Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Serious Deer Talk Forum A New Paradigm in Doe Management

One of the best things about this approach is that you don’t need everyone to subscribe to it or understand it…….you just need ENOUGH folks to where everyone else can still have their opinions and do as they please but just not have the ability to mess things up as bad…….They can fill the freezers……”manage” does……yada, yada, yada....for whatever reason……just as long there’s enough people who DON’T….so that the county totals stay below a level where we want them

I'm skeptical that you'd have enough participation to make much of an impact on the county level.

Not shooting does is a pretty easy thing to do… Quite a few of the plantations have virtually already done this even if it isnt in a fully organized form like I’m laying it out……Many of them shut down doe harvest this year across large acreages and doe harvest levels came way down…..So now if doe harvest levels stay at 1900 ish does for Bullock County and 1400 ish for Macon and 2100 ish for Russell moving forward..…which is about what they were before the big increase…Is there any reason for the plantations to change course next year??.......I'm gonna say probably not.....Somebody has to compensate for all the extra slaying and "managing"

Don’t get me wrong when I say “don’t shoot any does”…..I’m not meaning that as in completely zero does …..Its meaning no “quotas” where every club and plantation tries to take out 60 does here and 80 does there just to be taking them out………Shut that chit off as long as county wide harvests are sufficient enough to meet the county level goal……

Bpi is in line to the reality

Why not just manage your property.

You give them what they need and don’t shoot at every deer that walks out like most clubs do and you’ll see plenty of deer.

My neighbor has 60 acres and the does around my house are almost pets. But he don’t shoot at them every time they walk out.

Its really a bonus for a big club or landowner to have the other surrounding hunters "manage" the does……Shooting a bunch of does just to meet a quota adds a lot of extra hunting pressure to a property that doesn’t have to occur if the folks in the surrounding area are already shooting enough for everyone…..

I’m not sure you can develop a cookie cutter approach to deer cause “it depends” seem to be the greatest factor

It does depend. 😂

High Fence every county individually

You know this becomes a pretty simple formula of addition and subtraction once you get so many years of trend data on the books to look at for each county or “ranch”……Is the deer population down in the county??....Want to raise the population to higher levels??……SUBTRACT from the doe killing numbers…….If 1500 does have been getting killed annually then we need to reduce it to lets say 1200 and it doesnt really matter who "doesnt shoot them"………We overcomplicate the whole doe management thing way more than it has to be……

Here’s kinda what I think its gonna look like…….something along these lines anyways…..with each county having a different number for their yield….Let’s use Bullock Co doe harvest as an example…….Of course you would revisit these numbers periodically to see if they need tweaked

Increase Pop……………Hold Stable……………Decrease Pop
….< 1700…………….....1800 – 2200……………….>2200

The only way to effect that level of change is to have DOGE on a state level. I'd bet more money than I have that big insurance companies have more say in the deer limits than sound management practices. Heck, even the state biologist I had look at my lease pushed me to kill 15 doe's in 1 season, and then we could evaluate after they aged the jaw bones. You pull 15 doe's off 1050 acres, and you won't have much of a population to evaluate next season. Not with the deer densities we have right now. I wish I could tag mine to see how the move around the property.

This is also true. We aren't allowed to bait. Buy land next to a westervelt lease and start putting corn out and watch what happens. My former BIL used to raise deer. They would turn some out every year, and didn't kill any doe's. One of their neighbors killed 25 one season.

GWs have a hard enough time policing a county.. who is going to police the cooperatives?

Whatchu talkin bout Willis??.....Police them for what??

In what world is that "easy"? Anywhere I have hunted in Alabama, that conversation would go about like this: "Hey Bubba, listen I know the farmer let's you hunt the wheat field behind your Mama's house, but me and some other landowners have decided to form a cooperative, so you can't shoot every doe and spike that walks out in the field like you have been doing." Bubba: "Go to hell, F you, get off my Mama's porch."

Maybe you haven’t read far enough yet into the thread yet……Its completely voluntary…..I don’t think anyone is going around telling Bubba what he can do…..Actually the whole idea was to let Bubba fill his freezer and compensate for that by plantation X cutting back on their doe quota or eliminating it all together

Aint no way you get anything productive done on a daily basis