Deer Management Stakeholder Organization.

[Hortontoter]

My guess is that there wasn't an overabundance of does to begin with.

 

[bowhunter1023]

The problem is without knowing the correct population number that is a very big assumption. You can't accurately manage a live population by counting dead deer. Its the equivalent of trying to guess how many apples are left in the farmers orchard by counting the apples at Krogers. The only way someone could even begin to accurately know is if they had knowledge of how many there were to begin with. Each week the store could get 564 apples. To the DNR that would mean the supply is steady. They have no idea if there are 2,000 apples left or 20,000 by counting the 564 on the shelf. There just isn't enough data and too many assumptions and variables. The population in the field would have to be incredibly lower than where it was before you begin to even notice a change.

Another example I like to use is say someone owned an old fashioned candy store. Each week the same 10 kids come in and take a handful of candy out of a giant jar that is filled to the top. The owner never looks at the actual jar in the back of the store, he only sees the candy that is in their hand. He would absolutely zero idea how much candy is left in that jar. The only thing he sees is the same 10 kids with the same handful of candy. The first inclination that something is wrong will be when a kid walks up and he only has a half a handful of candy. At no point as that candy begins to disappear will those children say to themselves this candy is disappearing so I only better take half of what I used to. We may convince one kid to do that but the other nine will not. What the store owner ended up with was once a giant jar of candy that is now almost completely empty. It is for this reason that stores conduct inventory, actually count the supply. It is then and only then can they accurately guess how much candy is left in the jar by counting the handfuls of candy leaving the store.

The fisheries up at Lake Erie understand this premise for estimating the walleye population. Each year they drag 35 set routes in the western basin to seine spawned walleye. This gives them an idea of the hatch, aka they're counting actual live fish. This combined with estimating the harvest gives them a pretty good picture to set limits by. Without that live count the harvest count is worthless.

He's obviously the brains of the operation... :smiley_coffee:

 

[giles]

Thanks Joe!

 

[MK111]

I think that just means there aren't many deer in Butler county.

How about a rather lower number of hunters? Of all my 15 nearby neighbors I only know of 2 that deer hunt. Those 2 only hunt on their 10-15 ac lots.
I would say most people who live in a heavy populated area are too busy doing nothing to deer hunt.

 

[Bigslam51]

How about a rather lower number of hunters? Of all my 15 nearby neighbors I only know of 2 that deer hunt. Those 2 only hunt on their 10-15 ac lots.
I would say most people who live in a heavy populated area are too busy doing nothing to deer hunt.

Heavy population of people or deer?

 

[Lundy]

There is more than one one to estimate numbers and trends.

If I send x number of hunters into the woods to hunt deer and count the participation hours and harvest I can easily establish populations trends from that data. It would not be hard to determine a population increase or decrease at all if all other influencing factors(acorn crop) remain somewhat static. As evidence of this fact one merely needs to look at the harvest number over the last 12 years, it is very easy to determine by harvest numbers alone when the population was at its highest and when the population has been in decline.

The impasse is and has been for some time the number deer desired. Hunters want more, ODNR wanted less. ODNR instituted policy to reduce deer populations, announced the plan and used hunters as the vehicle to achieve their goal.

Hunters were the kids in the candy store continuing to take handfuls of candy even when they saw that the jar wasn't as full as it used to be, and when nearing empty, and only then, complaining to the store owner that the jar was almost empty. Those kids seem to accept little accountability for the jar running out of candy, they seem to solely blame the store owner. I don't think the store owner consumed the candy and remember he told the kids he wanted to store less candy.

If it takes two days for the apple pickers to pick the Kroger supply of apples versus two weeks they have a good idea of how viable their apple crop is.

Lake Erie fisheries does use live trawl method to measure recruitment of the current year class but uses catch rates and harvest to determine population models and does not include young of the year in population models.

Middle ground with all all involved parties is the only viable path forward to achieve some portion of what you want. My number one target for alliance would be the farm bureau.

 

[bawana]

There is more than one one to estimate numbers and trends.

If I send x number of hunters into the woods to hunt deer and count the participation hours and harvest I can easily establish populations trends from that data. It would not be hard to determine a population increase or decrease at all if all other influencing factors(acorn crop) remain somewhat static. As evidence of this fact one merely needs to look at the harvest number over the last 12 years, it is very easy to determine by harvest numbers alone when the population was at its highest and when the population has been in decline.

The impasse is and has been for some time the number deer desired. Hunters want more, ODNR wanted less. ODNR instituted policy to reduce deer populations, announced the plan and used hunters as the vehicle to achieve their goal.

