If you have that many younger bucks but only 4 or 5 older ones to kill then what’s happening to all of the young bucks???



Now I’m not saying 8 pt or better is the best route but it likely does result in better age structure than going 4 year old plus…….You’re knock on 8 pt or better is that you’re basically going to high grade some of the younger bucks. That’s true but you’re also going to be letting a lot of bucks walk that don’t meet the requirement. In comparison, the 4 year old plus scenario you’re just giving those same 8 pts another year before you shoot them plus ALL of their buddies. Hardly ANY bucks make it past 4 in this situation……where as the 8 pt or better will have anything less than 8 pts progressing into the next age class to become 5, 6, 7……. You may high grade the young ones but you’ll have better age structure. Again, I’m not saying that’s the route I’d choose but that I think we’d be better off as a whole if other groups chose that route rather than going with lets say a 3 year old or better program…..

If someone does, then so be it……If it doesn’t measure up then you assess the agreed upon penalty and move on. The overall long term management would be better off this way IMO

Better buy your own place cause getting deer hunters to actually agree on and actually stick to a management without arguing it almost impossible. I remember at a QDM meeting here in Florence and Westervelt reps were here. They said they had to keep the club less than 10 otherwise there was always problems. I dare is less than half that.

I honestly believe I can herd cats much easier than what you desire.

Also you said you don’t think that killing does is a good situation. What are you gonna do when your deer herd exceeds the actual carrying capacity. It’s gonna take some really god ground with a large amount of ag in rich soils

That’s gonna cost

Reduce cover and increase food ……A lot will be accomplished through growing season burns and “field” management. Cows would be awesome too but we wont go there for now.

Don’t get me wrong, if you have a 5000 acre property I’m not saying you should never shoot a doe. I’m saying that the idea of an annual doe quota that someone has to make a chore of is not necessary if you have the right balance of cover to food.

i called BS then i call it BS now . when they said we needed a 1to1 or 1to2 buck doe ratio so we'd have a shorter rut ,,,, i said BS . unless needed they should have left sh!t alone.

the should left does days (season) alone . i can live with the 3 bucks a year . no legal hunting over baiting . no extended deer season . what they doing now aint management . just a ,,,IMO !!!!!

I think everyone’s experience is different.

If you have a bunch of small tracts owned by multiple hunters the outcome of shooting does have chance to go south quickly. The larger the tracts the better. We had 5,000 acre a they now have over 6,000 acres

If and that’s a big if multiple owners start a cooperative and wok together
QDMA preached that early on, that’s about all you can do

even if its 6000 sq ac you still got a load of deer leaving it . thats about 9 sq miles of land . if my figuring is right

if it broken up spots itll be even worse.

i tried the coop thing here . did'nt work for all the reason they could come up with . always was , i dint kill one last year , i cant hunt much, my kid kill one . on and on . i said hell with it .

I agree about the 6,000 acres. You’ll still have I’d bet every deer living there wander all around. I used to think this buck was right there and only there. I’d guess most have differing locales thruout the year. GPS collars have broken a lot of old wives tales.

I’m thinking we’re kinda heading back to the older ways

CNC read my post before arguing please. I said we kill 4-5 bucks a year that were 4+ years old. I also said that was less than half of the deer we have on the target list. It’s more like 25-30%. We usually have around 20 4+ years old bucks every year we are targeting.

And with 8 pt or better you aren’t letting “a lot of deer walk that don’t meet the requirements” not a lot of older bucks anyway. There may be a few older 7 or 6 points but not many. Much more older bucks survive shooting 4+ year olds. They are just harder to kill. Your assessment that hardly any bucks make it past 4 is not what we have found. We do kill 1-2 4 year olds a year but we also kill some 6-7 year olds too. We use the cementum aging on each buck we kill to try to be as accurate as we can.

We have a lot of bucks that are 2 year old 10 points. Talk about making your heart hurt. Someone rolls into the skinning shed with one that has a 15” inside spread and long tines. And everyone around knows that deer had a pretty good chance to be an 140” deer. That’s what we had to stop. So that’s why we started shooting older bucks.

I don’t care that the rule was broken as much as you killed a buck that had the potential to be a stud next year or the next.

