GC i s providing them with a few data points. So, all should be good the way it is.

I don't really mind sending in the few deer I have killed, but it doesn't provide any usable management information that I can see. You have got to have a live deer number in the state based on some kind of provable information before you start a management system.. On Eglin AFB they use to do man drives with game wardens, foresters and any volunteers they could get. A line of counters would get the number of deer that came out of known size blocks and they could then extrapolate out the deer population. The same thing could be done in Alabama that could get numbers that were based on sound information, otherwise you're pissin in your ear.

Harvest rates are definitely good to have. Agencies can use them along with recruitment rates to determine what we’re removing/replacing from the land. Recruitment rates give you an idea of of the productivity of the herd. You can also determine an estimate of harvest that could be sustained. Having recruitment along with harvest data can give great insight to upward/downward population trends.

Our goal is not to count all the deer but, for a given area understand and “regulate” a sustainable harvest level.

NightHunter, how do y'all get and/or determine recruitment rates?

Without writing a novel.... camera survey based research and surveys. We will be doing a lot of population dynamics works for years to come. Technology is allowing agencies to employ a lot of cool things. I believe a lot of states will be updating how they do population work.

Thanks very much. Sounds interesting.

Honest to goodness this is the best written and logical explanation of why we need game check that I have read or heard anywhere since game check was introduced 👍🏻
Seriously, it makes perfect sense. Maybe Chuck said this same thing and I just blocked it out 😂

The estimates for deer harvest were way over exaggerated for years. The state needs to wake up and admit that the numbers and the process for getting to that number could have been wrong. And they need to quit blaming the hunters, yes there are some hunters not participating but not that many. I'm pretty sure it's a law that is being broke when a deer harvest is not reported and for the state to keep claiming that a vast majority of deer harvested aren't being reported is basically calling the majority of hunters (law breakers or uneducated) really pisses me off, because most us aren't outlaws or dumb! I take pride in being a hunter. Just maybe these scientists or biologists that arrived at 300,000 deer killed were way off.

That should come as no surprise. He always seems more in touch with real world reality of the average Alabama hunter and explains it that way. As I've said many times, the field people which include GWs, are not our problem. It's what happens when their info gets passed on into the political arena.

The harvest estimate may be a slight overestimate, although I don’t think it is. It’s way closer to what’s actually killed than what’s reported in GC. All you need to do is start asking a handful of processors how many deer they’ve had brought in and it don’t take long to say, “Wow, There’s lot of deer not getting reported”. Or be places where hunters gather and they don’t know who you are, and listen to conversations they’re having about not checking in their deer. For some reason, there’s a lot of people that just do not want to tell the state anything. I don't know what percentage is not reporting, but it is significant.

Please elaborate on this technology.
What new technologies are helping to count animals?

Outback, it’s voodoo magic and ninja warrior type skills stuff.

He’s probably referring to the use of FLIR for population estimates and other related technologies. Like I said, magic. Lol

I love reading how people believe you must know the number of live deer before you can manage a deer herd........with that logic I guess the only people that can effectively manage their deer are the high fence operations since nobody knows the exact number of deer on their property.

BigT, I believe having a statewide population estimate falls well behind having population trends. Knowing estimated recruitment and harvest is more important. We have to know if current regulations promote a sustainable harvest. Isn’t that what we are about doing?

I don't think you need to know an exact number of live deer. But I think you need to know how many you have in certain areas... mainly due to creating "zones". I'm not really sure how you create zones and start dictating bag limits in certain areas when you don't really know for sure how many deer you actually have in those areas.

They say we kill 300,000 deer. But we only report 75,0000. They say 1/3 of the people are actually reporting. Is that really true? I don't know.

They say we have 3 million deer or whatever the number is. They say there are plenty in ____ area Zone C.

Do they really know that?

I believe that they think they do. I would have to disagree but only because I think 75% of what they do is back of the napkin work with fuzzy numbers created by Statistics.

