Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Serious Deer Talk Forum State Wide Deer Harvest

There are certainly lots of good properties large and smaller that are well managed. The smaller the property the more important the neighbors are. Lockjaw if your dead set on the place you have now and I can certainly understand you wanting to be close to home, you need to lease it yourself and get just a couple of members that believe in not pulling the trigger and you might have a good place in 5 years, might is a big word on this. Killing smaller bucks will not solve any number problems you have and you can be sure of that fact.

I think all of these things are just different means to an end…..its just a matter of which route you wanna take to get there……Do you want to do it through season length?.......Do you want to do it through limiting how many deer you can kill??.......Do you want to do it through what weapon folks are allowed to use?.......etc….etc……..I don’t like doing it through reducing the season length because I believe you would actually have to make significant reductions in season length to create change. Those 10 days arent whats making it or breaking it when does can be killed to no end. I also like the idea of giving hunters as many weekends to go to the hunting club or to their land and get in the woods as possible. You could say that this is a little secondary to actual deer management but also to go along with this is the $$$ impact to the economy. Every extra weekend that hunters travel and go hunting is more revenue generated.

Here’s what I think about that last map……I made the intervals for the colors 100-150 green…….151-200 yellow……..201+ red……What I think is that we may be on the front end of that map really changing the way it looks as this CWD sweeps across the state if that northwest Alabama decline progresses toward the southeast …..AND the way this Game Check data wurks if we react to that as hunters and reduce what we kill then the change in hunter behavior will only make it look worse within the numbers….

Then factor in weather, plus actual man hours hunted.

I agree. I just misinterpreted that in your post.

And what percentage of the does were bred during the peck rut vs non peck rut times ?

Deer are like Rats Breeding here in my Homestate.......what with all th' Cover......Pines planted. That's Why I just go Deer huntin' on. my Lands.......100 pound Rule!!

Man this is crazy. The only way you can control a deer herd is in a high fence. Deer travel. If you don’t have any deer on your property there’s either no food or habitat or the neighbors are shooting them.

If those same decreases we are seeing in the northwest corner move across the rest of the state below is what the map may look like in a few more years…..and honestly this may be a generous assessment. This is assuming the decrease we saw this year was as bad as its gonna get…..We wont know that until after next years numbers are in to see if there is a continued decrease in those areas or if they stablize…..It will be a really telling year…….

Thank you for answering. What I want is to make the hunting better. While I believe we can have some nice bucks, and do, alot of that also depends on the neighbors. I do confer with the club next to us, and he has given me alot of good info. They don't kill very many doe's on purpose. We don't kill very many, although because of my knowledge of the property, I could kill far more than I do. If I am just a member, then I don't care as much, but since I am the pres, I do.

Yes I want to keep the property. I have a ton invested in it, and I believe fully the program I have been working on has made it better, at least in the places I have control. I see alot of deer, although it could be I see the same 10 deer alot. I got directions from the biologist on how to do a camera survey and am going to work on that with one of the members. We are supposed to get alot of the property cut/thinned, which should increase our carrying capacity, and hopefully we can get in that from the start and be able to do some habitat management as it grows back up.
That is part of the pressure issue we have. The center of the property has been thinned, and thats where the majority of the hunting occurs. Getting thinned/cut will double the huntable territory.

I know from talking with my lease manager I am ahead of 90% of the clubs he is managing as far as planting and set up. So I am doing alot right. Hopefully we can start lowering the member count and managing the population better. It's hard to do that when people don't agree with you on what should be done. And unfortunately, getting into a different club probably won't change that. Especially given what the lease manager is telling me. I have a good core group of hunters that are willing to work, which takes some of the load off me. We fixed alot of the stuff I think is "broken" last season. This year, we need to put distance between food sources and stand sites. And make the stands easy to access without spooking deer. The biologist who came out and toured the property also said my plots look really good.

Right now I have 2 feeders on plots, with a cell camera on eat. I am trying to encourage the deer to use the plots more. And that helps concentrate the coons for trapping. I realize this won't turn around over night. But it is much better than it was when I started. This is the 4th year of spring forage. There used to be none.

I have no doubts about your intentions or your efforts. First things first, you must reduce the pressure by cutting your members drastically. I understand you don't want to be the bad guy, but until you do you are pissing into the wind.
I've been running leases for about 40 years so I'm not just blowing smoke.
Sometimes you have to do unpleasant things and hurt some people's feelings. I've always believed that the best and most successful clubs are benevolent dictatorships. Your first priority must be doing what's best for the club and the future of the property in the long run. I feel for you man

Yes I know that has to happen. Might need some creative ways to work that out. And I need a spot to go for filling the freezer.....

If you want to fill a freezer, get a Tennessee license and take advantage of their "L Unit' regulations on does. Three a day for the season, pretty much in the entire west half of the state.

This is just my opinion but I really don’t think it’s a question about whether or not we’re about to see what that last map shows…..Do we think CWD is suddenly gonna change course from anything that has happen thus far??? Its just a matter of if it passes over the area like a wave and the map rebounds to previous levels or if it sticks and the declines continue over the course of the coming years. If there isn’t any intentions of making any change in the rules in response to it until we assess the matter for the next few years……then I’d argue that it would be better off to go ahead and put the word on the street that you might want to play things conservatively over the next few years……knowing full well that it will likely effect the data next year but also with the plan to take next years data with a known grain of salt. The GC numbers may be affected by doing so but the on the ground realities of the deer herd may fair better if folks choose to use restraint on their own. I believe the GC numbers are likely about to decline again either way you go.

I agree with that CNC. One of my guys hunts some out in the midwest, and he says it will take a while before we see alot of CWD in the state. I haven't really followed it. It would surprise me if they make the limits more liberal for the next season to further reduce our deer herd.

CNC what is the map you just posted? Sorry if I’m asking something that’s been answered

If you want to look at these deer densities on a more detailed level you could take those last numbers and covert all of them to deer killed per square mile……which would give you a range of something like 1.3 – 6.7 from the lowest to highest…..Again Jackson came in at 4 for reference to what I’m talking about….…Once you have all the county numbers converted to deer killed per sq mile then assign a color scheme to it like the one on a weather radar with different shades for 0-1…….1-2……..2-3……and so on through 7 or 8…….This would show the density map on a more refined level. If the state is gonna post up all the raw data……well, not all…..but enough to do these calculations and sich……Then they might as well just go ahead and post the accompanying maps that are produced from it. I can draw them out on paint but those GIS programs make it look way cooler

It works out to 3.54 deer per square mile killed in Shelby Co.

That makes me believe more that my density is low. That is basically 1.6 doe's and 1.9 bucks per sq mile based upn the harvest data. You would think with a number that low, we ought to have deer everywhere. Unless there aren't many deer to begin with.......

You are overthinking this. Even in high density areas, some areas have very few deer and other areas are loaded. They are almost always unevenly distributed. If all of Montgomery County had as many deer as there are around where I live, it would look like nuclear bombed out zone. The deer know where the safe places are

I have a hard time believing those numbers are correct for Choctaw county where I’m from, that’s just the number of deer reported by good ethical hunters. All the night hunters and many older people refuse or will never report a deer.

I agree. Choctaw, Clarke, and Washington aren’t close to being accurate.