those Neches River bottom Tyler Co deer are just products of their environment....it is thick like no other.

Question for you....I know that on ranches where I have been that we shoot lots of doe the numbers of deer seen period decrease due to the new pressure on the herd. Most of these ranches are HF so the deer numbers are still there but the sighting have gone way down. Do you think that due to shooting high numbers on a place with low hunting pressure would be part of the problem? You mentioned that the newbie location was remote and had lots of deer then changed? Was the hunting pressure in the new place making the deer more difficult to see? Were you shooting lots of doe and hogs in the new area? Just curious. I know from my years of doe management after years of shooting them they are harder to see than a mature buck in most instances.

Is that directed at me by chance? Nevermind, not gonna go down that road again. Believe what you want to...

I wasn't killing my does down there... we had 2 stand locations we could choose and I would hunt my other stand (above flood level about 3 miles away) to shoot does to keep the pressure off the deer down in the bottom. I shot hogs down there, but not during season, I'de work on them during the spirng & summer. Even the places away from my actual stand set-up weren't producing the deer numbers and I was covering some ground through open timber and looking over grown up clearcuts from my climber at drains and old roads that deer would use to cut across from the creeks to sloughs.

Whenever I go out to those counties, I always see deer. You have to do certain things to keep them around. I routinely saw 8-10 deer under my feeder every morning, and 5-8 deer every evening. Heck during the day the deer used to bed down near my feeders.

I would disagree with you, in the east texas counties I meantioned there are MORE deer than 10-12 years ago. Perhaps on the land you hunt, you've put too much pressure on the deer?

On the lands I hunt on, we've made the rules that you can not drive a ATV. Those things flat out scare deer in East Texas.

We also set up multiple feeders and we don't hunt the same feeder more than 3 times a season.

If you are near a river, hunt near the river. I was lucky enough to hunt off the Sulpher River and noticed that Bucks used that river to go trolling for Does.

Finally you need to limit the amount of hunters you have on the lease. The last place I hunted, it was 2000 acres, and we only had 6 hunters. I only like to hunt in East Texas if we have at least 300 acres per hunter. Whenever I get that ratio, I've almost always tagged out. The problem comes in when landowners try to get 1 hunter per 100 acres. It just doesn't work in East Texas, theres not enough deer to support that. But at 300 acres per hunter, the deer will not be pressured as hard.

I own the land and there have been 4 killed in 8 years and the numbers are going down. I appreciate your helpful post, I was being a smartaxx and you make a post in repsonse that is polite and helpful.


I do not have the deer I had back in the 90's.

Why does everyone (myself included) insist on hunting feeders in east texas anyway. I havent seen one deer under either one of my feeders while hunting this year. But they will happily eat the corn i put out on the lanes in my woods. You guys are lucky they are even coming to your feeders.

Not everyone does. I am 250 yards down a trail going to my foodplot. I have been very successful in the area and I know how to kill big deer, but I cant kill what is no longer around.

helps concentrate those deer pockets...back when I was living in the area and could hunt basically every day, only time I would hunt a feeder was if I was running late or was flat out stumped.

This is a great conversation and a great thread.

In addition to the article on how older bucks go nocturnal, I have found the comments on the decimation of doe populations through over harvest very interesting. As recently as last week, I had a friend classify me as "another german hard head" when I mentioned the over harvest of does.

Don't get me wrong. I am in favor of limited doe hunting to keep the herd in balance with the carrying capacity of the land.

I do think that doe harvest can be taken to an extreme. Let me give an example of my experience with a pasture where I first hunted back in '67 and off and on over the years. The area was full of deer back then. We saw deer every time we hunted. At that time there were no doe permits. Flash forward 40+ years. The place is now part of a management coop. Last year there was a doe permit for about every ten acres. This year there was a permit for every 15 acres.

I had not hunted the place in a few years when I went back there to assist the landowner with the harvest and help my teenage son harvest a doe. We only got to hunt a couple times, briefly saw a few does and heard a lot of shooting. I did not let my son shoot the "does" we saw because we could not get a clear view of their heads to make sure he would not shoot a nubbins buck.

This year, we hunted the place four times. We saw two bucks, one greater than 13" that we passed and zero does. Again, there was a lot of shooting in the area.

I am not sure that the high harvest of does has been good for that area. From my observations, it may have been over done.
Perhaps, the managers are trying to get to a one to one ratio.
Even that does not make sense to me. I have read the post on the benefit of all does being bred at the same time and that did not make good sense to me. There is actually safety in diversity of fawn drop in my opinion and it is for the same reason that monoculture of cultivars in orchards is not the best idea. In a monoculture, the entire crop is subceptible to the same dangers, such as late freeze, or insect predation, etc. How can it be any different with the deer? This is why the Good Lord arranged for the does to come into estrus several times or until bred. I am no expert in deer management and I am not pretending to be, but this makes more sense to me.

As bad as it's been in the past couple of years, I shutter to think of how little deer I would see if I didn't hunt a feeder.

Curly, you ever get any pics of the buck that kept giving you the slip from last season?

Nope, nobody on our lease did either. Wonder what happened to the old boy?

no telling, he may have cut his range down or summer did him in.

look at the tongue stickin' out...pretty sure he's just messing with you.

He messed with me all last year!!!

don't remember that one, but that's priceless.

Smart aleck buck!

I would bet that buck was covering some ground.

He got pretty scarred up the later in the season it got. According to pictures only of course.

hopefully you'll see him next season. After 100s of pics of the one I was after last season, I got .5 a pic of him this season. It was pretty dang annoying.

But the folks several miles off that had a cpl pics of him too last year didn't have any this yr and I didn't see "his" woman but once this year so I'm banking on them being hunkered down somewhere.

One fact nobody talked about, on the decrease in deer. The pigs population has exploded over this same time frame as the deer number went down, They will compete for food and eat the acorns when available. Hammer the the pigs put out year round food plots, supplimental feed stations and you can expect to carry around 45 deer per square mile and can expect to harvast about 1/3 the population every year. That means 12 to 15 deer per sq mile. Under the current pig number I would bet on aroung 20 to 25 per sq mile. Which drops the numbers of harvast to 7 or 8 per sq mile. So if the lease hunts one hunter per 100. It only takes one or two years to hammer the deer population in that area

Yea and no. We have had pigs on the homeplace for 25 years and at the lease in Cass county since 96. We have hammered the hell outta the pigs. We dont see many in Cass anymore, none this year at all and they have been scarce here for 5 years or so, but the deer have gone down and stayed down for the last 8 to 10 years.