Most east texas counties with normal deer populations are going to be around 5 deer per 100 acres. You could safley take around 20 percent of your herd a year. So you should be able to kill one deer per hundred acres. Now take your acreage split the amount of deer equally into does and bucks and there what you should not go over. And not more than 1 trophy mature buck per 600 acres. Thats a good starting point for the average east texas area. Keep records of what yall are seeing and adjust your kill ratios accordingly over the years. Thats all tpwd does anyway.

On our lease we have to shoulder mount any buck we shoot thats not a cull. It makes you real selective

AR might stand for Antler Restrictions or Antler Revenue or Antler Ruler but not so much Age Restrictions because as long as we have the added spike tag, saying it's all to let bucks mature, well, kinda makes the ones who set ARs in place, look, well, less than smart and that is kinda scary. I'll say it again Sig, your idea of allowing only one deer per hunter per season, regardless of the age or gender of the deer, or whether it's rifle or bow season, just one deer, sounds like a good idea but alas, I'm sure somehow that's flawed and less than perfect like ARs.

Same thing on my ranch

I am not sure of deer density on east tx but a 5 per 100 that works out to touch over 30 per sq mile. Lets say it is a 1;2 buck ratio ( 1 buck for every 2 does ) you should havest 25% of the doe's which if 5 and 25% bucks which is 2.5 make that half a spike. What it really boiles down to is there should be about two hunters per 640 acres. So if you and three other of your buddies are hunting 200 acers expect to kill a buck about ever other year for the whole place

Great! another post on how we should all shoot does if we are meat hunters! What a load of crap. In alot of ar countys you have 4 days to kill a doe or 2 and thats it, also thats one of the reasons why we have fewer deer every year under ar rules and bag limits because you can kill too many deer period. 338ultra i dont know where you hunt but in the countys we hunt ar dont work! If its working for you well thats great. Also us [meat hunters] dont care about antler sizes and a young buck will eat alot better than any 5 or 6 year old deer.

How do you get everyone should shoot 25% of the does everywhere? There's no way you can make a general statement like that and have any sort of reliability to the numbers, none, notta. Many areas or pockets as used earlier can support many more deer per acre. Many areas can't support any. At your rate you would eventually never have a femaile over 3.5 years old. Great herd health there.

Unless you are WAY overpopulated killing 25% of your does, or a 100% over a 4 year period will devastate a herd. That kind of thinking is what got us here.


They took numbers from MLD properties and HIGHLY concentrated areas of habitat and used those numbers to set limits for entire regions and beyond. That's akin to taking a human density number in South Oak Cliff and sprading it over Texas. We'd be bigger than China on paper.






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Hoytman, got a question for you. How many acres are you hunting on and in what county? I've hunted in East Texas for years. It was the worst county in the state of Texas for outlaws running dogs. Many times I set in a deer blind and watched a deer come across a sendero and a few seconds later dogs would be behind her. Even with it being the most poached county in the state, we still had plenty of deer. I didn't see 40 everytime I went out, but I was able to see 5 - 10. Those poachers had the same machismo mentality that you do, that young "buck" is going to eat really good. That young doe, sitting there is going to eat just as well. And regardless of what you think, it is better to have as close to a 1:1 balanced herd as you can, and there is no county in East Texas that has that. So, question is, how many acres do you hunt? Have you got 10 people packed on 100 acres? Are you hunting by yourself on 1,000 acres or 20 acres. How many cameras do you have going to survey this property?

I'll tell you where I hunt. I hunt pretty much by myself on 1,500 acres that borders a 12,000 acre ranch (that doesn't allow hunting) and two other 3,000 acre ranches that don't allow hunting. The ranch to the south of me is the only place hunters are allowed and that is where I am seeing the poorest health heard and younger deer, because after talking with these guys, like you, they are meat hunters. And before you say, well not everyone can afford a place like that, I pay $0. The landowner knows I am management minded and wants me to improve his deer heard. I've had 5 food plots put in for him, he bought 7 feeders for me to put up around the ranch and 4 game cameras for me to get a census of what we had and 4 new deer stands. I didn't have to pay for any of it. I'm fortunate. But I'm sure a lot of landowners would not mind guys coming out and hunting, but the problem is if they meat hunt and shoot the first thing that comes around, they are dropping the value of the land and no landowner wants that. If they are selective about what they will take they can improve the deer heard and improve that value of the landowners property.

