Since i cant stay logged in long, i'll have to do this in peices. This is a typical scenario. Say u have a 100 deer on a given land. The biologists say this land needs 40 deer, otherwise u risk loseing 25% to 40% in a disease outbreak. Well if i suffer a 40% loss, i still have 60 deer, more than their 40. So keeping levels low for years in case something happens seems kinda conservative to me. Of course there has never been a documentd disease outbreak of deer in the past, so this is just in case it ever happens.

When I was at LSU we went and did a class project in North Louisiana on this mans land that wanted to get into deer hunting as he had only duck hunted before. His land was poached over so bad it was hard to find anything but a few tracks. No deer were seen during our daylight trecks of the property.

We wrote up a proposal for his land. First order was get the poaching under control. He did that and the game wardens promptly caught a guy spotlighting on his place that had killed some illegal deer.

Great! But then he got in touch with the state and the dmap people told him to start shooting a bunch of does. I bet he had more doe tags then he had deer on that place. sigh!

Just wanted to say I cant agree enough! I talked to a biologist last year concerning by 1100 acres he advised to shoot around 30 does if I remember right. If you want to know how bad our state is getting simply look around us the hunting seems to improve at the state line. Its simply frustrating and I only hope as hunters we come together soon and make our voices heard.

I didnt start this to bash anybody, esp. Dr. Moreland who i have the greatest respect for or ldwf. Its very hard for them to balance everything and every place. Its up to us to realize and help them to fix it. We demanded bigger bucks and that means less deer, but no one expected conditions to get this bad. Gustav killed a whole yr. class and u will see very few big bucks killed this year. Mike, miss. has the right idea. Their anler restrictions are protecting 3 age classes of bucks and uwill see it get better and better.

No doubt about that. I hunt in Mississippi and I see way more bucks than I use to and I see probably at a minimum of 4X as many rack bucks as I did in the old days.

...did 'ya ever notice Louisiana talks'da talk but Texas,Miss.and Ala. gets it done !!!...read Bob Marshalls' 'NOTES' in tdy sports section of Times-Picayune pg.C-10 and they 'still' bump'n-up fees(taxes)and ticket volumes...(some of'em already make'n plans for their Christmas Party)...where's 'Wiki-Dribble' when'ya need him ???...cheers

I agree 100%. You can't kill big deer AND a bunch of deer. You have to choose one or the other. Too many people in this state associate killing with having a good time. I used to hunt with guys like this. They kept saying that hunting was not fun anymore because they didn't kill anything. They would see 4-5 deer a hunt and the majority of them were bucks. One guy saw 4 racks in one hunt and came back to the camp with the reds!
A club next to ours was on DMAP. Every year they would receive 40 doe tags. Over the last 6 years their doe harvest has went down big time. Last year, they only killed 3. This club is 1200 acres in Grosse Tete. Every year they complain to the 'Biologist' and every year they are told to shoot more does. I don't get it.
Want to know what slaughtering all the does does to property? Find someone that hunted Woodstock in Mississippi 15 years ago. They are just starting to get deer back.
WL&F has the task of trying to make everyone happy. That is an impossible task...

...I walked out 5 or 6 clubs inside of 50 years and quit deer hunting because of their dark commercial reasons...seen too many times where green new members gets short-ended w/dues that paid for two other 'relatives' and you had to keep your mouth shut...just can't respect some of those 'upper-class dignitaries'...cheers

P/S...think I learned more about humans than I did about 'deerS'...

me

19 Point killed WBR Parish during full Rut!!!

me

My Dads same 19 Point

me

My 69 yr ole moms 15 Point Taken Dec 2011@same lease my dad killed his 19 point Same Stand

My dad Hunts on several places from Spillway@Ramah to Cat Island off Miss River to local Hutning Club off River Rd in Port Allen area

2nd At Cat Island the shoot State Law,3rd The spillway is Manged Im not sure how they are managed there they lost alot population when river came up so high and Fooded Spillway and Morganza Locks were open

The 4th Place local by his house if Managed 6 points or better, No short Spikes Big Cow does Only

The 5th places is local place too in WBR Parish there state law too ' If its Brown its Down' as they call it

So ya see to me Managing is not worth a Hoot if you have other places around you shooting everything that walks, I've seen it b4 I was hunting one day on a place i grew up on and we did Managemnet, The deer cross the Bayou BOOM!!!!!! So its makes it Hard sometimes it pose to be Sport to some its MEAT on the TABLE I like it as Both thats how i was raised, where i hunt on my Place i do state law because there no management no wheres else around me either

Here a Couple killed off my Dads Place where they shoot 6 points are Better

I seldom see 'age' when management of deer is discussed on here. Typically a 'shooter' is determined by the number of points allowed. Do any of you use 'aging' as a determining factor in shooting a deer? And I'm speaking more specifically of bucks but aging applies to both bucks and does.

Comments?