Also the amount of pressure you put on a piece of property when you shoot 20-25 bucks plus 10-15 does a year is huge. It won’t be long and all those 2-3 year old 8 and 10 points you were seeing while sitting in a food plot are going nocturnal. Pulling the trigger, blood trailing into the woods with flashlights or a dog, 5-6 people pulling a buck up out of a bottom, all that increases pressure. Makes it so much harder to see deer

I can say that our experience when we had guys wearing out does on greenfields does became very much nocturnal. 1.5-2.5 yr old bucks would show up mid afternoon and stay in the field til dark. You could see does on the seed of the fields at last light and we’re safe because no one wanted to lay the fine for a young buck. To kill a doe you had to get in the woods and then that even became difficult.

As I stated before, I’d go with 125”+ or anything you want to mount for a club like this……The 8 pt or better was for the folks who want to manage but not as intensely.

Bad management is the same as no management. A lot of your posts lately have been about trying to get older bucks on a property. Older bucks breeding the does and so forth. I agree with that. That needs to be the goal. Shooting young deer just because they have 8 points doesn’t get you there.

I think if 4-7 year old deer are breeding your does you are fine. I’ve seen 4 year old deer be more dominant that deer older than them. The issue would be if you have a buck shortage on your property (which I think most do) and you had 1-3 year old bucks doing the majority of the breeding. To me that’s when you have long rut issues. Killing young rack bucks compounds this problem in my opinion

Alright, now we’re in agreement…….Let’s start from there.

The assumption is that managing for 4 year olds will produce more older bucks and better age structure than the other types of management……and that’s where I’m saying that maybe we need to rethink that idea. What percentage of bucks have the potential to make it to 125”???......Maybe 30%???......What percentage have the potential to make it to 4 years old??......All of them.


Keep in mind that I’m thinking about it from a landscape scale. What strategy is the best for “the group” to adopt…..As it is now we have all adopted the age method. Think about what Matt has stated in past threads about corn and cameras…….”All bucks above 3 years old are being wiped out in some areas”……What does that do to the stress on the younger bucks??

I disagree with the increase food and reduce cover. Seems everyone has bait and plots but not everyone has good heavy cover. One property I hunt has the only really think stuff for a couple miles and it is a deer magnet even more than food which they can get anywhere.

I don’t think there is way to get an older age class of bucks unless you set it so high that the area bucks won’t reach that BC score except for the outliers.

I see what you are saying CNC. And the 4+ rule of thumb isn’t perfect, but it is soooo much better than 8pt or better.

I guess as far as what percentage of bucks have potential to get to 125” depends on food. Genetics is what it is. Implementing both, age and antler restrictions would be best for a trophy club in my opinion.

I can only go by what we have experienced in that club. Our experience says that once they get 4 they are harder to kill so you kill fewer. But we are probably lazy hunters as a whole. We use cameras and corn and we definitely can’t kill all the older bucks on the property. Now we could kill a PILE of 3 year old bucks. This club did that for years. It was an 8 pt or better and 15” wide rule. But they rarely killed any deer over 125”. We feed a ton of corn too. And we all run cell cameras. Spinners in every plot and plenty of corn piles in the woods. We do have a lot of pressure on the property due to people riding around and feeding up their corn spots. I think that is why the 4+ are harder to kill. If we stopped that we might shoot all the older bucks, I’m not sure.

Keep in mind that I’m referring to large scale property management and not necessarily the guy hunting 100 acres…..But you can only hold (with cover) “X” amount of deer and still maintain a healthy plant community whether you try to accomplish that through blasting does or whether you accomplish it through balancing the habitat.

For example, you cant maintain a healthy understory if 75% of it is grass cover. There’s not enough good “food” being produced for the amount of deer the cover can hold. That’s why the food resource gets plundered. If you go with the doe blasting method, you’re essentially trying to knock back the herd to the point that the small amount of food being produced is enough. What I’m suggesting is that balancing the cover to the food is making it to where the amount of cover only supports the amount of deer for which you have good food.

You are absolutely right that a lot of people don’t have this issue. In many areas the amount of food in plentiful in comparison to cover.

The ideal thing to have happen here would be for the big landowners to have their property balanced as far as food and cover and then allow there to be does that get kicked out when the cover fills up that expand to prop up the surrounding area.