Too Many Deer?

My father-in-law sat out on a some stands on our place in Kimble County a few evenings this week. Yesterday eveing he counted 36 whitetail. 16 were bucks with 5 or 6 being over 3.5 years and 3 being mature. This was on a stand overlooking a 40 acre pasture with 2 feeders and a water trough. We have a section plus 200 acres. Our neighbors range from 150 acres to 12,000 acres with few hunters on the smaller tracts outside of opening weekend and Thanksgiving and Christmas. Should we consider doing some serious culling this season? We feed year round and protein during the growing months. It is very dry right now and we have several sources of water that draw animals.

I don't think you need any serious culling at all. You are at about a 1/1 buck-doe ratio. 1/2 of your bucks are over 3 1/2 years old. It sounds to me that whatever you have been doing just keep on doing it for a great deer herd. Let the 3 mature grow one more year and then take them out and that will have you a crop of mature bucks to take out each year from now on.

If you have the only water you are pulling them in. I wouldn't start piling them up until I had a survey done. I hunt a section and can see 30 a sit some days but looking at the surveys from the last 3 years, helicopter/spot light on my place and the two 1000 acres tracks to my north, numbers have climbed since the 2011 drought to around 1 deer for every 15-18 acres. During the winter they like to cross my section using the thick brush and draws for cover to get to the huge wheat fields south of me. This is why I see so many, I'm in the bottle neck. Without the surveys I would have assumed we had twice the amount of deer in the area.

We had a place between Junction and London for 49 years, but had to sell it a few years back. One year we culled 32 does from 325 acres. That had very little effect on the numbers and it was sort of like digging a hole in the sand. The hole just continued to fill back up. The next year a change in the numbers was hardly noticeable. One thing I think it did is during the rut with different does coming into and out of the pasture, it caused different bucks to follow them and helped change the makeup of the herd in a very small way. Four and a half years later, I killed the best buck I ever killed on that place, a 147 5/8 inch 12 point that was aged by a game biologist to be 4.5 years old. I think somewhere along the way, culling those does helped. With the number of deer in that area, I don't think you can ever go wrong by culling numerous does. How many might be the secret, but too many can be a problem for sure. Just my opinion.

I would imagine from a pure numbers game you didn't change much but by elimating older does/does in general you allowed the existing deer left to have more browse. A older doe eats a ton compared to a yearling...once a doe quits breeding she becomes a drain on the resources of that ranch imho...

If the buck to doe ratio is good or where you want it, then it might be worth removing more mouths. If those bucks that are excess do not meet your criteria as keepers then they can be removed. Most people think the first thing they need to cull is bucks and forget about does. I would cull doe numbers down to a tight ratio and remove any bucks 2 or older with less than 8 points at first.

Sounds like you may need some help

Wish we had to cull does