Is Doe Harvest Actually Important?

The best habitat in the world can't offset an overabundant deer population. Bronson, Bonner, and Moriah discuss the challenges of maintaining an adequate doe harvest and why this is such an important component of well-managed properties.

Transcript

Why Doe Harvest is the Foundation of Deer Management

Moriah Boggess 0:01

Welcome to Wildlife Investments, where we discuss wildlife research, habitat, hunting, and land management with our panel of leading resource managers. Wildlife Investments, resource management by scientists. Hey, real quick, before we start the podcast, we hope to see you at our second Wild Turkey Management Academy that we're holding February 28th, 2026 in Ufala, Alabama. The course is going to be taught by Drs. Marcus Lashley and Dr. Will Golesby. It's a one-day classroom course. It's going to cover everything from the basics of wild turkey biology, how to make management decisions, managing different cover types for turkeys. Marcus and Will are even going to get down in the weeds, laying out different properties, walking through different scenarios that they've encountered so that you can apply those to properties you manage. Go to wildlifeinvestments.com, click on our education events page. You'll see all the information you need to sign up. We hope to see you the end of February and you follow.

Welcome & Podcast Intro

Dr. Bronson Strickland 1:04

Today we are going to talk about one of those topics that's often neglected. People get sick and tired of hearing about, and that is the importance of dough harvests and keeping your population under control relative to the habitat and what a big impact that can have on your success and the success of your management program. We got three of us today, Dr. Bronson Strickland, our resident deer management researcher and expert. Good to be here. This is a really, really important topic. So we wanted to make sure we gave it some airtime and just refresh people's memories of how critical this topic is.

Habitat, Feed, and the Supply/Demand Trap

Moriah Boggess 1:45

We also have with us Bonner Powell. Bonner is another one of our habitat management deer turkey experts. Bonner, how's it going? Pretty good. Happy to be here. Excited to talk about shooting more deer. And I'm Mariah Boggess, another one of our deer management consultants. And we're excited to have this conversation with everybody, and we're going to jump right in it. So I'm so sick of people not shooting enough deer and then complaining that nothing's changing all the time.

Bonner Powell 2:15

Is that what we're going to start it with? Just that line right there. That's what's no welcome to nothing. That's the teacher. I'm sick of it. I'm so sick of people not shooting deer and then complaining. I do think it is a valuable point that there's only so much we can do with it. Like, it's kind of like what Bronson talks about with the seesaw, you know, there there's only so high we can get habitat value. And without proper harvest, it kind of always is going, you know, I mean, they're going to adapt. It doesn't matter how much, you know, how much burning you do or how much food you have in the woods during the summertime if you've got a a deer per three acres. Right.

Moriah Boggess 3:03

And it's crazy how much money people will spend on feed.

Bonner Powell 3:08

Yep.

Moriah Boggess 3:08

And if we really pull back the covers, the reason you're putting out feed is to try to improve the nutritional plane. But what is always ignored is the other side of the nutritional plane is supply and demand, and no one wants to manage demand. We think about supply all the time. And we talk about habitat management all the time, and people do it. And I'm glad that people do habitat management and we can, you know, implement that on properties. But I mean, it was we put out that figure recently that like it's just very much so just kind of a visualization of how our brains work with that. You increase the ceiling, that invisible ceiling of of nutritional quality, and then no one does anything, and suddenly you went from having 60 deer per square mile, they were poor quality with poor quality habitat, the better quality habitat, 80 deer per square mile and poor quality deer. Like, is that really what we want?

Bonner Powell 4:09

Right. Yeah, I mean, man, people just don't shoot deer, eat deer, kill deer, regardless of bucks or does, man. I mean, what they say, Bronson, at that thing we were at the other night, the average licensed hunter in Mississippi is like one and a half.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 4:28

Yeah, it it it varies around 1.5. Might be 1.3, 1.6, but yeah, one and a half.

Bonner Powell 4:35

One and a half.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 4:36

And just a decade ago, it was two point something.

Bonner Powell 4:39

Really? Yeah. Yeah. Ten years ago it was, you know, almost, you know, a little bit more than two and a half or something like that.

Moriah Boggess 4:46

I know from when I worked in Indiana and North Carolina looking at that data, both of those states uh regionally very different. The kind of hunters, very different, and the way they view dough harvest very different. Both of them, it was right at about 1.3 or something. It's consistent, you know, I'm assuming across the whitetail range for the most part.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 5:10

Yep.