Thats a great point and if u read my posts u know age is what i stress. So many deer are aged incorrectly and ruins the whole process. First year deer in the south are short spikes, 21/2 yr. olds have long spikes, sometimes browtines are small forks. 31/2 yr old deer have 3in bases and 6or 8pts on small rack, thats on good habitat. Thats why miss. rules will work, they are protecting the deer that need it.After his second season bucks totally change, after that u dont have to protect them. The problem is not too many does, but too few bucks to breed all the does and having buck seasons before the rut. They have never killed a buck on tensas over 31/2 yrs old, lots of 250-338lbs deer but never one over 31/2. of course that is absurd, but they say he's at least 31/2 and everybody says 'oh hes only 31/2'.

I also hunt in grosse tete...I don't agree with taking huge number of does unless your deer population is showing nurishment problems but that is deffinately not the case where I am... I do beleive however that there is nothing wrong with sticking one or two does for the freezer each year. then go for the big boys. I know of a club that runs along hwy 386 that is dmap wondering if that is the one you are talking about.

If done correctly is great, but it isn't. A few years ago while hunting a club in central La, the club asked to be part of the dmap program. The wlf dept. told the club to shot (I forget how many but a lot of does. They didn't even know if we had any does on the property. So everyone started shooting every doe that came out. In two years there wasn't a deer left on the property and they still said to shoot does. How is this management? Sure if you shoot all deer except 1 buck he will probably get big, if you ever see him.

When you kill a doe you have killed a myriad of deer. She will not produce anymore and the off spring she never had will not produce any and so on. Bewteen the doe 'harvest' and the poachers and the coyotes killing fawns and the hogs eating everything in sight , it is a wonder we have as many deer as we do .

TURKEY HUNTER you are so right but you forgot the la. dept of WLF

Everything turkeyhunter lists is true, and there's at least another u could add to the list. Thing is, in management u account for those losses in ur total harvest. This is not just la. problem, illinois and wisconson hunters are also complaining of low numbers. I'm not saying never shoot does, but not always the answer to every problem.

I agree with you 100% on this. And its a very large part of why my and my father(R.I.P) stopped hunting louisiana for deer, except in tensas NWR. The populations are so far down due to poor herd management its sad. But It works the same everywhere, that if you shoot too many, there won't be any left.

Hunt R, i think i mentioned in your post a few weeks back about the *managing* of deer at my club in bama. Well, heres a little more imfo into that club. The club was founded roughly 20 years ago, and the pictures and stories i see and hear from the older members are awesome. For the first 10 years it was an 12 man club killing 50-70 deer a year(and don't start questioning if they were over the state limit, i don't know and don't care cause i was not there). When they added more members there were several years they killed over 100. But the policy was(and still is) to shoot whatever you want(within legality). In the last 8 years the numbers have dropped WAY off. When i joined 6-7 years ago, we killed 60 deer between 20 people. Since i joined it had stayed close to that or gone down, and we have lost about 8 members. Last year (tho it was a bad year everywhere due to the heat) we struggled to kill 40, and 5 of them were mine(the 3 cull bucks and 2 does). For 3 years i have tried to help them to move toward a better job of management other than (don't shoot little deer) but the simple fact is, we still have 50% of the members who's idea of an enjoyable season is killing meat. One guy even BRAGGED to me because he killed 2 spikes and 2 does in louisiana AND 5 does in bama.....I didn't know what to say without insulting his intelligence so i just shut my mouth and walked away. This season i am starting a 2nd club with a few friends of mine who actually WANT to kill more than baby bucks and does, but we'll see how it goes and grows.

My point is that i cannot make some of those guys realize that you CANNOT just keep shooting every deer you see. Our club has lost 9 members in 5 years, 2 of them (my father and 1 other guys) passed away, and the other 7 all left because of decline in deer numbers. Complaining that they were not seeing deer 10-20 at a time anymore and spending *too many days* without seeing deer. But i guess some people won't understand good logic until it hits them in the face when there are no deer at all...

BPaul - The club I was talking about is at the end of Sidney Rd. It is all Schwing and Wilber property. The property we hunted (no longer have the lease) required bucks to be 14 inches wide and 17 inch beams. That still didn't eliminate the killing of younger deer. Every year we would kill 3 or 4 real nice 8 - 10 points that should have been let go (not bashing anyone that killed one, I would have). These deer would barely make the minimum but only weigh 140-150 pounds and were just young deer that would have been hammers if left to live. One of the main problems was we were not allowed to shoot cull bucks. We had a bunch of 4, 5 and 6 points that didn't meet the minimums but had huge bodies. A few of them we even had pics of for several years.
We also had very few does. Our trail cameras had a disproportionate number of bucks to does. It got to the point where we were EXCITED to get a pic of a doe.

okay i know exactly where you are talking about ... i know some bordering land owners close to them..( hoffmans, white city, smith..i'm a tab bit further ....Our major problem was cull bucks not being shot..this was changed last year and now i am very excited to see what happens... we have plenty does on camera year round but like you said JD a few nice 8 and 10s but always good number of cull bucks that walked years before but now we are 8 pt and 16 inch but any malformed rack or cow horn will be taken also this year...

