Рет қаралды 3,759
I usually do not doe hunt until the last few days of the season. This year I got to my stand just before daylight and legal shooting time was 7:37. I killed the first doe at about 20 yards at 8:06 nam and two more at around 9;30 with my single shot 44 magnum. I had tags for 3 does and was intending to kill 2 or 3. After killing the last two a 4th one posed for me at exactly the same spot where I shot the 2nd one and just about 30 seconds after killing the 3rd one, but I was fresh out of tags.
Good herd management and good buck hunting are achieved by keeping the herd size any a level well below the carrying capacity of the area. In areas like mine with substantial deer populations it is very important to kill does. By killing these three I really directly reduced the number of mouths to feed next year by 9 total with 3 shots because each of them was carrying two embryos. The capacity of these deer to proliferate is so efficient that you simply must be killing does in order to prevent them from becoming overpopulated, which will lead to stress because resources are limited. Many hunters believe that because there are lots of crop fields around that they can sustain high levels of deer but that is not true. The number one factor to reduce winter stress in northern states is the availability of woody browse and because most farm woodlots are very poorly managed the lack of woody browse impacts the survival of deer through winter. Bucks and fawns suffer most from a lack of browse. Bucks often have very little body fat at the end of the season and they require large amounts of available browse to regain weight lost in the rut. And fawns, especially if they were born later in the spring or summer, have the same problem.