Deer Hunting | Deer Hunting & Management

Best Time to Deer Hunt: Early in the Season

Best Time for Hunting Whitetail?

After each season, we as hunters must wait the better part of a year before we can head back out deer hunting. This built up anticipation, fueled by a treasure trove of game camera photos, drives optimistic hunters to the woods in mass, each in search of a heavy-horned buck.

As it turns out, deer respond to that increase in hunter activity by changing their behavior and movement patterns. To seasoned hunters this does not come as a complete surprise, but there are management implications that impact local whitetail populations. So hunter activity not only affects our hunting efforts, but also our effort to management deer.

Anyone that has ineffectively attempted to hunt a specific buck knows what pressure does to a deer. After getting bumped from a bedding area, detecting a strange smell around a feeding area, or noticing anything abnormal in its core area, a seasoned buck will immediately change when and where it moves.

This change may be short-lived or long-lasting. It really depends on the level of intrusion and the demeanor of each individual buck on the response, but we know there is a response. Behavioral changes caused by hunters/hunting pressure also decreases your chance for success, and it goes for does, too.

Early Season Deer Hunting is Tops

Source: “Deer season is upon us. Surveys are being conducted. Deer cameras are being set. Managers are making harvest recommendations from these data. But let’s be honest, hunters across the country are more eager to hit the woods in search of that trophy buck than to spend time on reviewing harvest recommendations.

As part of most management programs, doe harvest is an important component that needs just as much attention as trophy bucks. Hunters see doe harvest as an inconvenience. Therefore, most hunters put off doe harvest until late in the season after they have had sufficient time to fill their buck tag. This, however, could cause hunters to fall short of their overall harvest goals.

Researchers from the Noble Foundation and Mississippi State University designed a study to address many aspects of deer behavior as it relates to hunting pressure. During the 2008 and 2009 deer rifle season, landowners and volunteer hunters from the community were invited to participate in a two-year study to determine how hunting pressure affects observability and harvest susceptibility of white-tailed deer.

No archery or primitive rifle hunting was allowed prior to the study. Thirty-seven adult bucks (≥2.5 years of age) were equipped with GPS collars across the Noble Foundation Oswalt Road Ranch. Hunters were assigned to compartments at a high hunter density (one hunter per 75 acres) or a low hunter density (one hunter per 250 acres).

From this study design, researchers determined how hunter density and duration of the hunting season influenced observation rates of white-tailed deer.

Hunter observation rates of collared bucks were highest during the first weekend of the deer-gun season in both the low and high hunter density areas, but as the hunting season progressed, observation rates declined along with the movement of deer. The number of observations of collared bucks in both the low and high hunter density areas declined by greater than 60 percent across the 16-day deer-gun season.But what about does?

Hunters also collected observation data on does throughout the season and found similar trends. Observation rates were greatest the first weekend of hunting and declined across the low and high hunter density areas as the hunting season progressed.

Overall, deer modified their behavior to avoid hunters by moving less and using security cover, which made observation by hunters more difficult. Early in the season, hunters had greater success observing deer at higher elevations on the ranch where vegetation was relatively short and woody cover was sparse. Late in the season, deer chose areas that were more densely vegetated – areas with greater woody cover or along riparian corridors.

On properties with similar hunter densities, these results might explain decreased observation rates to hunters, and illustrate why it is important to adjust timing and intensity of harvest to help achieve population management goals. If you are like most hunters and feel that meeting population management goals is an inconvenience, consider harvesting does earlier during the season. And the more time you spend in the field, the greater your overall chances of meeting population management goals.”

Best Time to Deer Hunt: Start Early

In short, it’s best if a hunter has access to a really large parcel of land with no other hunting pressure. Since this is rarely the case, the take home message for hunters is to take advantage of your hunting time early during the deer season. Research has found that early in the season is the best time to hunt deer. White-tailed deer will be much more visible. If you need to reduce the doe herd, do so early and avoid the urge to wait.

Deer hunting during the early season allows hunters an opportunity to achieve harvest and deer management objectives, with time on your side. An early start also gives you a great shot at your “hit list” buck. Otherwise, the animals you are hunting will be even more difficult to find as the season progresses.

Deer Hunting and Management is Conservation for All

Benefit of Hunting for Conservation

The benefits of managing habitat for white-tailed deer have been well documented. Decades of anecdotal accounts by land managers substantiate the widespread benefit of deer management, and published research by academics serve as documented proof. Managing deer is good. Taking a hands-off approach is bad for deer, native plants and other wildlife.

