Ok. Here’s how a lot of hunters think, mostly those who came through the deer restocking/herd repopulation era: Does are to be highly protected because they make babies. Gotta protect them all. More does equals more deer. Most of these are in favor of shooting bucks, any buck, over a doe. That don’t sound too bad except…….

The breeding habits of white-tailed deer do not work like that. In a given area, most does are going to enter their estrous cycle within a 10-14 day window of each other. Let’s say you have a population of 100 deer over a given area. If your ratio is 3:1 that’s 75 does to 25 bucks. A buck will tend or stay with a hot doe for 1-3 days and breed her multiple times. So during the first few days of estrous let’s say those 25 bucks are able to breed 20-30 of those does. Some of the bucks are not going to breed. Some will breed more than one doe. That leaves 40+ does unbred. The second half of that first cycle let’s say the majority do get bred. Let’s just use 60 total for the first 10 days. Also in that time frame 30% of your bucks have been taken out of the population from hunting mortality and rut mortality. So now you have 15 does left that did not get bred the first cycle. You have 17 bucks remaining who are already run down from chasing/breeding for two weeks. Those does come into estrous again 28 days later and 17 bucks are competing for 15 does and will absolutely destroy their physical fitness in order to get it done. They should be recovering from rut and yet now they are doing it all over again with more competition than the first rut. If your population is skewed any more than 3:1 you begin to see a pretty good percentage of does not getting bred at all. If they’re not getting bred, that is not contributing to recruitment. It is hindering it. In areas with high coyote populations who’ve learned to prey on fawns, longer breeding seasons increase the amount of time coyotes have to hone in that predatory behavior, leading to more fawns killed by coyotes. Not less. Having populations with high numbers of does and few bucks is more harmful to reproductive success than helpful. Habitat also contributes to success or failure. High quality habitat with good buck:doe ratios and predator control can have phenomenal reproductive success and healthy deer vs the alternative of poor habitat, high deer populations and low reproduction from the stresses they face in nutrition, depredation and competition for resources.