Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Serious Deer Talk Forum Charts and Graphs

Like Matt said......this stuff is highly predictable.

Yep, this right here. I like all these acorns!

Hey Harold, I’ve been making the same loop around my place for, oh I don’t know, 25 years, and I normally see 25-45 deer at dark making the 2.5-3 mile drive around from the lease to the house. Last February, after season, did it several times. Saw as many as 50. I think I’ve seen 4-5 at most making that same loop this year. You are honestly going to tell me that from February to this December folks done killed all the deer out here? That’s laughable. They’re in the freaking woods and not in the ryegrass pastures. They’re not having to feed on water oaks by the highway and be seen cause they’ve got them in the woods. I think you are simply doing this now to generate more attention. If you don’t understand the impact acorns have on deer harvest you need to do a little research.

AND, treemydog has a valid point. There’s a whole bunch of folks holding out for that nocturnal buck on the feeder to make his first daylight appearance, and they won’t shoot anything else until he does. I see that all the time. Once he’s dead, they’ll start shooting other deer. 😂

Matt when do acorns start turning bad/sour less desirable where deer start finding other food sources later in the Season?

Curious to hear Matt’s answer but in my experience, white oaks have a short shelf life and red oaks last into January

It’ll be a good long while. They’ll eat them the entire winter. Some water and willow oaks will drop until January.

White oak species can, and often do begin sprouting before spring. The ones that don’t may rot. Red oaks (includes the water and willow) can last months and usually don’t sprout until spring. We will not run out of acorns this deer season. They’ll be there.

Thanks. That's what I was thinking sure won't be running out ha.

Is it????

Well that was meant to be a joke but……Predicting that an increasing trend line will eventually crash downward doesn’t take Nostradamus type vision……..Its predicting which year it will happen that’s a little more difficult…..My prediction on the increase in doe harvest revolves around the idea that I believe simply changing the rule will get more shot than would have without the rule change…..I think that’s still going to prove to be the case by the time we get to the end of the season…..Like we were previously discussing with zone C not getting changed and making a comparison to that area….it may be that many counties just arent down as much as they would have been……Right now Zone C is 25-35% behind

I will say that I am surprised at how far behind a lot of counties are continuing to fall……A lot of north Alabama counties are going to end up WAY off from last year if the trends continue…..The numbers keep getting worse every week…..It may very be that the number of “opportunities” are down so much this season that the rule change doesn’t come into play for many folks…..That’s why I said in another post that it will likely be next year when north Alabama bounces back to their “up” year to see how the change impacts that part of the state…..The new numbers for tomorrow are looking pretty ugly

I think that it's you are slowly winning over the masses and they are listening to you and just not shooting them.

Only ugly to Chicken Little.

2Dogs, you gotta understand how this works. If harvest numbers are down, it's really bad and indicates that hunters have killed far too many deer and the population is going to crash soon. If harvest numbers go up, it's also really bad and we have too many new and out of state hunters and those hunters are killing too many deer and we are going to run out of deer soon. It's what happens when you only use one variable for statisitical reference, with zero context, and failure to account for any additional variables impacting the one variable that you are using. It is the formal definition of built in bias.

I just heard from the head of Alabama game and Fish. Deer season is already canceled for next season due to the drop off in numbers!! 😀😜

Can everybody just check in a couple of does to make the numbers look better?

We're gonna whack a bunch on our 3 properties over the next 3 weekends. We've haven't shot any in the last few years and we've got more than I like to see, ratio wise, so we will, for the first time in 4 years, thin the herd down some this year before the rut starts. That'll help the kill numbers in Dallas, Wilcox and Clarke, which brings up another point. We havent shot any does in the last 4 yrs, but just our family group will probably kill 20 or so this year. If you have just 30-45 groups or clubs, like us, across 3 counties, that all end up doing that, that's an additional 600-800 deer, all killed in the same year. Doesn't that drastically skew the harvest data that CNC's graphs and theories are based on? Yes it does, and this exact situation happens all over the state. Many years ago, a club I ran was on DMAP and we killed 180 antlerless off of 3,100 acres in one county, in one season, and it needed to happen. Donated the meat to project venison and local church food shelters. Herd was growing exponentially at that time and there was a visible browse line across the entire property. Situations like that do happen, and will skew the data for that county, for that year, for sure. Was it a uniform, county wide overharvest issue? No. It was a very specific targeted harvest on a specific, contiguous large piece of property that was being heavily managed.

Well I am getting my stuff together going hunting

Did my part and more on the way.

But it's a Chinese fire drill we have here.

Not enough numbers = all the deer are dead.
Too many number + all the deer are dead.

There's no scenario that is a win.

We coming up with a group of killers this weekend. It was said that Louisiana hunters kill all the deer in Alabama. We gonna try our best to prove that wasn’t a lie!! Yall better get what yall want in the next couple days. Yall have been warned!!

Kill'em all. Hope y'all have another great hunt.