Controlling hunter harvest is easy on the property you hunt but you have no control on what the neighbors do.
I have access to a pretty big piece of property in Athens. There are 3 of us hunting this land and we take 3 deer per year, 1 each, that is all we can eat a year. I have in years past brought down a few guys to take some does off of one side of the property during bow season. That side is separated by a road from the rest of the property and the population density is vastly different on one side to the other. Some does needed removed there because there really isn't any hunting pressure on the adjoining properties on that side and there were just stupid numbers of deer over there.
I have never felt the need or pressure to harvest extra does to control the population on the biggest section of the property, the neighbors harvest plenty enough every year to keep the local population in control.
We do have some deer that never seem to leave the property or even leave their small section of the property. I run 8-9 cameras and some of these does, especially one piebald has never shown up anywhere but on one camera in one small area. We have watched her raise her two young every year for the last 3 years. She is seen daily in this area during every day of the guns seasons. We have or had a really wide eight point that my son was hunting for 3 years, only shows up on two cameras, never any others. Yet I also have had smaller bucks show up on 6-8 of the cameras in a week.
The land I hunt is a working cattle farm with a lot of open pasture, I can see forever. I watch the deer travel back and forth across the fences, I hear the shooting, I see the drives going on, I see the deer running back into the property I hunt. Countless times over the years I have watched a small buck or some does cross the fence and heard the shot, never to be seen again. It is what it is they shoot deer and bunches of them. I even had a couple of the guys hunting the neighbors hang 2 sets of deer testicles on the fence, on Monday of gun season, knowing I would see them. It was their way of saying something to me I guess. I do admit that I enjoyed it when the GW wrote a citation to a guy in the same group that day for killing a turkey out of season, shot across the fence on the property we hunt. The GW thought the hanging of the deer balls, when he saw them, was pretty funny, so did I. All of the deer blood in the field where he shot it across the fence wasn't so funny.
This year and last year we had a huge population of young bucks, I would see 6-8 a day during the gun seasons, my buddy in another area on the farm was seeing even more daily. Same deer day after day. Years ago I would have thought that that would bode well for the future of the farm and how we let these guys grow up. I have found over the years that the farms carries about the same number of mature bucks every year and about the same number of almost mature bucks. It really doesn't matter how many we have seen the year before. I few years ago we had 3 bucks that were almost "shooters" for us. The following year only one of them every showed again. That same scenario has played out many times over 25 years on this farm. I think (don't know for sure) that so many of the younger bucks we let walk end up moving to places unknown where there is a lower buck density. One might think with how many young bucks we let walk year after year that there would be a buck behind every tree after this many years of the same philosophy, but it just doesn't work like that. If the neighbors and their neighbors are killing a lot of bucks it just makes room for these guys to establish themselves where a vacancy was created. I have had bucks that I have watched for 6 years and many others than I see one year, all year and never see again.
We are not hunting 5000 acres where you can control a whole lot of what is going on, you can just do what you do and hope for the best
Will there be a party on Halloween? I have an adorable Chip -n-Dale costume that is sure to be a hit!
