When
is the best time for hunters to harvest does in Alabama? According to Alabama
Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries Director Chuck Sykes, the answer is simple:
When you have the opportunity.
“I
am now a weekend warrior,” Sykes said. “I shoot them when I can. If I need to
kill so many does, I have to do it when I can. In a perfect world, it would be
better to get it done early. Don’t wait. Get it done, and then concentrate on
your buck hunting. That accomplishes a couple of things. It leaves more food
for the deer that are left, and bucks have to work a little harder to find a
doe during the rut. That means more buck movement, which is good for hunters.”
Alabama
hunters have progressed from the philosophy that a doe should never be shot
under any circumstances to aggressively thinning the deer herd by taking out
does and are now back to a more balanced approach to herd management.
“I’ve
got personal experience on one 250-acre tract of land in Choctaw County for the
past 40 years,” Sykes said. “We were planting food plots before it was
fashionable to plant food plots. I’ve got one four-acre field that has been
hunted since probably 1975. The first year we hunted it, if you saw one deer
every couple of weeks, that was good. By the time the late 80s and early 90s
got here, if I didn’t see 25 to 30 a day, I was upset. Both of those were
unhealthy. The first one was there weren’t enough deer. The second one, it had
been taken to the extreme and there were too many deer. Both of them were
unhealthy situations. Now I can go sit on that food plot and I’ll see eight or
10 deer. That’s what the habitat can support. The deer are healthy.
“We
went from a time when it was forbidden to shoot a doe to where we shot
everything that was there. We went from one extreme to the other. Now you have
to balance it, because there are a lot more people hunting now. There are a lot
more predators out there. You just can’t have the blanket policy of kill all
the does you can and it’s not going to hurt anything. Those times have passed
for most properties. There are still some areas where the deer are overcrowded,
but for most areas, it’s not the case.”
Sykes
understands why it was forbidden to shoot does back in the middle of the 20th
century when deer populations in the state were struggling to remain viable.
“Back
then, if you shot the does, you weren’t going to have any babies,” he said. “It
went back to the fact that the more females you had in the herd, the more
little ones you could have to get the population up. It was beaten into our
heads that you don’t shoot a doe: ‘That’s the future of your deer herd.’
“Well,
everything has to be held in moderation instead of one extreme or the other.
When you have too many, you’ll sit on a food plot and see one little spike and
25 does. Traditional wisdom told you to shoot the spike. It was legal. You
could kill a buck a day, and that’s what a lot of people did. The buck-to-doe
ratio was skewed terribly toward does and the herd was unhealthy. Now we’re getting
back to where it needs to be.”
Alabama
went to a statewide three-buck limit in 2007, with the exception of Barbour
County, and the results have been noticeable. Hunters can take three bucks per
season, one of which must have at least four points an inch in length on one
side. All antlered bucks taken in Barbour County must have a minimum of three
points on one side, except during the statewide special youth deer hunting
dates when any antlered buck can be taken.
“With
the three-buck limit, you’ve got more bucks making it into the older age
classes,” Sykes said. “People have shot does to get the numbers down. Now it’s
a maintenance thing. Instead of a blanket statement of don’t shoot any or shoot
all of them, now you’ve got to do more fine-tuning on your management program.”
Wildlife
and Freshwater Fisheries (WFF) assists landowners with deer management
decisions through its Deer Management Assistance Program (DMAP). Through the
program, landowners and leaseholders can ask for assistance in management strategies
to reach the specific goal for a particular parcel of land, whether the goal is
to have more deer or more quality deer. WFF biologists will survey the
property, review deer harvest data collected from the property and then
determine what the hunters on that land should do in terms of strategies like
doe harvest and antlered buck restrictions.
For
those who are not on the DMAP or some other management program, Sykes said it’s
difficult to determine which strategy would be best, but he does offer some
guidance for those who are managing without assistance.
“Without
having a biologist visit the property to do a habitat assessment, set up game
cameras to determine deer densities and review deer harvest data collected from
the property, it’s tough,” he said. “A good rule of thumb that I have used over
the years is if your club shoots five bucks, you should probably shoot between
15 and 20 does. The optimal buck-to-doe ratio is one-to-one, but that’s
basically unrealistic in a natural setting. If it’s three-to-one or
four-to-one, you’re probably in pretty good shape.
“And
it goes back to your objectives. If you’ve got 100 acres, you can only expect
to kill a few deer. If you’ve got 10,000 acres in a club, that’s a little bit
different. But you need to have realistic expectations of what you want to
accomplish. Do you want to go see a bunch of deer? Or does it not matter that
you hardly see any deer, but the one you see is a big one? Then your harvest
strategy changes drastically, so it’s hard to give a blanket recommendation on
doe harvest.”
WFF
asked the Conservation Advisory Board to scale back the antlerless harvest in a
portion of north Alabama for the 2016-2017 season.
“Basically,
in much of that area, you have a lot of agricultural land with little wood
lots, like you do in the Midwest,” Sykes said. “The area also has much smaller
hunting tracts on average when compared to other parts of Alabama. For most of
the region, either the habitat is just not there to support the numbers of deer
you do in Choctaw County in a pine thicket, or management activities on
adjoining properties have much more impact due to the smaller average tract
size. Property managers up there requested a reduction in antlerless deer harvest
because they felt like the numbers were too low. Our biologists looked at it
and agreed that it would be a good idea to try it.”
Judging
from what I’ve been seeing on social media, Alabama is enjoying another banner
year in terms of harvesting bucks with impressive antlers even with the drought
conditions of the fall.
“Fortunately,
the antler growth was already done by the time we were in the drought,” Sykes
said. “We had good rains in the spring and most of the summer. During the
antler-growing period, the deer were in good shape. The drought didn’t hit
until late August, so the antlers were done.
“Another
thing about the drought is the acorn crop. Because of the early rains, we had a
good acorn crop. And with the drought, I’ve never seen the metering of acorns
like this fall. The trees would drop a few, then a few more. They didn’t drop
all at one time, so the deer had quite a bit to eat. I don’t know why that
happens. I just noticed it this year. I planted my food plots a week ago, and
there was a swamp chestnut oak still dropping acorns. Usually, they’re done
dropping by the first week of November.”
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There
are not definitive rules regarding the best time to take does out of the deer
herd. If time in the deer stand is limited, WFF Director Chuck Sykes recommends
taking does when the opportunity is available.
Photo by David Rainer
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