Statistics can be manipulated to tell you whatever you need them to tell you in particular if there is any political agenda involved.

I'd like to see something published:

How many deer per county estimated
How many deer killed per county estimated
How many deer per WMA or Public Land area
How many deer killer per WMA or Pulic Land area
I want to know how they got to the numbers
I want that broken down into whatever zones they want to have.
I want to know see what kind of conclusions they are drawing from these numbers and how they got there. I want to see the math or the logic used to determine their conclusion based on the data they present to us.
I then want to see how they determine appropriate seasons and bag limits based on their numbers for both private and public land. (I think they should be individually considered). Every WMA should have it's own season and bag limits and not just what they've been doing since 1972.

Basically I want them to publish the road map behind what they are doing so that all of us can understand what is going on and I want to know who's got a political agenda. I want a dern report published to the public. It would be published yearly BEFORE the next season's bag limits and dates are determined.

I don't think they'll do that because I don't believe they have good data to work with. This is why I am Pro Game Check. But Ultimately - They don't share a dern thing and that opens the door to a lot of "I think we should do _____" which is BS. Chuck thinks we should have 4 months long season because he is out of town a lot during December and he want to make up some time at the end of the season (I agree hunting FEB btw so this is not the point). Or he's got season tickets to the football games so he doesn't want Bow Hunters to start hunting in early October because he can't go hunting or doesn't want to bow hunt, etc. He doesn't want those pesky bow hunters to get the drop on any of his deer. Or his buddy doesn't bow hunt and in his buddy's club there are a few bow hunters. He listens to his buddy who doesn't want them at all period to be able to hunt before he has a chance.

That is the kind of BS I believe really goes on.

Y'all don't pick this apart because I'm just talking out loud here.

Back when I was taking Wildlife Biology classes in college (pre game-cam), we learned about spotlight counts and track counts. Data gained from those techniques (stone-age stuff now) were used to develop indexes... which showed population trends in a given area. The number of animals seen and the tracks counted didn't give a definitive pop, but it pointed at trends in the populations. Each year's data didn't seem to be significant at the moment, but was really useful when compared to the past year's counts. In other words, with numerous years of data under your belt, the info generated each successive year becomes more and more important regarding understanding trends in the population.

This technique can be used with harvest data... but the same caveat holds true. Harvest counts that give us index numbers (trend data) seem 'cloudy' at the moment with regard to the current year situation, but will mean more to managers as time goes by. We are in the very beginning of this GC stuff, so the info we are providing now is fairly valuable, but will mean more after we get decent compliance and have numerous previous year's info to compare it to. The DNR, hopefully, was trying to do the same thing with the yearly harvest surveys, but I can see where the GC system, if respected and used correctly would produce better data. The DNR knows this thing is in its infancy, and the numbers they are getting from 25% (or whatever the number truly is now) is not perfect... but you have to start somewhere if implementing a system like this. Much like the seat belt law, at first, lots of people bucked against it, but now I believe a vast majority comply. GC will be similar. It may take 4, 8, 12 years, but at some point, they will have the compliance they need to confidently use the data.

Nighthunter said it well. The first goal of most wildlife managers is to encourage a sustainable population. And you technically don't have to have a definitive number to start with to pull that off. Recruitment rates and mortality rates are important, however, and if you have a good idea of those, you have a reasonable change at making the sustainable thing work. Then when or if something starts trending in an 'off' way, you have somewhere to look to find potential causes and understanding the effects. A sustainable population should produce a relatively (statistically) stable harvest. Also, in a perfect world, this doesn't produce the end all to management info. This is just a piece of the puzzle used to help determine what managers should be regulating to produce the sustainable situation.

I am on board with you Matt!

