Going to look at a deer lease this weekend north of Bluffton towards Tow Texas. Anyone have any info about the deer population or the quality of deer in the area? What am I expecting to see if I were to hunt there ? Any info would help greatly. Thanks

I hunted the Granite Hills Ranch in the late 90's about a mile from the Bluffton store. Plenty of deer and back then a good buck was in the 130's we had a few Fallow deer that were on the ranch. There were quite a few Turkeys along with a ton of Hogs

A bud owns 800ac close to Tow.....Lotsa deer but in the 29yrs he's had the place they've never taken a buck over 135 and it's been pretty well managed and protein fed last 15yrs......they been pounding the 8s but seem to be more every year and they're all cookie cutters....15.5in spreads and score 125 as 4-5 year olds. Tons of those kinda deer.

unless things have changed in that area quite drastically in the past 20 years, this is very spot on. We hunted around Bluffton and back towards Llano from the 60s up thru mid 1990s.

Thanks for all the input. I'm new to this forum so I thought I'd give it a try. As long as there is deer in the area I'll be happy. Anyone know about how many deer you might see in on hunt? and what size body the deer are? I'm guessing they will be smaller deer if there are that many deer?

I can't speak for current in that specific area since I haven't hunted there in about 20 years, but what we had were considerably smaller than other areas. We used to refer to them as "meat leases" because you could easily limit out in a weekend or two if you wanted to, there were a bunch of deer. I recall seeing 30-40 per sitting, sometimes more. Back then a grown doe would dress out 50-60 lbs and a decent 3-5 y/o buck was 80-100 lbs. This made the antlers look huge for a 8-10 point 16" wide buck that only weighed 80-100 lbs. There was not much game management or herd improvement back then that I was aware of. After I left that area for a lease in northern Williamson county but my dad stayed another year or two with his old group. One opening morning I shot the biggest deer of my life to that point in time and my hunting buddy on our lease killed one even bigger than mine. My dad killed a nice Llano county 8 point too. We loaded our deer and headed to mom/dad's house to process and dad showed up with his "trophy" about the same time. We pulled around to the big mesquite tree where we did all our skinning and hung them up side by side, used a cotton scale to weigh them. Dad's Llano 8 point weighed ~90 lbs, mine was ~130 lbs and my buddy's was ~140 lbs. My dad said "dang, I thought I got a nice deer until you hung it up besides ya'lls, now it looks like a jack rabbit".

I suspect there have been much better management and population control since back then, and some improvements are definitely possible.

There's still millions of them and they still look like large dogs.

Actually "large" dogs is probably an exaggeration. They look like nice, mid-sized dogs.

Quality and numbers will vary ranch to ranch. Most will have plenty, and often too many, deer.

In this area, numbers is the first thing to get under control. If you have 4 acres/deer and 6 does for every buck than you can expect small body sizes and corresponding antlers. But, if you can the get the density and B:D ratio balanced better, and let the bucks get to maturity, these deer can show you something. My Llano Co buck last year weighed 174 lb live, 136 lb dressed.

I would see what kind of management history the ranch has, and if they area part of an area Wildlife Management Association (WMA).

Either way, it's a real pretty area to hunt.

Did you get the lease?

no did not get the lease, wanted to many hunters on the piece of property, but the property was beautiful and seen deer on it. I just like to have more acres a gun.