I believe the best way to grow bigger and healthier deer is give them exactly what they want: high-quality natural foods. To paraphrase, if you build it they will come. If you make whitetail habitat better they will be healthier, at the very least. The truth is that nothing is as good as the food found in prime habitat under good environmental conditions, neither pelleted protein feed nor food plots even come close.

Albeit, supplemental forages can have their place in a well-rounded management program, since they help maintain a constant nutritional plane for a deer herd during tough times. Even good habitat can find itself in poor condition during drought conditions, which is especially true here in Texas.

However, when you as a hunter or landowner are doing it right there should not be many tough times. Lands managed for deer typically anticipate the worst by keeping the right number of deer.

Working for Deer, Wildlife

It takes hard work to manage deer and the habitat that they need on private lands, so why do we do it? Mostly because we simply love doing it. We enjoy taking care of the natural resources that we love. We like watching wildlife and white-tailed deer. We want to give something back to the sport that we love, deer hunting. We want to give something back to the animal we love, white-tailed deer.

We also realize that deer must be controlled. Wildlife conservation is different that wildlife preservation. Whitetail populations have the ability to increase rapidly. Habitat deteriorates when that happens and we know that negatively affects local deer herds, but also native plant communities and all the other animals that live there. The fallout of having too many deer has numerous, negative impacts, from soil erosion to native plant regeneration to commercial ag production.

It boils down to conservation, taking care of what we as people have. It also comes from an understanding that deer are a renewable natural resource. Management is the price we are willing to pay for the tangible and intangible things that we get from stepping into the woods each and every time we go hunting.

Some people will never understand that. And I’m okay with that, because I don’t understand all of them either.

Deer Hunting is Necessary

Every plant and animal has a place in the wildlife world. It’s paramount to realize that although we have allegedly “progressed” as a society, the important things in life will always remain the same: family, friends, good times and proper stewardship of the bountiful natural resources that we’ve been given.

It will not make a hill of beans how fast our phones download data or how many movies we can stream if the environment becomes unsuitable for life. Humans are smart as whole, but as a group we don’t always make wise decisions.

Habitat-based white-tailed deer management has fueled better deer hunting across the US, without a doubt. But all of the combined management effort has not just benefited deer and the people that hunt them; deer population and habitat management has helped most all other plants and animals that call those places home, too. Deer hunting and management has help fund, directly and indirectly, many forms of habitat management. That benefits everyone.

Leopold and Deer Management

Aldo Leopold: “… I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn.

Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows.

The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.”

Public Hunting in Texas: Draw Hunts Going Online

Texas is well-known for white-tailed deer hunting, but it’s also known as a state that is overwhelmingly privately owned. That means finding low cost and/or quality public hunting opportunities can be few a far between. However, with a little luck you could be hunting smack-dab in the middle of some well-managed lands. That’s because Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) offers some really good draw hunts on public hunting lands across the state.

We took advantage of these draw hunts growing up, specifically for deer, and it did allow us to see some beautiful parts of the state as well as meet some other awfully nice hunters. The TPWD draw hunt system is basically a lotto system with an entry fee that puts hunters in areas where animals need to be removed. It was an annual, late-summer ritual to sit down with their printed draw booklet and “map out” the areas where we would enter, hopefully hunt.

It was never a sure thing since the odds of getting drawn were low, but more years than not we were fortunate enough to get to go hunting somewhere. Most of the these public hunts take place at TPWD’s wildlife management areas, but they also hunt state parks and some state and national forest. Now the whole draw system is going online, so although it will make it easier for hunters to apply, it may very well increase the competition.

Source: Effective with this summer’s applications, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s popular Public Hunt Drawing System will be online-only. The Public Hunt Drawing System offers affordable hunting experiences in more than two dozen different hunt categories, including eight specifically for youth only. Applications will only be accepted online — no “Applications for Drawings on Public Hunting Lands” booklets or application forms will be printed and mailed out.

With the new paperless system, hunters will be able to browse the drawn hunt catalog by hunt category and location using interactive maps, as well as complete the application and pay online. Selected applicants will be notified by email and can accept permits and pay any fees online. Permits will be issued by email and can be printed at home or stored on a mobile device. Those applicants who are not selected may still be eligible through a secondary drawing if any permits are unclaimed by the payment deadline. There may still be opportunities for traditional standby hunts at some locations.

