For those who haven’t experienced the sheer amount of does we have in NW Alabama…

This is a 5 acre food plot mind you. Eaten to the dirt in less than a month.

What is planted in the plot? Why did they all of sudden start eating it?

Looks like some sort of brassica. I’d be willing to bet he finally got a frost to turn them sweet and the deer found them.

Small acreage food plots are not a good measuring stick in my opinion for determining if you have too many does……..How many other 5 acre fields are there around this one planted in the same thing??.....What if we have a 4,000 acre quail plantation and we plant a 5 acre soybean field in the middle of it??....Do the results really tell us anything about whether we have too many deer for the 4000 acres??...No, not really

Send em to my place…we don’t shoot any cause we don’t have that many. Works well for the rut

That's not alot if it took them a month. Mine would clean that up in a week easily. Plus right now down here all they have to eat is food plots and corn.

There’s probably another 7 acres of food plot on the same 130 acres.

An 8-9 species blend.

Do you have an exclusion cage for reference? Simple to build and anchor and gives a real good indication of what you are actually growing through the season. My primary plot at camp is only about 1/3ac and looked almost barren by the end of January except the cage which was 18-20” tall.

We have exclusion cages on all of our fields. It is pretty shocking. Our fields look like well managed fairways and the cages are lush. We started using them years ago to help with how well our seed mix was doing.

Just shoot the does. I love shooting does. They taste great.

Is it bad to have a lot of does? The best deer hunting in the state is places with insane numbers of does.

Are the deer underweight or malnourished?

If given the choice, I’m always going to want to hunt places with higher than average deer numbers. I’ve spent too many years of my life seeing zero deer on deer hunts.

Same plot.

It’s all about resource allocation. Currently I have more deer than I can comfortably support and skewed ratios. Just been lazy shooting does the last couple years.

Fewer does will make for better hunting, especially during the rut.

Thank you! That’s a much more telling picture.
When I still had a club, and membership was down, some members would balk at the added expense of lime and such. Claiming that fields grew all the same regardless of pH. We started using exclusion cages to show what we were growing, absent the browse pressure, and even did a few test plots where we only limed half and put two cages out. The results ended those yearly arguments about the extra $100.

When was this pic taken? It looks to me to be a completely different time of year than the previous picture.

It was taken near the end of summer. Spring planting

So anyone who's plots are eaten down have too many deer???

That’s the logic. I can’t wrap my head around it. There are places with sustainable deer populations that are really very high.

Yep....its badly flawed logic

If you had too many deer the plots would have never gotten as high as the first pics!

Do you have a visible browse line on your native vegetation? All greenbriar nipped off, all honeysuckle eaten up to about 5-6 ft high, all preferred deer foods pretty much heavily browsed or gone? If not, you probably don’t have too many. If you do, you need to kill some does. Food plots are supposed to be preferred foods and draw deer to them. They are supposed to be eaten down, that’s the whole point. What’s happening with your natural vegetation is a far better indicator.

I haven't seen anyone mention our extremely dry summer and fall as a possible contributor to this as well. I have a small plot of brassica's and they were being hammered, but now, the deer have eased off them a bit. They are wearing out the cereal rye and winter wheat that is coming up though.


If they have consumed alot of the browse in the woods, they are going to pound a food plot. I wish I had a 5 acre field to plant on my lease.

Killem all!

Here's what it boils down to….Depending on soil fertility, 1 acre of food plot will produce “X” amount of forage……which will only support “Y” amount of deer…….That “Y” number really has no relation to what the carrying capacity of the land around that 1 acre will support……Just to put an arbitrary number in the equation……The land may easily support 100 deer while the 1 acre plot can only feed 5……Unless you’re talking about HUGE plantings, of which very few people do, then you’re not using good information if you use food plots as an indicator of too many deer. Its just something that’s good for show and tell…… and a reason for someone to shoot a bunch of deer and call it “managing”.

That’s a good point CNC. Add roving sounders of hogs to the mix and it gets real complicated as 5-6 medium pigs can do a two weeks worth of feeding in the average plot overnight. I currently have 4 resident does that stay tight to my personal property and are regulars in my little plots. They make their living in the abundant forage around the adjoining properties and I’m always looking to increase the browse availability. I have several bucks as well from October through early March but they are conspicuously absent the rest of the year. I’ll occasionally get one in a plot but it’s uncommon. They don’t come to the feeders much either. They are just passing through. There are a few other does that occasionally hit the plots but they mostly cross our property N/S and miss the plantings. It’s the ones that make a long E/W loop that I see regularly in the field.

There’s a ton of does around here

Where is your place at Lauderdale or Colbert. I imagine y’all had a good acorn crop too. Everywhere I’ve looked acorns have been a plenty.

Very few years have I seen the acorn production I’m seeing now.