Hunters were the kids in the candy store continuing to take handfuls of candy even when they saw that the jar wasn't as full as it used to be, and when nearing empty, and only then, complaining to the store owner that the jar was almost empty. Those kids seem to accept little accountability for the jar running out of candy, they seem to solely blame the store owner. I don't think the store owner consumed the candy and remember he told the kids he wanted to store less candy.

If it takes two days for the apple pickers to pick the Kroger supply of apples versus two weeks they have a good idea of how viable their apple crop is.

Lake Erie fisheries does use live trawl method to measure recruitment of the current year class but uses catch rates and harvest to determine population models and does not include young of the year in population models.

Middle ground with all all involved parties is the only viable path forward to achieve some portion of what you want. My number one target for alliance would be the farm bureau.

Very well said.

 

[MK111]

Very well said.

I thought the same.

 

[Jackalope]

There is more than one one to estimate numbers and trends.

If I send x number of hunters into the woods to hunt deer and count the participation hours and harvest I can easily establish populations trends from that data. It would not be hard to determine a population increase or decrease at all if all other influencing factors(acorn crop) remain somewhat static. As evidence of this fact one merely needs to look at the harvest number over the last 12 years, it is very easy to determine by harvest numbers alone when the population was at its highest and when the population has been in decline.

The impasse is and has been for some time the number deer desired. Hunters want more, ODNR wanted less. ODNR instituted policy to reduce deer populations, announced the plan and used hunters as the vehicle to achieve their goal.

Hunters were the kids in the candy store continuing to take handfuls of candy even when they saw that the jar wasn't as full as it used to be, and when nearing empty, and only then, complaining to the store owner that the jar was almost empty. Those kids seem to accept little accountability for the jar running out of candy, they seem to solely blame the store owner. I don't think the store owner consumed the candy and remember he told the kids he wanted to store less candy.

If it takes two days for the apple pickers to pick the Kroger supply of apples versus two weeks they have a good idea of how viable their apple crop is.

Lake Erie fisheries does use live trawl method to measure recruitment of the current year class but uses catch rates and harvest to determine population models and does not include young of the year in population models.

Middle ground with all all involved parties is the only viable path forward to achieve some portion of what you want. My number one target for alliance would be the farm bureau.

What you are forgetting is the DNR never once laid out a plan for their decimation agenda, for a very long time they purposfully decieved hunters saying that there were too many deer. Never once stating how many deer was too many, how many existed and their method for achieving it, nor ever once stating how many deer they desired. Between 2008 and around 2011 or so they continue to make bulshit excuses for what people were seeing in the field like bad whether, mast crops Etc. I very clearly remember tonkovich telling a print newspaperthat the deer harvest was down because deer didn't have to move around as much because of a plentiful acorn crop, as proof of this he pointed to the reduction in road killed squirrels, but it was most certainly not because of a reduced population. I very clearly remember him spouting a 650,000 population number for years, however when I sat down at a picnic table with Mike, papers and pencil in hand and grilled his ass on it he couldnt answer it, magically they stopped releasing population numbers that year also. I remember quite clearly Hunters themselves being blamed for failure to adapt to a changing food patterns as an excuse for the lower harvest. So forgive me if I say you can take that the DNR laid out the plan so hunters are to blame bullshit somewhere else, there was a blatant and obvious effort of deception involved. I particularly like the one where Tonk forgot his audience for a moment and was telling us about a meeting he had with some bigwig farmers who were pissed off that they lowered the antlerless-only tags. Then he started to talk about how he had to tell them that lowering the antlerless-only tags didn't really matter and it was just to make Hunters think they were pulling back. The look on his face when he realized he just admitted to purposefully trying to deceive Hunters, to a group of hunters, was priceless.

Interestingly enough the first year that tonk came to our gathering at Stroud's everyone was very cordial, we spoke of the deer population issue but nobody really was impolite and put him on the spot. Shortly after that his friend decided to talk shit online about how he got Tonk to come to talk to some of his most heated critics of his reduction agenda but nobody said boo. The next year Tonk showed up I had a stack of paper 3 inches thick of charts, graphs, and quotes that he had made over the years to print media, I even made him his own copies for reference. I then spent the better part of two hours grilling his ass and watching him talk in circles. Funny, after I said boo he never came back.

As for you're also using number of hunters and hours in the field to assist in figuring out the population numbers. Mike Tonkovich told us to our face that Hunter survey data was largely useless because of the lack of respondents to the sample size.

The Lake Erie biologist do not use the live trawl data for current year population estimates, they use the live trawl data from two years prior to estimate current year live population. The point still stands, you have to start your research with a scientifically viable method to obtain a live population estimate. From there you can factor in approximately how many are being taken out and come up with a pretty close population estimate.

