Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Serious Deer Talk Forum Sykes is Frustrated - BooHoo!

What percentage of hunters are actually buying a license? Even if every single person bought one that was legally required to would it be over 50% if the hunting population? I am seriously asking. Seems I remember a number of around 180,000 license holders last year. Are there 250, 300, 500,000 hunters in Alabama?

For what its worth,

If you believe random sampling is an appropriate method of survey for a population, it doesn't take a large percentage to give "accurate" results. I.e. for a population of 250,000 participants to get 95% accuracy the math suggests that you need only to get 400 or so surveys returned. So if you think you will get 50% sent back to you, you need to send out 800 surveys. The error margin is typically a factor of if the target returned is met, etc. I.e. 95% confidence with a margin of error of 5% would tell you that maybe only 380 surveys were returned or deemed adequately completed, etc. Other issues also play number into that as well.

The real issue is whether a random survey is appropriate for sampling of a given population to determine a particular "statistic". As an engineer, I'm not a big fan of random surveys of matters of any real significance. So whether a random survey of hunters to determine harvest etc.is appropriate/accurate, I don't know but I do like math...

Not sure and I am no statistician or engineer, but that I can tell you that would be a very large sample size.

It's worked for the waterfowl HIP deal for more than two decades. You fill it out or you don't get the license. And if you hunt in another state (for waterfowl) you fill out a HIP deal there, too, before getting your non-res license.

Six or seven questions. Could they be fudged? Sure. So can the current Game Check "harvest" record paper deal. Kill a deer or turkey, fill it out, drive home, throw it in the trash and put another copy in your wallet. As has been said, some folks are just going to be like that.

I think Alagator or whoever lives in Washington or Idaho said they are required to fill out the post-seson big game survey within a certain timeframe and if they do not they A. get fined and B. cannot buy a license until doing so and paying the fine. Sounds Draconian but I'll bet they get compliance and results, along with data.

I don't work for DCNR, or the State of Alabama, and I'm not friends with Sykes. I've met him once at a CAB meeting. I say that to say this: why are you bashing Sykes for complaining about people not using game check? Same with Snapper Check. Having been seriously involved in the red snapper issue,I know for a fact that if we had 100% compliance (which I realize is not possible), we would be better off. I would assume same goes for deer. Why not just use GC? What's the big deal? It helps manage the resource, so use it. Also, it's the law, so use it.

I had an exceptional statistics teacher in college. Not only did he know his stuff but made every student in his class read a little book called "How to Lie with Statistics". He made the point that through sample size and other data collection and manipulation techniques, you can take the same set of data and basically make it show whatever you want it to. It's exactly what the global warming crowd has been doing to keep their money train rolling down the tracks. Could it be done with deer population and harvest data if someone wanted to? Absolutely. Am I saying that is what the State is doing. No I am not but the smaller, less relevant or more isolated the sample size is when extrapolated to the population as a whole, the easier it is to make is show whatever you want it to.

I think that just surveying licensed hunters would be plenty to meet our needs. The trend line that we’re really looking at over time is the average number of deer killed per hunter and how it changes. If you remember back to our mock survey on here that number was around 0.8 bucks per hunter and 0.7 does for last season. You look at that number over time and see if it’s generally decreasing, increasing, or staying the same. You don’t have to survey all of the other hunters to see this. You can just look at licensed deer hunters and see if they are killing less deer per hunter over time..... more....or about the same.

That's why I put little faith in random surveys.

For a conspiracy to in place there has to be an end goal. What id the end goal. What does the department gain by messing with the numbers as some have suggested? Does people think that the DNCR wants 10 extra days so they can personally hunt more in north Alabama? I just don’t understand the mindset. If a backdoor deal was cut as suggested to get Gamecheck passed, why? How did it make life better for the DCNR or worse.

It is so much harder to try to count every event of anything, than to get good estimates through random sampling. Imagine the time and effort needed to count every tree on 1000 acres and record it's size and type. It would be real easy to miss areas and to double count others. A 5% cruise would be far more likely to be accurate. Trying to count every deer killed is also a very difficult task. You need every hunter to participate, or your results are gonna be off. And the thing is, you will never know how many are reporting.

The hunter survey may have been flawed; anything done by people can be messed up. But in all the years I've been here I've never read anyone who listed a specific problem in their procedure. Lots of people have said they didn't believe it, but I have never seen any reason to think they weren't doing it correctly. And the results always seemed reasonable to me. The harvest was higher in good years, down in bad years. The GC numbers don't seem reasonable.