In a health herd the recruitment is around 1.5 fawn survial per doe that is why you need to take 25% but if you have 6 blocks at acers each and they all have 5 guns on it that makes 30 guns that expect to shoot a big buck and some doe,s. Don,t work ! 2.5 bucks out of 10 and 5 doe,s out of 20 is very healthy harvest but if a area has to many guhs then no regulation helps because 30 bucks and 30 doe,s is to high harvest

Sig,

I agree with you on the fact that taking 25% of the does might be too many, if you are wanting to GROW your deer heard. But if you are wanting to sustain it or selectively reduce it, it might not be that bad of a number.

If you have 100 does and you kill 25 of them, The natural fawn recruitment rate is about 56% average for HEALTHY DEER HEARDS in the state of Texas and that includes predation. But let's drop it down to 50% since East Texas or wherever you hunt is so crappy. If you that leaves you 75 does. If these does have 38 fawns, half of them being bucks half of them being does, then that next year you will have 94 does. Not bad numbers. IF you want to sustain your deer heard, cut it back to 20% of the does and still have 100 does the following year. If you want to grow it, cut your harvest back to 15% and have 106 does the next year. While not and exact science, because no one can control the precipitation those numbers will get you close and you can see that Turkey fanatic is probably not too far off.

You are not figuring in habitat, drought, predation, etc. How are you getting at a recruitement rate of 1.5 fawns per doe? Won't fly from what I can tell. You are basing this off a doe herd that is 100% adult breeding age doe that have all had twins. Show me a deer herd in the state that is healthy that is 100% old mature doe and no 1.5 yr olds. A healthy doe herd will have 40% or so of doe that are 1.5 yrs old that fall and they will not have a fawn on the ground. As an example using 100 doe for math. You have 40% or 40 doe at 1.5 and if the remaining doe herd of 60% or 60 hd has a 200% fawn crop you would only hvae 120 fawns at census time. That would look like a 120% fawn crop on paper for your census. That is what I consider a healthy doe herd. It does not happen very often like that. You can't preach herd management to someone when you have not seen the place in person nor have any history by checking their records. TPW would reccommend that you shoot 16% of your deer herd on the buck and doe and you will be ok and have plenty of numbers in a perfect world. These guys that are not seeing the same amount of deer post AR to pre AR have more than AR issues to contend with and telling them not to shoot deer or that they have shot to many is not the answer. It lies deeper than that. They are not in that perfect world right now.

It seems most everyone was content before ARs and for those out there who seem upset that we are fussing about ARs, honestly, weren't you content before them too?

The problem I see with all of this is that deer just can not read. They do not understand what they are supposed to do under AR's. If they could read then they would know that a percentage of them are going to die each year and they would reproduce exactly that same amount each year. First thing before you can grow a herd is that you have to have enough nutrition to do it. If you deer numbers are at carrying capacity then how are you going to increase numbers of one portion the density with shooting less if there is not enough forage to support them? They are at carrying capacity in any given year. If you going to increase population then you have to improve habitat or improve nutrition to grow the population over the long run. Again there are other issues in these AR areas that are effecting their deer numbers. I am guessing it is a combination of many factors including the AR.

I was happier before we went to an age based harvest system on our lease back in 2007. Granted we've seen alot more mature deer since but I haven't taken a buck either. One of these years its going to pay off though, I'm confident of that, so I just pay my money and bide my time.

In a ways I have to agree with you Curly. Everyone was happy before the AR's. But you would have to agree that deep down inside most every hunter in those areas hunted each season with the hopes of taking a bigger buck than ever. There in lies the problem. TPW and the state of Texas has long been a leader in deer management. In the American public eye the midwest was growing bigger deer than the leader and I think this is were TPW started the change of their management goals. With a statewide(not just a regional issue) population out of control they used this AR method to change that issue. If you were ok before them and now you are not then you fell under the blanket management plan IMO. Sad for you but great for others. How do you fix this? Time will tell but I can assure you they are getting an earful on it and are working on it now. That "fix" they come up with help some but still not all.

But there are also ranched out there that EAT everything they shoot. Not just pass 'em on the hunters for hungry, and mount the antlers....

Although I do not hunt much in an AR county, Waller and Austin Counties, I do like the AR's but the spike tag has got to go.

Until they get TWIMS up and running and get to managing on local levels even lower than counties, we are screwed. They know. Just started with this program and it's gotta run its course until they can fund something better.

I think we need mandatory deer check stations and reporting procedures. they need to put a pin on a map wher the deer comes.