Gladly, for what its worth I'm not a biologist or in any way affiliated with the state fish and game, this is all just personally what I would look at if it were my responsibility. I'm sure an expert could get even more mileage. Part of the game is establishing a baseline, the first year or second year wont be as useful as the 3rd and 4th and so on. You'd want to continuously check it with what you thought you knew about compliance rates, processor numbers and whatever else you could index it with. If I were using the data and I noticed say, a 20% drop off in harvest in Calhoun and Cleburn counties and the reported buck harvest has a higher percentage of spikes and forkies without noticing a corresponding drop in statewide license purchases I'd want to take a closer look. As nighthunter mentioned I'd be interested in recruitment studies in the area, I'd check with the biologist at Choccolocco WMA, try to send out surveys to licensed hunters in the area, do some population sampling and send out knowledgeable biology guys to look at the habitat in the area. I figure there's only a few possibilities to look for, either 1) hunter opportunity is down for some reason 2) reporting is down in that area for some reason 3) the population is down in that area for some reason. Once you confirmed there was an issue one could reasonably assume you could figure out one or two of those causes and work to correct them either by 1) figuring out what impacted hunter opportunity in the area and trying to counteract it 2) stepping up focused enforcement in the area so you can get a clear harvest data picture or 3) limiting the doe harvest and continuing to study/improve habitat and recruitment in the area.

Having access to data could really open up the ability to manage the state's deer heard more effectively, finding and counteracting problems more quickly.


I'm not arguing for or against any changes, I'm just mentioning all the ways data could be useful. It wouldnt bother me to report my harvest to the state any more than it would bother me to report harvest to my hunting club, both reports presumably could be used to maintain or improve my hunting experience.

What you are arguing for is called a one-tailed test in Statistics. That's what we have at this point in my opinion because there is no good data anywhere. We have a series of one-tailed tests at the moment we are trying to jumble together and none of the data can be validated.

This would be appropriate to determine the direction of one effect without considering the consequences of another effect in the opposite direction. You don't ever use a one-tailed test to draw a conclusion about the significance of a single effect.

That is theoretically inappropriate as this clearly leads to results we cannot replicate and are questionable.


When we fold in recruitment we have moved to a two-tailed test. We are trying to do this but I would venture to guess that's not in reality what we are doing. Also... this is still too basic for what we are discussing here given the other variables, weather, predation, disease, etc. It would be very clear from the outset that no two-tailed test could ever cover this. That's a total joke. So, this should be much harder.

Take the two-tailed test... Well, I have to question how we derived our "recruitment numbers" and if they were derived from Statewide data, county level, etc. Lot of pitfalls and problems in this area. That takes man power we allegedly don't have to get the amount of data necessary to compare to Game Check (which is much more detailed I would assume give the population of data) and get any sort of results or draw a conclusion from anything but a very high level. And even then those would be questionable when applied to a subpopulation.

This is the essence of the problem IMO if this is what we are actually trying to do.


This is totally flawed from the outset if the goal is better management beyond a Statewide blanket kind of management style. That should be as clear as it can get.


In the end I don't think there is any way in the world to ever get the amount of data you would need to make a valid conclusion with knowing something in Statistics called a population. In this case it would be many subpopulations. It could be orange cones, boxes in a warehouse, whatever you want it to be.


What we are arguing against and why.... then clearly shows me I should be skeptical of any conclusions that are drawn from our fictitious "data". Anyone who knows enough about statistical analysis to understand how this should be determined... should also know that a population can be hypothetical.


What I am arguing for based on this scenario would be to use a hypothetical statistical population that is derived from someone or something other than a number that is pulled out of your ass.


Basically what I'm saying is... If we don't understand this, the person in charge should go to the math building at Awbren walk into the Statistics professors office and start with "I don't know what I am doing please help me." That would be step #1. I think we skipped that step.


I'll get this agrument back down to the 4th grade level though for everyone's benefit..... You have an unknown number. You think you added 5. You think you took away 7. You have an unknown number. The next year you think you added 7 but you took away 6. You have an unknown number. But everyone is happy because _____ or _____ or they got to shoot all the deer we feel like they wanted? I mean really.... WTF is that?

I would be surprised to learn a states fish and game department is immune to a FOA request since football coaches text messages don't seem to be.