Moriah Boggess 5:11

Yeah.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 5:12

Yeah. It's being able to deal with only X amount of deer carcasses, your time and expense to get it processed.

Moriah Boggess 5:20

It's something I've been I think you and I, Bronson, have talked about this. That lot that the idea of being able to quantify all of the forage that's out there, there seems to me, and I think you and I have seen this on some properties, a disconnect between the assumed value or the assumed quality of deer you should have versus what a property is experiencing because there's so much food everywhere, it seems like the deer should not be starving. And I think across a property like the bottom line hard was you could quantify how much poundage of food there is. Food plots, you could quantify how much poundage of food there is. And if we uh use habitat management, we can increase that poundage. But I think one of you know a major point that isn't talked about with just the tonnage uh answer is the quality part and variety. And I wonder, you know, kind of going to the Fred Pre Prevenza nourishment idea, how much value we get by having different cover types managed differently, therefore different species and tonnage of different species. To me, that seems like the ultimate combination that actually gives you true quality. It is. Because I think even in like southern Mississippi, you could have a lot of really well-managed pines, but if that plant community is dominated by five or six species, you might have a lot of tonnage of quote unquote deer forage, but those deer are probably lacking some important, at least micronutrients and maybe even macros during different times of the year. Mm-hmm. And that kind of the deer density thing ties into that a lot too.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 7:13

No, no question about it. And so we we know this is going on, but here here's a way that we've all seen that verifies what's going on is and and just two examples I give all the time, you go to an ag environment, soybean rich, and the deer wearing the soybeans out, completely as we would expect. But then you look over on the periphery of that field where there's giant ragweed, and they wear out the giant ragweed. Meaning that's an oversimplification of the diversity of a deer's diet, but they need something else. Now, in this case, it may not be they need a nutrient from a positive tissue-building standpoint, but maybe they're needing to counter the chemical makeup of all the soybeans that they ate. Maybe they need some more roughage, you know, but there's some type of interaction there to where they're overdoing it with this one package of chemicals, this particular plant. They've got to buffer it with another package of chemicals, the giant ragweed. And then quantitatively, the South Texas example, when this Fed, you see a decided shift in the diet of deer in a fed enclosure, they start eating things that deer normally don't eat in that environment because of that phenomenon. They're getting too much of a good thing and they've got to counterbalance it with other chemicals from other plants. And then there's too much of a bad thing.

Moriah Boggess 8:50

I I think of the coastal plain, and my experience is the coastal plain of North Carolina. I haven't really spent a lot of time in the coastal plain of Mississippi, but you can have a well-managed forest and there's a lot of deer forage. I like again, a coastal plain of North Carolina, in a low basil area pine or longleaf forest, there's never a time of the year that there isn't a green leaf for deer to eat that deer consume. I mean, I've watched them eat gulberry, a lot of gulberry, eat them, eat yopon. And when you look at the understory of that forest, it is mostly wiregrass, yopon, gulberry, and there's some other waxy leaf species. And I've had this conversation with people. I can't prove this. This is me stepping outside of the scientific bounds of what I can prove. But I think if we could do an experiment, you could probably explain a lot of the variation in antler quality and body mass in that region, not by the amount of tonnage of food available, but by the presence and availability of high-quality foods, like, for instance, you rarely see common ragweed, horseweed. Any of the dominant forbs that we get in central Mississippi and across the central United States, when you disturb soil, you get a pretty rich plant community. You don't get that in the coastal plain. But I bet one of the reasons you don't see a lot of those is that they probably get consumed by deer so quickly and they're underrepresented in that plant community already because they get dominated and out competed by those waxy leaf species that hold their leaves throughout the year.

Bonner Powell 10:41

So my wager is quality is just slightly above dirt, by the way. You know, yeah.

Moriah Boggess 10:47

But they can they can chew it and keep going and into the landowner, hey, I've got plenty of green everywhere. I don't have a deer harvest issue. There's plenty of food everywhere, and the deer are always eating. And so I think that could be true. And the other side also being true is your deer are resource limited. They are close to carrying capacity, or you know, there's at least some density dependence happening there. And I wager that in that situation, if I had the acreage and a willing landowner in the coastal plain, I could consistently grow 150, 160-inch deer with an extremely low deer density. Probably a quarter of what most properties have, or maybe less, just to be able to spread out those mouths enough so that there is enough of those high-quality Forbes available to those individuals.