Worst crop down here I've ever seen

It’s the biggest crop o ever seen. Especially on Choccolocco.

This is the assumption I have tended to operate on, which is one of the reasons I like to put lime out and plant just about any plantable ground I can. My thought process being I am providing forage that is able to pull nutrients out of the soil and thus is higher quality than the native vegetation. I am not sure that plan is the best plan for deer movement, however. I am limited on plot size by the timber co, they just aren't going to knock down 5 acres of trees and let me plant a food plot on it. Depending on what I plant, I can get a lot of traffic in it, whitetail clover is a good one. Deer that feed in my plots that are heavy with Whitetail clover often spend an hour or more in the field at a time and they usually visit it more than 1 time a day.

I keep the majority of my cell cams on green fields on my lease. I do that to monitor traffic on them. What I don't have happening yet is multiple deer on all the fields I have monitored at the same time, which tells me I don't have a boat load of deer. Some of my plots get pounded, and what I have noticed is any plot that has dark black or brown soil, whatever grows in it, the deer seem to prefer over what is growing in the of the plot.

I had 8 deer out in a new plot we just did this year, which is the most I have seen at any one time in a field. It's across from a pine thicket, so I suspect as the field fills in, it will get more traffic because of its location. My norm is to see 3 to 5 deer in a field. Anytime I see 6 or more, that makes me happy.

Too many deer or too few food plot acres. The first pics could simply be the results of drought. The summer planting of beans is also irrelevant. In my experience, even with a well balanced deer herd for the habitat, you can't grow beans in small fields. They all get eaten, even in low deer density areas. As abolt said "Do you have a visible browse line on your native vegetation? All greenbriar nipped off, all honeysuckle eaten up to about 5-6 ft high, all preferred deer foods pretty much heavily browsed or gone? If not, you probably don’t have too many. If you do, you need to kill some does. Food plots are supposed to be preferred foods and draw deer to them. They are supposed to be eaten down, that’s the whole point. What’s happening with your natural vegetation is a far better indicator." Food plot browse is a poor indicator of deer density.

It’s not about deer deer just getting by, it’s about managing populations and habitat so that each deer can have an abundance.

The ideal scenario is for does to never be nutritionally stressed at any point of the year (especially when lactating), bucks to have abundant nutrients to recover after the rut and plenty of protein/minerals to grow antlers, fawns to not be nutritionally stressed (especially ours that are born in late summer stress period).

In situations like I posted above, there is definitely stress on the whole heard in the two nutritional stress periods and in more severe cases, year around. Similarly, many bucks in areas of too high deer numbers and/or bad habitat, may not even be fully recovered from the rut when they start growing their next set of antlers. It’s not about having as many deer on your property as possible, it’s about having the healthiest herd and biggest bucks. Stress plays a much larger part in antler growth than most realize.

Put the kool-aid down man and back away slowly........

Some of our does look very poor. Had one in the field with ribs showing but her fawn had a pot belly. I will shoot a few like every year but I’m the only one that’ll shoot does in our crowd. People should try not shooting immature bucks.

Ask yourself, are chances better of growing healthier, bigger bucks higher in…

1. An area with high competition for resources and more stress
2. An area with low competition for resources and less stress

Also, will your rut be as intense and prime for hunting in…

1. An area with a too many does and heavily skewed sex ratios
2. An area with a healthy amount of does and balanced sex ratios

Also, will your bucks be healthier/more likely to thrive in…

1. An area with skewed sex ratios wherein some does don’t get bred on their first cycle and effectively cause an additional chase phase, greatly increasing the rut stress on bucks
2. An area with balanced sex ratios wherein all does get bred on their first cycle thus avoiding additional stress on bucks

We’re in Winston. Very healthy acorn crop this year for sure.

Which part of the county?

I’ve said too much lol. Can’t be giving too much detail for any possible ALDEER outlaws to exploit.

Sounds complicated

And all based off food plots getting eaten like they’re designed to do.

I’m just kidding. What do you estimate your deer per square mile to be? 80? 100?

Large swaths of Bama have closer to 10 or 20.

I can't look at a food plot and say oh I have to many deer..here is why.

If I plant soybeans, assuming I get them up past the cotyleden stage, the deer wear them out. Does that mean I have to many deer?

If I plant clay peas, I can have a really nice stand, until mid August, and then in a week I'll have nothing but stems. Does that mean I have to many deer?

However, if I plant whitetail clover, then as long as I get rain, I have than enough for the deer to eat.

Brassicas are an eat them and they are done crop. When you have a preferred forage, it's going to get more use. Plant some whitetail clover and if it gets eaten to the ground by may or early June, then you have to many deer.

That's my unscientific assessment based.upon what I see on my lease in an area with 30 to 60 deer per square mile based upon the last deer density figures I saw.

