How Many Does Can I Harvest?

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“How Many Does Should I Harvest?” This is undoubtedly the most commonly asked question I receive each year as fall approaches. Hunters ask whether they should shoot any, a few, or a lot of does. By asking some additional questions I can generally give them a target doe harvest. Here is the information I use …

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Mature Bucks: Who Needs ‘Em?

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For decades in the late 1900s states such as Alabama, Michigan, Pennsylvania and others managed deer herds in such a manner that the majority of bucks harvested were 1½ years old and very few bucks ever reached maturity. In Pennsylvania, less than 1 percent of bucks reached maturity prior to implementation of antler restrictions in …

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Five Ways to Track Predator Abundance

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When you are trying to increase fawn survival through trapping and hunting predators, you need to know whether your efforts are effective. Counting actual predator density is not feasible, but there are several ways to gauge the relative abundance of predators.  Relative abundance means determining that you have more or fewer predators than you did …

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Aging Bucks on the Hoof

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Harvesting white-tailed bucks based on age is becoming an increasingly common management strategy. To implement this practice, hunters must have the ability to accurately age bucks on the hoof based on their body characteristics, an ability that most hunters considered impossible a decade ago. Today however, hunters across the whitetail’s range are estimating the age …

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