Bonner Powell 11:43

Yeah. I think something we should talk about for that point is that can be done, but where are you going to find the willing landowner to shoot those those deer? I mean, that's what I see the problem is. Especially, you know, and I think sometimes it's uh it's easy for us to get caught up in like what the recommendations are and how we present those to landowners, but and I mean y'all tell me if I'm wrong, but I see a lot more success with clubs. You know, if we've got a big club of people, we're gonna have one or two, three killers in there that are good for, you know, 10, 15 doughs a year if we can get them some tags and things like that. But with the single landowner that has a fairly large block, I see we struggle a lot with getting dough harvest in. And it's just because of the, you know, the separation of work. I mean, it all falls on one person. It's hard to kill 30, 40 deer a year by yourself. And I think that speaks to another problem kind of with what we've been experiencing with hunting as well. And we talked about this some the other night, Bronson, at that event is just the willingness of people now to invite others to hunt on their property to help harvest those. I think there's a lot of, you know, kind of problems with the system that have allowed a lot of this to happen. I mean, I don't know how y'all feel about that, but you know, again, it's just gonna be really, really hard to find a single large landowner who is extremely busy because they have the job or the means to afford the land, so they have to be busy. How do we get them out there, you know, theoretically at least 15 to 20 days and only shoot does? Or like we talked about yesterday, brought some, you know, some poor quality bucks. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 13:41

But I think all of that you you can overcome if you think outside the box a little bit. So you're gonna have to to turn loose some of your willingness or wanting to hoard everything and all of the harvest decisions. You're gonna have to trust in a few people and and let them, you know, dough only. Yep. And then you think, well, legally, there's only so many dough. Well, especially if you're in the Southeast, most every state wildlife agency, if you're part of a program like DMAP, you can typically get additional tags on private lands. And there's a lot of hungry people out there that would love to have venison. And so it's just working with your, you know, your club members, family members, et cetera, friends that hunt the property, working with your community, but you know, where there is a will, there's a way. And and to me, we we keep dancing around the central theme to me is that the best deer management is very vanilla. And it doesn't get a lot of sensationalism at all. Some of the the most important things that we can do is manage deer density. And, you know, and I I make this joke quite a bit that, you know, there's no diet pill with with with deer management. You mean you just you can't pour out something out of a bag that make them antlers way bigger? There's no product that you might see on Instagram, and if I just do that, it it's the work. It is the year-in, year-out work of managing deer density. And even if you lease land and you may listen to us, and I wish I could do all the habitat management, but we can't because we lease it, understand. But one thing you can control is deer density.

Bonner Powell 15:39

Yep.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 15:40

And that's really boring, and people get tired of hearing it, but it does not negate the importance of it.

Bonner Powell 15:46

Yeah. You can you may not be able to do anything with the habitat, but you can flex that trigger finger. Also, it's kind of seems to me, Brussels, it's kind of more the the tortoise and the hare, you know, the tortoise is gonna end up winning the race, you know, steady dough harvest over a long period of time. You know, we can make huge exponential jumps in like pounds per acre of food, habitat, all of that, but you're still gonna have to be consistent across time with that. You can't just make the one jump in a two-year period and expect to start killing really, really big deer. You know, it would take, you know, somebody being consistent over 10 years would probably have more success than somebody that's very inconsistent that blows up every, like once every five years, they get fired up about it, do a lot of habitat improvements, and then they walk away for three, you know, the tortoise is gonna win. That's right.