The issue isn't whether your herd is stressed or not. It may very well be. However, the issue is you posted pics of a winter and summer foodplot being eaten down and said it indicated you have too many deer. The argument is that you can't tell anything about your herd just because your foodplots are eaten down, especially in a drought.

For instance, If I have 1,000 acres well managed land with half quail woods, burned and thinned, 25% hardwood bottoms, 10% young pine plantation, and 15% foodplots, then I would be worried if my foodplots got eaten down. If I have the same acreage and 1% in foodplots of 20 - 1/2 acre size fields, I would expect them to be eaten down despite the good habitat, especially beans. If the 1,000 acres was closed canopy pine plantation, I would also expect the foodplots to be eaten down as soon as they were planted unless they comprised at least 10% of the acreage. Even then it might not be enough.



Again, we have established you can't tell if you have "too many deer" from a couple eaten down foodplots. But we also have not defined "too many deer".
Take the 1,000 ac examples from above. Lets say both the well managed and poorly managed are side by side. Same dirt, same everything, just one is closed canopy pine plantation with 10% foodplots and the other is open canopy, thinned, burned pine woods, hardwood drains, some thicker areas and 10% foodplots. These two properties have vastly different carrying capacity. If they were in Dallas county for example, I would guess the well managed property could carry a healthy deer population of 100 deer. The pine plantation would be lucky to carry 30-40 in a healthy condition.
Also note that you can have too many does without skewed sex ratios. Often goes with having too many deer overall. Not something that can be addressed with a foodplot pic either.

An extremely small percentage of the state of Alabama has “too many deer”.

A much larger percentage of hunters think they do. It’s really amazing.

"Too many deer" to alot of people means you cant grow a garden without them getting in it or somebody hits one on the road now and then. But then again, im hunting a populated rural area, not a 5000 acre hunting club. Theres alot of deer around here. Theres also alot of food, alot of water, alot of cover and anything else a deer might need. However, these deer have been born around and have always lived around people. They are not dumb deer. Where i hunt is just not like a hunting club at all. This place has its own special set of problems.

When you see a deer standing out there in the middle of you food plot starving with nowhere to turn just wondering where the food is.... that's when you will know you have "too many deer".

Let me know when that happens.

Most people's food plots are "too small"

That's the real answer. 1/4-1/2 acre food plots are garbage. And didn't you plant it for them to eat? Now your mad because they ate it when you weren't around?

That's "too many deer" in a nutshell.

You know what part of it is with people hollering about “gonna have to kill some does!!”…..its just hunters wanting to boast about having good hunting property……Also, somehow or another when we start talking about state wide deer management its like it becomes some kind of contest on who’s county or area is the best instead of it being a non-bias assessment of the facts. Like somehow you’ve offended their pride if you say Jackson Co is declining…..I guess that’s just male psychology for you.

Im real close with 2 girls who are crack shots. Just shoot me a PM and I will turn them loose on those does for ya. We can let the aldeer herd geniuses decide from the pics of them stacked up. LOL

Another thing I have noticed is if you base your opinion on sex ratio based on what u r seeing on green fields u r probably way off. The difference between what I see hunting and what I see at the feeder at night are very very different. Even my little bucks seldom show themselves during the day. Don’t know why it isn’t like they r getting shot at

The sad reality is if you have a timber co lease, having a big "green field" is a pipe dream. None of mine are over about half an acre, and they are certainly not all situated in the best locations on the property in terms of adjacent cover.

Thats why I moved to clover. It was the one crop I felt like no matter how many deer I had, they couldn't eat it to the ground on a small plot. Sunn hemp is pretty similar. It is hard for the deer to eat it to the ground too.

I saw 32 deer on my last afternoon sit at my place mainly does with a few small bucks mixed in. I pulled all my camera cards before I left. The same day that I saw 32 I had at least 10 different bucks on camera moving down a logging road less than 100 yards from this food plot.

Never saw a single one of these bucks in the plot while I was sitting.

I am probably 3:1. That's very good IMO Doe/Buck ratio free range I mean my neighbors shoot literally every buck they see starting with 2" spikes. They lay waste to everything.

So if I based my deer herd off of what I saw and the fact that my plots are eaten to the dirt due to lack of rain and heavy browsing that would be a false assumption.

There is no such thing as "Too Many Does". I promise they will go somewhere else before they starve.


What I have out there standing in the food plot is called 32 pieces of "bait". Deer are starting to think about a Rut which will be end of January which is attributable to the Bucks I got pictures of in the woods. I have a ladder I will start hunting along the logging road but when the Rut kicks off some of these bucks will show in the plot. That is guaranteed.

Pretty simple concept.

If you want more bucks... Stop shooting your deer.

If you have no bucks someone killed them. Figure that out otherwise your effort and goals are toast.