338ultra i hunt my property and neighbors totaling around 300 acres and im the only one who hunts it now that my daughter stopped hunting and have 4 stands and 2 food plots about 2acres each and its north of sulphur springs in hopkins co. I have lived there 23yrs now and have hunted it every year since then. When we first moved on the property we had plenty of deer but could only hunt 1buck and no does ulesss hunting in archery season. Always saw lots of deer and you could kill 1 buck any size and your done! Now ya can kill 4 deer and there are more hunters so numbers are taking a nose dive. dont need a slide rule to figure it out. And on a personal note i dont need a big set of antlers to stroke my ego and i eat every deer i kill. Dont need you our anybodys ok on shooting a young deer to eat. Ar is for horn hunters and nothing that will benifit age or health of a herd with the bag limit set the way it is. If they will reduce the bag limit to 1 deer any size or sex it will come back to what it was. After letters and emails to tpw and not one responce it aint gonna happen anytime soon.

it's going to have to be property specific or else it is still going to be labeled as a blanket program.

At least the blanket would come closer to fitting the bed....

here's another example.... Deer here on our farm are rare in south central fannin county. However in Northeastern Fannin County near the federal lands and timber and red river and bois d'arc creek (a big creek)...they are more plentiful.

When the guidelines say in ETR, "Bubba, you can shoot four of them deer as long as you shoot the does during thanksgiving, and the bucks can't both be nice'uns".... guess what, there are people that shoot four, legally.

Look up the states Wildlife Management Units, and Regions for Wildlife... the ones in use today, not the proposed ones; It's scary.

I somewhat remember our parts of East Tx being tied in with ya'lls and that's just not good for anyone.

Like i said and tell these guys who know all, if ya aint hunting in the countys that are having problems you dont know squat. We dont tell you how it is in your county and i sure dont want them telling me about how it is in hopkins co unless you hunt there. Believe there are some areas in hopkins that are still doin good as far as numbers go but down in most areas.

So you are telling me that in general, as a buck gets older his antler spread does not increase? So if he is born with a 5" spread with spikes his spread is never going to increase? That is profound research coming from Hopkins County Texas. I bet no place else in the entire USA has ever seen a phenomenon like that, those deer must have a disease (sorry, I'm a sarcastic person, I would be this way in person too, so don't think less of me that I might be big shotting from a computer).

AR has everything to do with increased age limits on bucks. Now I totally agree with you and several others on here that are totally against AR's, that they should knock out the spike antlered buck kill. There's no need in it. They are basing this off of a controlled study in Kerrville, and it's crap. Not every yearling spike buck in Texas is inferior to a yearling buck that has a split main beam.

But in contrast to what you are saying, I totally disagree that antler spread is not an indication of an aging deer. Is it the greatest identifier, not hardly. But how many yearling bucks have you seen walking around with a 13" spread? Sounds like none. Sounds like you aren't seeing 3.5 or 4.5 yo bucks with a 13" spread either. It's unfortunate, but I do believe that yearling doe will eat just as good as that yearling buck with a 12" spread. And I do believe, in the long run, it will benefit the overall health of the deer herd (maybe not numbers), but deer size and YES ANTLER SIZE. Let's face it.... Thousands of hunters don't pay thousands of dollars every fall to go out and shoot a 90" whitetail rack. They pay the money at the chance to shoot that 150" deer. That's ultimately going to trump your meat hunting. Don't get me wrong either, I shot 3 does this year to fill my freezer, because I love to eat them. I could have killed spikes or bucks with a greater than 13" spread, but I personally know you can't eat the horns, but do know they sure look good on the wall. Now that's not to say, I see a 3.5 yo 6 point, he's going to see Jesus and he will not adorn my walls. My opinion. But just like everyone else on here, we all got one, they all stink and the TPWD ain't listening to none of them.

IF I were you Hoytman and you truly want to do something about the situation, you should start a Management Club with all your neighbors and put them under the MLD program. Then you can pretty much steer whatever management practice you want. That's what I am about to do. Either that or get the neighboring hunters kicked off their lease for littering onto our property. They have been throwing six volt batteries and other trash across the fence. All we did was ask them to move their feeder more than 15 yards from our fenceline.

It won't just selectively reduce it. It will devastate it, in fact, it has! And in an area that was just getting good.... we needed to grow the deer herd. We are no where near saturation rates.

Even in your example, which is best case scenario, you lost 6% of your doe herd the first year. Extrapolate that over the next five and see where the number's are? Couple that with increase buck harvest, lessening the breeding/birth/survival rates as well, and the number plummets. That's what has happened in these NE Texas counties, the numbers have just GONE.

The numbers just don't lie.

Your right i should have mentioned that we are already at a .7 doe to 1 buck ratio. It took alot of doe killing to get to that ratio.