I missed your 1/13 update. Went back and found it at the bottom of a page. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. It proved exactly mine and other's point about the weather. Kills in most of the southern part of the state should've jumped up sharpely the week ending 1/13, with the rut starting to kick off, but instead of jumping up, they stayed flat due to the weather not being conducive to killing deer or hunting.
That’s not correct either…….Looking back at year’s past the numbers for the southern counties do not begin to really jump until the 20th………On 1/13 most southern counties still have 50-60% of the annual buck harvest yet to go
Exactly, the biggest jump always occurs right around the 20th and MLK day, but they start catching up quickly, starting pretty definitively, the second week in January as the bucks start searching for those first does in all these SW counties. But hey, dont believe me, or anyone else that has hunted deer all over the southern part of the state for the past 35-40 yrs. Certainly dont believe Matt Brock about anything. He's just a big buck slaying machine, that manages 10s of thousands of acres professionally, and has a degree in wildlife biology, and 20 years of hands on experience growing and managing deer all over the state. You're right CNC, I'm just not sure anymore what you're right about. I honestly dont know if we are running out of deer, have too many, dont have enough, are killing too many, have too many fragmented properties, have too many major highways in the state keeping deer from moving around and influencing genetic diversity, if out of state hunters are causing most all of the problems, if too many residents are hunting, if big farm and big insurance are bribing the DCNR to keep the harvest high to eliminate deer completely, or potentially something else that you actually think is causing catastrophic issues with our deer herd. Then there's the issue of the game check harvest numbers, whether they are correct to start with, what the compliance rate is, has the compliance rate changed from year to year, whether killing a bunch of deer is good because it shows they are present in large numbers to be killed, or it's bad because GC shows that we are killing them all, or it's a good thing that the harvest is down because less are being killed, or that's bad because that means we are running out of deer and that there are not enough around to kill. It changes so often that it is confusing. The only things that I can tell you for certain that are wrong with the Alabama herd is that our sex ratios are way out of whack because way too many bucks are killed annually, and have been forever, statewide, and the state harvest regs allow way, way, too many young bucks in the 1-3 yr age classes to be killed, which leads to the buck age structure problems that are prevalent throughout almost all of the state, which further causes a ton of societal and other herd health issues and stress, within the herd. Other than that, things are pretty good.