It seems far more likely to me that the hunter survey underestimated the harvest. They only sampled licensed hunters and made no effort to count the harvest by unlicensed. This wasn't an error - they said in all the reports that they weren't included. As someone already said, the actual numbers don't matter, the trend is what is important.

It's all a moot point now. GC is what we have and we should make the best of it. I have reported all my deer and turkeys and urge everyone to do the same.

Go back and re-read my edited post. When I ready what blade had quoted, I realized that I made it sound like the state was intentionally manipulating data. That was not my intent and I went back and edited my post. Re-read my post now that it is corrected. I was simply stating statistical facts with regard to sampling and data manipulation. As an example: Assume that 60% of your total deer population survey data came from Dallas county up around Portland, and the other 40% of respondents were scattered all around the state. When you extrapolated that data statewide, your estimated population numbers would be way way off, as the majority of the state does not have anywhere close the the population that they have around Portland. Statistics are a very valuable tool but unless care is used in data collection and analysis prior to using statistical techniques on it, you can unwittingly and unintentionally paint an incorrect picture. If you just used data as described above in the Portland scenario, you could statistically say that the state's deer population was around a million animals. Your data has to come from all areas of the state and be evenly distributed across the state as a whole to be truly statistically valid. I disagree with the comparison to a 5% timber cruise. in that situation, you have a defined area and it is easy to see if your sample is applicable to the property you're cruising when taken as a whole. That's why it works in that application. With wild animals across an area as large as the state of AL, there are too many variables involved: terrain, cover, urban sprawl, pressure, human population densities, carrying capacity, land use, recent disease outbreaks etc. A small but very specifically targeted survey covering all AL counties across the entire state would work and be statistically valid assuming you could get an adequate number of accurate responses from different parts of each and every county.

Well Georgia must be LAZY also. They say they harvested approx 316,000 deer based on a scientific survey of 2500 hunters in 2016-2017. Their tele gamecheck reported 186,000 deer killed for 57 percent particpation. Gamecheck numbers are useless unless maybe you can extrapolate outwards with the 57 percent useage for the deer numbers harvested in the counties in combination with the hunter survey numbers????

Also I have recieved the alabama survey 3 times in 37 years of license purchase.

I will also add that I take exception to the APP. I do not have room on my phone to run the APP. Numerous times I have tried to delete other APPS and I have never been able to delete enough space to run the gamecheck APP. I have deleted stuff and loaded back like instagram and snapchat ( keep up with daughters on them) but gamecheck never downloads successfully.

I agree.

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I think it is a fools errand to try to manage the deer herd on a totally local basis, but it makes sense to have management zones
based on the northern one third, the central one third and the southern one third.

There are still a ton of deer in the southern one third.

I think there are still a lot of deer in most of the central part of the state, but I know
from the AOA that it varies.

We know from reports here on Aldeer that many places in the northern one third have few deer. So it would seem doe limits
would be in order in those places. >>>>>But GC would not be necessary to know this.

And we also know that an extension of the deer season into February in the northern zone was totally unnecessary and was never
even asked for. >>>>>So that is an example of bad management by Chuck Sykes right there.

Agree.


And the trend for many many years is DOWN - lower harvest numbers.

That is a known fact. Especially the buck numbers - way down due to the 3 buck rule (which is a good thing imo).

We also know that the ratio of doe kills to buck kills has gone up, with almost equal buck to doe kills now for many years per the surveys and
reports from the DCNR. And many areas killing a lot more does then bucks.

We also know that the kill rate for yearling bucks has gone down. Another good thing.

And all of this is known without GC.

That was a really messed up thing for him to say.

Chris Blankenship was the author of Snapper Check and did a great job with it. Those scientific findings alone are used to debunk any guesstimate regulations that the feds has or was going to impose on us. Thus the reason for the extended season this year. I use it as well as GC.

I'm not against the GC, Steve. I actually agree that we need a check system, I'd even support a tagging system. I'm against chuck's accessment that only 30% are complying.
I've always rejected the idea that we're killing nearly 1/2 million deer annually. That's just insane.
And yes, I also agree with Chuck, the survey was bogus SWAG.

I'll report every deer I kill.
I will never, ever report a turkey.

Regarding the "Random" survey - Given the number of hunters in Alabama, a random sample of less than 5% should result in someone getting a survey once every 20 years. I've had a lifetime license for 30 years, and an annual for 8 years before that, and never received a survey card. Never met anyone else who did either.

If someone is getting then almost every year, the survey ain't random, and the state must be cherry picking the data for some reason.