If you can figure out a method by which you can accurately guess supply on hand without first at some point knowing supply on hand, you should patten it because you would be the richest supply chain logistics manager in the world.

 

[jagermeister]

So after 39 pages what has this newest dead-horse-beating thread accomplished?

 

[Lundy]

"The Lake Erie biologist do not use the live trawl data for current year population estimates, they use the live trawl data from two years prior to estimate current year live population. The point still stands, you have to start your research with a scientifically viable method to obtain a live population estimate. From there you can factor in approximately how many are being taken out and come up with a pretty close population estimate."

You should probably know that the head lake Erie fisheries biologist is a pretty good friend of mine. I am very familiar with population models and methodology.

How would you propose to count live deer?

 

[Jackalope]

"The Lake Erie biologist do not use the live trawl data for current year population estimates, they use the live trawl data from two years prior to estimate current year live population. The point still stands, you have to start your research with a scientifically viable method to obtain a live population estimate. From there you can factor in approximately how many are being taken out and come up with a pretty close population estimate."

You should probably know that the head lake Erie fisheries biologist is a pretty good friend of mine. I am very familiar with population models and methodology.

How would you propose to count live deer?

Then either your friend has lied to you or the DNR has lied to everyone because here it is right on the odnr site.

"Biologists from the ODNR Division of Wildlife conducted bottom trawling surveys at nearly 40 sampling locations across Ohio waters of the western basin. This data provides biologists with an estimate on how many young fish will enter the fishable population two years later. "



.

 

[Lundy]

I am not going to back and forth with you as that is a fruitless endeavor. I do not disagree with one word of what you posted from the ODNR, not one. I've spent a lot of hours discussing this in depth with him on many occasions. I have pretty good understanding the models and the model adjustments that take place every year. It is just not that simplistic. Yep, just count the fish and were good to go, not quite

 

[Jackalope]

As for estimating an actual live population of wildlife. There are plenty of articles from universities and even the USGS on it.

None of them say counting dead animals without a good live estimate is a viable method of estimating live populations.

The first article from north Carolina university gives the 4 most viable and popular methods. Again, none of them recommend counting dead animals.

http://bfy.tw/DObJ

 

[Jackalope]

I am not going to back and forth with you as that is a fruitless endeavor. I do not disagree with one word of what you posted from the ODNR, not one. I've spent a lot of hours discussing this in depth with him on many occasions. I have pretty good understanding the models and the model adjustments that take place every year. It is just not that simplistic. Yep, just count the fish and were good to go, not quite

I didn't say that was "all" that went in to it, or that it was that "simplistic". Don't convolute my original point now that ive shown you proof that a live count is paramount to managing a population. I said that they have to conduct a viable live population estimation to begin with, then incorporate factors of reduction from there. Without a known population estimate, which the walleye article points out is the most critical piece of information, you can't begin to accuratly manage a population. AKA like the candy jar you can't just look at harvest data to tell if a population is decreasing as it wont show the true extent of the damage until its way too late.

 

[brock ratcliff]

I was present with Joe. The only discrepancy ; the DoW claimed a level population of 750k for several years, not 650k. This in spite of declining harvests.

 

[giles]

will there be any candy for future kids? That is my concern.

 

[giles]

I also have a problem with them using vehicle collision. Odds are, the areas it occurs the most are areas not huntable. So it turns into over harvesting the surrounding area and doesn't clear the roads. To solve that problem, you need to make those areas huntable or take it out of the equation.

I know of a stretch of road about 2 miles from me that a dead deer is laying most of the time. Problem is, the guy that owns the property (1,500+acres)in that area doesn't allow any hunting. Using those numbers for the entire county hunting regs isn't accurate, as those deer aren't huntable with anything traveling over 55 mph. We can reduce the deer in the rest of the county to zero and have little effect.

 

[finelyshedded]

I was present with Joe. The only discrepancy ; the DoW claimed a level population of 750k for several years, not 650k. This in spite of declining harvests.

They sure did! I believe 3/4 million was the estimated pop for four years straight....laughable

 

[finelyshedded]

I also have a problem with them using vehicle collision. Odds are, the areas it occurs the most are areas not huntable. So it turns into over harvesting the surrounding area and doesn't clear the roads. To solve that problem, you need to make those areas huntable or take it out of the equation.

I know of a stretch of road about 2 miles from me that a dead deer is laying most of the time. Problem is, the guy that owns the property (1,500+acres)in that area doesn't allow any hunting. Using those numbers for the entire county hunting regs isn't accurate, as those deer aren't huntable with anything traveling over 55 mph. We can reduce the deer in the rest of the county to zero and have little effect.

Excellent point Dave!