Posted By: chital_shikari
Bergmann's Rule - 03/20/18 01:03 AM
I glanced at the Wiki article because I remember reading in another article about 500lb WT that as latitude increases, so does body size in white tail deer.
I was talking to my "uncle" in GA this past week while we visited his cabin and lease near West Point, GA. He said Texas has much bigger deer than Georgia. I took him for his word but have been thinking about it since.
I know we have big deer, that's for certain. But how big?
In a rough guesstimation, I told him an average mature buck in Texas weighs around 180lb live weight--don't kill me, I don't know how accurate this is! He replied with "If a deer is 180lb here, it's like a 12-pt." Completely unscientific, but I think we can all understand the nonscientific backwoods comparison the two of us made: 180lb is a big deer in GA.
Mr. Paul Simone at Texana Springs Ranch in Hunt, TX once told me that the average WT doe in that area (his work with TPWD concentrated on Kerr WMA and of course management efforts on his current workplace of 2000 acres) weighed 80lb dressed out. We hunted with them in February of 2016 and all of our deer dressed out past 70lb with the biggest in the high 80s, if I remember correctly (all were doe except for 1 nubbin buck, which the ranch wanted dead anyway). I shot a 3.5/4.5 year old Madison County buck in 2010 that was around 100lb of meat and bone. I shot a Menard County 2.5/3.5 year old buck that was likely 60lb of meat and bone. That's how I got to the 180lb average weight for mature deer, considering that a) doe are smaller than bucks and b) I haven't shot a WT deer in the south or north of Texas, where I've heard (and witnessed) bigger deer and c) the bucks I've shot were not truly "mature."
Let me know your thoughts. I'm probably grossly ignorant on most of what I'm saying here (the paragraph above) and would like to know more. How closely does the white tail deer follow Bergmann's Rule, in your opinion, across both the USA and Texas?
I was talking to my "uncle" in GA this past week while we visited his cabin and lease near West Point, GA. He said Texas has much bigger deer than Georgia. I took him for his word but have been thinking about it since.
I know we have big deer, that's for certain. But how big?
In a rough guesstimation, I told him an average mature buck in Texas weighs around 180lb live weight--don't kill me, I don't know how accurate this is! He replied with "If a deer is 180lb here, it's like a 12-pt." Completely unscientific, but I think we can all understand the nonscientific backwoods comparison the two of us made: 180lb is a big deer in GA.
Mr. Paul Simone at Texana Springs Ranch in Hunt, TX once told me that the average WT doe in that area (his work with TPWD concentrated on Kerr WMA and of course management efforts on his current workplace of 2000 acres) weighed 80lb dressed out. We hunted with them in February of 2016 and all of our deer dressed out past 70lb with the biggest in the high 80s, if I remember correctly (all were doe except for 1 nubbin buck, which the ranch wanted dead anyway). I shot a 3.5/4.5 year old Madison County buck in 2010 that was around 100lb of meat and bone. I shot a Menard County 2.5/3.5 year old buck that was likely 60lb of meat and bone. That's how I got to the 180lb average weight for mature deer, considering that a) doe are smaller than bucks and b) I haven't shot a WT deer in the south or north of Texas, where I've heard (and witnessed) bigger deer and c) the bucks I've shot were not truly "mature."
Let me know your thoughts. I'm probably grossly ignorant on most of what I'm saying here (the paragraph above) and would like to know more. How closely does the white tail deer follow Bergmann's Rule, in your opinion, across both the USA and Texas?