over-control has as many problems as under-control...like Yang told Montezuma and J.D. 'Don't get'da natives restless' '...We had a old school prof from the Scotland Highlands would say 'ya can't teach a horny monkey Laws of Math in husbandry you got to let the young and females cycle-out then he would pop us in the head w/a yardstick !!!...it's a long way to Tipperary !!! (think man, think)...cheers

Samu, when i first stared hunting we drove thru miss. to get to our club. Miss. had no doe gun days, la. only 2. We would see several hundred deer and many nice bucks on this road. Then miss. opened doe day, they had hides hanging on the fence for over 100 yds. By the mid 70's u would barely see a dozen deer on that stretch, and its still like that today. In the time period ur talking about u could kill 1 buck a day, so i'm sure they were legal, even if the killed 50 each.lol i once killed 11bucks before christmas, and 3 of those i mounted. Joe Hatten still holds the bow record typical from tnwr in '95 and j.mcmurray still holds the all time state record, so we killed big bucks back then also.

We found it fairly easy to distinguish age class of bucks. We would go by body size and we were usually accurate. Up to 150 pounds was 2 1/2 -3 1/2. 150 pounds to 180 was 3 1/2 - 4 1/2. 200+ was 4 1/2 and older. We had no food plots due to the property being all swamp and no way to get a tractor or any other equipment in there. Our property bordered Persac, Brushly and Double Ought.

The Admiral is right on on this. I'm not for more regulations, i think the state is right to set liberal seasons, but its up to us not to overhunt an area. JB, u r describeing a perfect example of lack of nutrition, not cull deer. When i got my land i picked the poorest i could find, then i improved the age and nutrition and u see the size bucks i have even tho i have about 3 times the number of deer recommended. U can have high numbers AND big bucks if u improve ur habitat.

yea i agree with you about body weight.. on the same note it is not unusual for us to see deer that 160-180 doe killed a few over the years...all in all starting to see improvements in deer antlers over the last 4 years and hoping it keeps getting better...let them 6 and 8 pt that are young walk next year you will be amazed... hopefully bordering properties will do the same between abundance of natural food and cover in the area it is just matter of time and everyone getting on the same page JD you no longer hunt in grosstete ? due to losing a lease?

huntr - I agree, the problem was we could not do anything about it without dumping mega $$$$$$ into it. When I say it was swamp, from Decmeber to February, pretty much everything was under 2 feet of water. The landowners would not allow us to have trails any wider than a 4 wheeler which meant no tractors. We fed out of feeders but did not want to spend the money on high protein stuff.

Paul - We gave up the lease. Part of our property had heirs on it and they shot anything that moved. Can't tell you how many times we would let a spike or small buck walk just for that deer to get shot within sight of our stands!! It is a big long complicated mess. The other issue was the lady that ran our lease wanted to hunt 20 people on 1000 acres. That is NOT including the 10-12 heors that hunted a 200 acre section we hunted also. We had a few stands that you could sit on and hear 4-5 feeders go off, and NONE were the feeder that stand was over...

some parts are low swamp but our property is mostly ridge we just started planting peas, clover, etc we still try not to make huge trials only what is necessary and i feel the same for shooting lanes only what is needed keeping everything as normal or should i say natural looking as possible seems to be a big help on non spooking deer. your hunting situation didnt sound like a good one so maybe it was a good thing to get out of there

Paul - It was good for the sheer fact that we had some really good deer. No monsters but good deer. It was also close to home and only $815/year. The bad parts were too many people, a camp with no electricity or water and a muddy mess. My stands were 4 miles from the camp and towards the end of the season, it would take upwards of an hour to get to my spots. No faster than 2nd gear and gumbo mud over the floorboards. I grew up hunting there and it used to be awesome. We were the only club back there. We hunted 4000 acres with 20 members. We would see 15-20 deer a hunt but very few bucks. We went to 6 point or better in 1994 and progressively went up with the requirements. When we started killing decent deer, that's when we started having land taken from us. Good thing we couldn't get electricity back there or we would have been outpriced years ago.
I won't miss it, I'm trying to get in an incredible lease in Mississippi that I've been guest hunting on. It'll be nice to hunt with no skeeters, no gumbo mud, running water and electricity and NO FEEDERS!!!!

That is the one thing i do love about that area is the overall deer quality is diffenately there and with some help it could produce monster deer but i dont think that will happen too many shoot happy people around that area sometimes i get discouraged about letting nice bucks walk hoping they make it till next year...well good luck with the miss lease ..hate seeing people go out of state but i can see your point with the mosquitos,mud,etc let me know how you do this coming season.

Without a four page litany. Here we go. I joined a club, which no longer exists. (thank you Roussell lawyers of Laplace) When I first joined in 1996, you could jump 30 or so does in squirrel season, but we shot no bucks over a little basketball rack 6 or 8 point, with a 9 inch spread. After we shot 25 or more does for 2 years, we started to shoot nice 8pt 165lb deer.

I was interested in key deer so i googled-key deer rut-, found the most informative article i ever read on deer. North and central florida habitat is very similar to la. and the deer are also very similar. our marsh deer are similar to their everglades deer, so even tho this study is on florida deer, its almost the same for la. deer. Since i cant 'cut and paste' links you'll have to google it youself.