these past numbers.


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Also, I think that Mississippi is the closest analogous state to Alabama.

What are their harvest estimates the last 20 years and what are their population estimates? Maybe someone can post info on that.