Let me be clear too about the deer…..Highways and interstates are not 100% complete barriers to doe expansion.....more like restricter plates. However, for it to happen you would need for one particular bubble to be rapidly expanding and pushing outward while the bubble next to ti was fairly void of females compared to available habitat. And that’s just it…..we don’t really have that happening anywhere…….there are very few bubbles “expanding” due to our doe harvest…….and for sure not to the degree of doing anything more significant than a very slight morphing of bubbles floating around each other.

There IS an amount of variance that occurs on the edges. As an example……You may be on the boundary of a bubble that has a doe population with a late Jan estrous running from about Jan 20 – Feb 4…….To the east you have a doe population dominated by does that go into estrous in early Jan…The closer to the boundary you get, the more likely you are to get a small amount of that spill over as variance. You’ll likely have one or two strays that pop off hot in early Jan while the majority will go hot in late Jan…These are does from the other herd that have pushed across the boundary.

However, these does will never be anything other than a small amount of variance on the edge as long as the bubble you’re in is already filled with late Jan does. If you have 99 late Jan does and 1 early Jan doe…..the likelihood long term is that the lineage of the one with die out…..especially if it establishes a home range with a highway running through it. This pushing back and forth of doe herds against one another is what is creating that lava lamp bubble type form you see in southwest Alabama……Highways and interstate mortality just creates that line more distinctly in other areas. These are ever evolving bubbles…..again though, with few bubbles seeing any expansion…..and why we see things holding fairly constant at this point in our restocking experiment.