My buddy is considering starting this with the intent to extend his hunting season. I read a little bit about it on the TWPD site but it didn't state all that much. Any pro's and con's to this? Also is there a minimum amount of land to be eligible, does it have to be high fenced? Any additional info would be helpful, thanks!

understand that MLD is extended privelages that are for the betterment of the deer herd. you'll have to have (and maybe you do) a solid management plan in place. you will have to have relatively significant deer census numbers and such. they won't give them unless that is present. so you may end up incurring more effort and cost than you were intending for those tags and season dates.

also...MLD property only gets to harvest deer they have mld tags for. and you have to fill those mld tags. a guy I know who had about 200ac he was hunting on in a buck only county....he wanted to go mld so he could shoot some does. place was hunted hard...bucks were tough to come by. they had does though. they obliged him...gave him a few doe tags...said his buck numbers were too low. didn't give him any buck tags. hence he didn't get to shoot any bucks until numbers improved. eventually they did...but it wasn't the answer he was expecting.

It does not need to be high fenced

We went MLD this year. There are several levels of MLD. You have to put in a decent amount of effort to get started, then there is a progression through the levels. I believe the extended season comes with level 3, so it takes several years of keeping up your end of the bargain (verified by site visits from the TPWD Biologist) to get to the extended season.

It is an excellent program, but you have to be prepared to really give in order to get.

First off, if your buddy has been hunting this land for a while he will need to start keeping records of harvests, animal sightings on each hunt, and any management work that is or has been done such as food plots. If you have some of these kind of records going in it will help tremendously and may allow you to jump a few levels. Be careful what you wish for though- as was stated above, you harvest off the permits you get not the tags on your license. I was on a lease one time where we went from LAMPS to MLDIII in consecutive years. There were eight members and we got eight buck permits only when we could legally kill two bucks each. MLDIII does let you gun hunt from bow season thru the end of February but there again you have to be careful. In many counties, by mid-January the bucks are shedding their antlers and you may mistake a doe for a buck with no antlers.

It's a great program, especially for years like this one where a long season is necessary to try to meet your harvest goals. I've been hunting under it for 6 years and wouldn't change it for anything.

MLD's, when used correctly and honestly, are a great management tool. However, I also believe it is one of the more abused programs.

Agree!

How so?

A crossbow and muzzleloader can extend seasons without all the paperwork.

true dat

Why would anyone want it to extend the season using MLD? Most have 2.5 months with a rifle and add on a month with bow. I thought it was mgmt purposes to meet harvest quotas to achieve buck/doe ratio and be at or below carrying capacity. I don't know anyone on it that uses it to hunt longer just to hunt longer. They do it to remove extra mouths. Once rut is over they just shoot mouths into Feb.

MLD level 3 tags, allows you to remove bucks that you could not normally take under AR regulations.
I have been under MLD level 3 for four years and like the program very much.

this but we are on MLD 2 and biologist give us a hit list that in some cases would not make ARs as well

Do you have to be in a high deer density location to participate in the MLD program?

Some ranches (leased) use them as currency and not as they were intended, to control deer population/quality. Pay more, get more tags which on large ranches can lead to overharvesting one part and not harvesting enough on the other and more often than not, tags are returned unused. Everyone is looking for a trophy until the last out, so they don't use their tags for management bucks and thus your left with a glut of deer, especially older, dominant deer that don't fit the bill as trophies. If it sounds like I have experienced this, I have.

I've hunted three different MLD ranches, the smallest being about 1000 acres and the largest being about 2500, which was part of a larger co-op that consisted of about 20K acres total, and saw good results from them except for the smallest one that we weren't on long enough to see the results. Not to say it didn't work though.

The extended hunting season shouldn't be the reason to get MLD status, but only as a tool for the ultimate goal, which is to improve the herd and at the same time raise the possibility for trophy deer. The key is accurate game counts (some to be done by landowner/hunters, some may be done by a biologist.....seen it both ways) and make sure that everyone who hunts the property/properties involved are educated about the program, its intention, and are all on the same page. Being able to focus on the deer, its age and getting away from the AR restrictions which I think can hamper improving trophy potential is just another benefit.

In our case, which was MLD 3, we were given the extra season, but also an inordinate amount of extra tags for does, cull bucks and/or spikes. We had a rule on ours that no trophy tags could be used outside of the normal rifle season unless it was with a bow during the normal bow season. We used the extra time (mainly the extra month prior) to take cull bucks and some does, leaving the rut period to focus on the trophies, not that we didn't take some cull bucks during that time also.

The first ranch I was on was a great deer place with good numbers, but had not been managed well. It took a couple of seasons of really sticking with the program and taking the required number of does and shooting primarily cull bucks and spikes, but the results we saw were phenomenal in terms of the quality of bucks after the 2nd and 3rd season.

I'd highly recommend it for herd improvement assuming it's managed well and everyone sticks to the plan. I'd say that larger properties and/or co-ops with several adjacent ranches would have better results than a smaller place sitting on an island since you can't control what your neighbors are shooting.

And as someone else mentioned, it doesn't have to be a high fence place.

Does it cost a lot to have a biologist come out and get started on the MLD program? My neighbor next to my ranch told me he spoke with a biologist and its not cheap but he didnt go into details. He wants to go MLD and asked me if i was interested.

My step dad used to have a MLD ranch in the hill country 20 years ago and he told me it cost him nothing and TPW paid for it.

Thanks

I always thought the same thing as your stepdad and that it was a service that TP&W provided so long as the property qualified for the program. However I was always the hunter and not the landowner on these ranches so I'm not 100% certain how that part worked.

True, you had better have significant deer numbers, depending on how many people you have hunting the lease the biologist is likely to tell you under MLD you will be given fewer tags than what would be alloted under the state regs. I've talked to a few who have gone MLD and if you don't meet your harvest requirement you can lose your MLD status and even be fined, in short it can quickly become more of a job than fun...

You need to have 5 prior years of records from the ranch on deer killed also. I will agree with all posted above and will restate that you will be issued tags based off of your surveys and TPWD management plan. You may or may not like what you get since TPWD's idea of how many deer you need to have on your land might differ from your idea. If you are on a larger ranch and need to take off lots of deer to get to CC can be a chore. Shooting 100,200, or more deer can get to be a lot of work and takes all the fun out of hunting for some when it becomes that much work. Shooting that many is not a one year and done either. It might take 3 yrs or more of killing that many to achieve the goal on the management plan. If you do have to shoot that many I would start contacting local food banks, churches, etc to find needy families needing the extra venison. Lasty you will have to keep records on every deer killed, then turn them in by the deadline. Failure to do so can cause you to loose the MLD status. You will need a cleaning area, scale, people to shoot that many deer, possibly a walk-in cooler or some place cold to store a weekends worth of deer. All things that need to be thought out ahead of time, not the first weekend you hunt and have 20 deer on the ground.
I have never heard of anyone being fined for not using all the MLD tags.