Moriah Boggess 16:48

So we're kind of talking right now about resource availability for animals to reach their full potential. The other side of this that's sometimes I think gets passed over is the fact that the more deer you shoot, the more deer you produce. Because of density dependence, deer being a very density dependent species, if you kill more deer, you will have more successful reproduction the next year. That's been proven time and time again. You not only see an increase in quality pretty immediately with body size and eventually with antler size, but you have more reproduction. And I don't think it's coincidence. If you look at, and I've done this with several states, looking at the estimated population size for those states using state agency data, and some of that is, you know, it varies by state how they calculate it, using that number and then using harvest numbers and some of the best quality states from an antler standpoint. I'm talking, you know, those Midwestern states, Ohio being one, for instance, all of them have historically been high harvest states. Yeah. People whack the deer in Midwestern states. For the guys who haven't hunted there or or lived there or spent time, when gun season starts, and my experience is with Indiana, but man, it's a pumpkin patch. There's people everywhere. It's it's there's a heavy tradition of hunting, and like they light them up. And I don't think it's any accident that those states that have always had a heavy hunting tradition, small woodlots and areas where deer really get whacked, they're when you look at reproduction numbers, it's hard to tease out what states are better than others. But in general, those, you know, there's there's some Midwestern states. I believe Wisconsin has historically had a little bit higher reproduction rate, at least measured than some of the other, you know, southern states at least. And a marker of a healthy deer herd is having a lot of turnover. And that's one thing we look at, you know, and at some point we'll do a podcast talking specifically about the deer data we collect and how we analyze it. And there's there's a bunch of different ways you can look at deer data to try to parse out what's happening with a deer herd, and a lot of that's looking at trends. But one of those, and some state agencies use this as a metric for deer herd health, but one of it's just how much of that harvest is yearling dough. Because generally dough harvest is somewhat random. People often shoot for the bigger dough in a group, but body size is is highly variable by individuals. It's so it's somewhat random. And when you start to get in the 20, 30% range of dough harvest being yearlings, you're in you're in a pretty good area. But when we walk onto a property that has been poorly managed, poorly harvested, it'll be like 10% or less. And it's just because you have all these old deer that aren't successfully reproducing, you have a stagnated population. Therefore, that's telling you deer are stressed, they're nutritionally stressed, and you're not having new bucks enter that population. population.

Bonner Powell 20:00

Yeah, tie that back, tie that back into lactation as well. You know, if if lactation's in the tank, most of the nine times out of ten is because they hadn't been shooting shooting enough deer in the past, you know, five to ten years. And and you see a quick response with lactation as well, you know, after you start foresting deer. It's like a like you said, Mariah, a a guy in my community, he's he's always said this and he has no, you know, obviously no biological training or anything like that. But he'd always say the more you shoot, the more they are, you know, just everywhere you hunt, more you more you shoot, the more they are. And I I always remember, you know, I'll always remember that because he he's seen that enough times that he knows it. He doesn't now he might not know why and he might not know what the contributing factors are, but he knows he's like if I go somewhere and I shoot more, the more deer I shoot, the more they are next year.

When Populations Don’t Change (and Why)

Moriah Boggess 20:58

Most people I don't think understand that at all. There's like an undertone assumption when you're on social media and people get on the subject of deer harvest that like if they shoot 10 extra deer this year, there'll be 10 less next year or you know, like, oh, if I just don't shoot a couple for a few years, they'll be everywhere. And it's like, well man, I honestly believe a lot of deer herds and you know I've I've I've heard this from from people I look up to and you know people I really respect state agency deer biologists in other states that, you know, there's a lot of markers in a lot of states reproductive wise, harvest-wise, that would suggest that deer harvest is pretty much compensatory at this point. Like we're not shooting enough deer to really make much of a difference. In other words, the number of deer we're shooting now versus how many we would have to shoot to actually reduce the population, there's a chasm between those two. Simply shooting an extra one that most hunters shoot an extra one wouldn't make much of a difference that you would ever even be able to tell. Like we're so far from actually keeping deer populations down.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 22:09

