All yall with these 30-50 doe tags, hook a brother up. Good lord that's a lot of meat

All those years and dollars wasted on biologists, seminars, and feed/food plots when we had Texas Dan here all along, giving us the real business on how to grow trophy bucks.

When I bought my place in Leon county in 2016 there was a fair amount of deer, they opened the doe season up more and our population has cratered.
150 acres next to me has eight hunters on it, fifty acres has five hunters on it, and they all shoot does.
We haven’t taken one doe since I bought it and the population continues to crash.
I hunted with the grandkids all weekend and saw one little four point no does.
Common sense has to come into play here or our population will continue to decline.
I’m tired of paying biologist to destroy our deer herd.

Provide better food sources and you'll have deer, especially later on in the season.

We provide plenty of food plus all the natural food, there has to be deer for them to be there.
Deer make tracks, in places where they traveled in years past was trampled with deer tracks, now hardly any.

Sorry to hear that, but it sounds to me like a situs issue….it’s a local situation that may not be a county wide issue. 5 miles away they could be overrun with does.

Have you tried speaking to the neighbors?

Call the county biologist and get his take on the issue as well and ask what he is seeing county wide?

I agree totally, there were lots of deer there before they opened the doe season for two weeks, I have talked to landowners and biologists, biologists is a waist of time, I told him the same thing about deer densities, and about small places with unlimited doe harvesting, and that’s why a permit system would work better a lot better.
We don’t over harvest at all, we have taken a spike buck the last two years and nothing yet this year, two of my neighbors don’t hunt much at all, it’s the small place to the south of us that does most of the shooting, it’s so aggravating, we see nice young bucks every year, most not legal and they just disappear, why they shoot these young bucks I cannot figure out, this is supposed to be there last year hunting that place because of the lack of deer.
People are so brainwashed about shooting does to the point where they destroy their hunting, just watch hunting shows that suppose to have top nox management practices and they have a lot of deer bucks and does.
I let the grandkids do the shooting but I do like to go out and set , it’s aggravating not being able to see deer.
I have seen and let walk some really nice bucks over the years.

There is a happy medium. I hunted south of you in Walker county during the late 90’s and early 2000’s. We had two farms we leased. One was loaded with deer and we would see prolly 15 does to every buck. We needed to thin some does there.

The other farm was mostly old growth pine and didn’t hold many deer. A open general doe season there would have decimated the population, as the local hunters would have shot them if they were legal, at the time I know we would have.

Hopefully they get off and the landowner decides not to lease or sells to someone who cares more about the wildlife population.

Deer managment is not a one size fits all, it’s very property specific. Everyone wants to be ( or thinks they are) a wildlife manager; they hear about these large south Texas ranches doing large scale doe culls every year and think they need to do the same on their 40 acre farm in east Texas. And that is not always the case.

Group of guys up the road from me leased a couple hundred acres, nice guys, mainly bowhunters. They always talked about how they never shot trophies, just culls and does. It was a common sight though to drive past their camp and a yearling buck would be hanging from the skinning rack.

Another way to understand your doe numbers for places like ours where does are rarely at feeders due to pressure from bucks. The most visible deer in your herd is a 1,5 year old buck. Take the number of 1.5 year old bucks, multiply it by two to account for doe fawns, and divide by fawn mortality. For example, last year we saw 25 1.5 year old bucks, so that means there were 50 total fawns from that age class, divided by a 0.4 fawn mortality and you get 125 total does.

Obviously there are some other variable such as 1.5YO mortality but overtime you can use that estimate to get a good understanding of your doe herd.

Along with MANY civilians like myself. Good ol' TCD.

Nailed it.

I think your math double-counts mortality; 50 fawns would be the offspring of 25 does. If your fawn survival rate is 40%, then your total births would be 125, which would be 63 does (not accounting for singles).

My understanding of fawn mortality is the numerator of surviving fawns over total does. In this case you could have a number over 1 if more of your twins survive. So 50 fawns off of 25 does would be 200%. Not sure if that is the right or official way to do that but it works for our numbers as year in and year out we consistently have around 25 1.5 year olds, 60-80 total unique bucks, and a 2:1 doe ratio which aligns to that 125 number.

Maybe fawn recruitment is a better word. I’m not a math guy