Lots of Bullock acreage is managed and privately owned. There will always be substantially more deer on private or leased, heavily managed lands where habitat management, low hunter pressure, year round food plots, supplemental feeding, and selective harvest programs are implemented. In fact, these well managed properties will have a higher carrying capacity than the surrounding properties and they will and do suck deer in, off of these surrounding properties. That means that the 2000 acre club located beside the heavily managed property, the one with 30-40 members paying $1000 dues, that shoots forked horn or better bucks and whacks most of the does that they see, will be the first ones to see a decrease in hunt quality and start complaining that there arent enough deer anymore. They'll always have some deer because of the managed properties being beside them, but at some point, their year after year overharvest of the resource will begin to effect the managed properties. Most of the managed properties that I am familiar with dont have a deer numbers problem. They have neighbor problems, that keep them from being able to achieve their goals for their properties, because dead deer dont get old, reproduce, reach maturity or grow bigger racks. Alabama has always excessively overharvested the resource with regard to bucks. You're just not a hunter if you cant kill multiple bucks a year. "Selective buck harvest" and "Alabama hunters" dont even belong in the same sentence. Have the does been overharvested? Yeah, probably so in some areas. Meanwhile there are other areas where more does need to be harvested. The real recipe for disaster involves the coyote and pig explosions over the last 20 yrs (fawn recruitment & decimation of deer food sources) , the state allowing wide open doe killing all season long, all over the state, the continued allowing of the overharvest of bucks, coupled with management practices driven solely by $$$, with almost zero reg enforcement and laughable penalties for game violations.