In addition to now being able to apply for multiple hunt areas within the same hunt category (i.e. apply for a Gun Deer — Either Sex hunt on more than one hunt area), the online system will give hunters more time to apply. Application deadlines start in August and wrap up in January. Applicants will have until midnight on the day of the deadline to apply.

Non-refundable application fees for drawn Special Permit hunts range between $3-10 for each adult applicant 17 years of age or older. Selected adult hunters pay an additional permit fee of $80 for regular hunts and $130 for extended hunts. There are no application fees or drawn hunt permit fees for youth age 8 to 16. There are no application fees for the e-postcard hunt or the U.S. Forest Service Antlerless Deer permits.

Applicants will also retain and continue to accrue Preference Points, now called Loyalty Points, as in the past. Points will stay with the category and be applied to each application equally.

The new online-only system will begin accepting electronic applications in July for 2014-15 Drawn Hunts, including Special Permit hunts, E-Postcard hunts, and US Forest Service Antlerless Deer Permits.

More information about the new online draw hunt system can be found on their web site.

Deer Hunting with Drones

Deer Hunting with Drones?

The use of drones for all sorts of things continues to increase. But, what about deer hunting with drones? Like me, I bet most think deer hunting with drones is a bad idea. However, some think drones add an exciting element to finding and hunting deer, especially big bucks. Starting to sound sketchy yet? I see some legitimate applications for using drones for deer surveys and other wildlife management activities.

If you’re like me, then at least part of the reason you head out hunting is to get away from technology, not to use it while out in the field hunting deer. Admittedly, I do use motion-triggered game cameras to document deer using the areas that I hunt. That sounds like an unmanned, immobile drone.

In case you missed it, the Boone and Crockett Club release their official position on the use of of unmanned drones for hunting white-tailed deer and other big game animals. As you may have already guessed, B&C is not in favor of hunters using advantageous, real-time views from the sky to bag their bucks.

B&C Club: No Drones

Source: Trophies scouted or taken with the assistance of drones/unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are not eligible for entry in Boone and Crockett records, the Club announced today. “These highly sophisticated, remote-controlled aircraft have no place in fair-chase hunting,” said Richard Hale, chairman of the Club’s Big Game Records Committee.

“The Boone and Crockett Club stands with state wildlife agencies, the Pope and Young Club and hunter-conservationists everywhere who are discouraging the use of drones in hunting.”

In the early 1960s, the Boone and Crockett Club barred trophies taken with use of aircraft. “Spotting or herding game from the air, followed by landing in its vicinity for the purpose of pursuit and shooting” was deemed unethical. The Club’s policy spawned regulations in Alaska and elsewhere designed to protect the integrity of hunting and
conserve game.

Hale said Boone and Crockett is always on alert for new technologies that could erode the time-honored traditions of fair chase. Fair chase is defined by the Club as the ethical, sportsmanlike and lawful pursuit and taking of any free-ranging wild, native North American big game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such animals.

No Deer Hunting with Drones

Hunting in it’s purest form has always been about trying to kill something to eat. Deer hunting with drones seems far removed from such a simple idea. The thought of scouting with drones makes sense on some level, but it also sounds weird. Envision the western skies full of drones looking for the biggest mule deer, elk or pronghorn.

A lot of value gets put on the largest-antlered or largest-horned animals by recreational hunters. Here’s a thought: Do we blame hunters or B&C?

The Key to Late Season Hunting Success

If you’ve noticed the deer hunting season is nearly over and there are license tags left in your pocket, don’t panic just yet. There is still time to fill those tags, as well as the freezer. Many hunters find themselves behind the proverbial eight ball as the season winds down each year. Whether it’s because we’ve run short on hunting time because of other commitments, spent too much time waiting on that big buck that seemed to show up on game camera from time to time but never while we were actually on stand, or if it’s just because we’ve suffered from plain ole procrastination. It happens. The pressure may be on, but the late season is one of the very best times to put deer on the ground.

There are numerous farms and ranches looking to achieve deer management objectives, namely keeping the whitetail population within the carrying capacity of the available habitat. Other hunters are just looking to put something next to the potatoes. No matter which camp applies to you, hunting the late season all comes down to a single four letter word, food. The breeding season takes an awful lot out of deer, especially bucks since they burn a lot of calories fighting one another, searching for and pursuing does, so they are always looking to strap on the post-rut feed bag. Combine that with the fact that the fall and winter (to date) has been colder than normal and deer are forced to forage. Continue reading “The Key to Late Season Hunting Success”