Yeah that that's a real apparent when you look at harvest data and you know just lucky enough to be able to do that for a couple decades. And it it was essentially you could you could look and Mariah you use the term of density dependence and that and that's really just a response of the population to a change in density. But the change in density has to be meaningful meaning it has to change the fundamental relationship between the number of mouths and the food that's available. And what we found even in real productive environments that when you just bump up your deer harvest 10 to 20% the next year, even though that was a lot more deer you killed, it was a lot more work, you know, on your part, it was not enough to trigger a density dependent response. It was like you needed to double sometimes triple that amount. And then there might even be and this can be real perplexing for people when they're wanting to, we did all this work, now the next year we ought to see a big response. Usually there's a lag of two years and sometimes three years because now we got to let the habitat recover. And we got to let deer take advantage now of this new food availability and then they will express that in body weight lactation antlers and so forth. So a lot of people find it overwhelming and it is a and it is a big change. The the other thing I I agree with you Bonner what what you said but but I think the way I would put some context on that would be you keep shooting them and I don't remember how you said it exactly, keep shooting, they're going to keep coming, they're going to be there. I I would say for a lot of people the next year that would be true. A lot of people when they start standing on the population and and harvesting more, well then deer start responding behaviorally and a lot of people don't like that. The one benefit of having a very very dense population is that a lot of people simply enjoy seeing a whole bunch of deer. You know we deal with that all the time with people and I love it when we talk to people that have listened and read and followed the stuff we talk about. Mariah I remember we were with a client that that just said it. It was like I know I get it we should we we could kill more deer. We could do a better job with that. But we like seeing deer. I I have no problem with that as long as there's an understanding of the seesaw the density food availability relationship and okay you know if if you fit that into your situation and you want to see five to fifteen deer every time you hunt, a okay with me that that's all right. As long as you recognize the consequence and the reproduction uh repercussions of that that's okay.

Bonner Powell 25:09

Yeah.

Seeing Deer vs Managing Deer

Moriah Boggess 25:10

The trade off yeah the trade-off yeah yeah this is a little bit of kind of tangential in that the property I'm thinking of is a lot more of an exception than the norm for for most landowners but I've been on a couple of properties and in addition to those I think of some state parks where I've been over the years in a couple different states that didn't allow hunting in their parks. And these being very drastic examples of what happens when you don't shoot does period or you're not shooting near enough. But I've been on a couple properties that that was their hunting strategy. I remember one growing up before I really even went to school and studied it and I remember thinking how much the hunting sucked on that property all you saw was does. I mean you would see groups of 10 12 does just come in and devour this guy's bait piles that he was using to and his his logic was he was gonna he was going to bring in the bucks and I remember hunting there over a weekend and seeing 50 60 deer and not seeing a single antler he had stockpiled so many does that no doubt I mean no doubt bucks obviously were there during the rut for breeding opportunities. But outside of that from a buck's perspective why would you stay in this small core area that had very little resources and really high competition for resources and I think in some ways when when the pendulum swings the other way where people really don't harvest those and and they dig into this mindset of stockpiling deer to make this this area where there's just so many deer and bucks are coming in that can backfire and make your hunting even worse and maybe even your your buck hunting even worse in a different property where I had access to to this data or have reviewed their data it's well over 10,000 acres and they've had a very strict deer harvest program on that property for a long time but they've had a hard time getting people to shoot does they've really under harvested their doughs and they have a high deer density and then they have this restriction on buck harvest that tends to high grade their population. And so over time you can actually see in their deer data they've had low dough harvest and their buck harvest has been getting worse and worse not only from the number of animals shot but also from the quality of those animals. And you know we're talking three and a half year old deer that aren't getting out of out of the teens and that's routine for them. Like to shoot a deer into the 130s or 140s is is an exceptional buck on a Midwestern property. And so in that being an example of like man not only is dough harvest really important, I think most people are are shooting some to keep the prop the population turning over they're not doing super great they're not doing super bad. And we're always focused on what it could be like if you did super great and that that property population was cranking. What I'm talking about is like the other side of the coin when a property stagnates and that's a that's a real thing. Like I've seen that multiple times I'm curious if either of you have seen that on properties you can think of. I think it's the norm.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 28:31

I don't know if stagnate is the right word I think that that certainly can be appropriate. I would say I think it's the norm that it's an equilibrium that they have reached a a new norm based on the number of deer that are there and the extent to which the habitat is managed and the acreage of food plots that are provided is that there is not going to be any noticeable change until something overwhelmingly changes. And whether it's adding food to the system or removing mouths from the existing food supply, that is the only way there's going to be a change is doing that. And it's not just a little dab is going to do you it it's got to be an overwhelming change. Big change on the deer side requires big change on the habitat side and I don't think people are doing it near enough to cause a big change. It's hard it's a lot of work but that that you gotta recognize that's just the way it is and circling back there is no quick fix there's no product there's no spray there's no pouring it out it requires habitat producing food and the number of mouths being appropriate consuming the amount of food that's available. That's it. All the variation that we see across the United States eastern United States is based on that relationship. We got a temperature relationship heat conservation heat dissipation that's never going to change we can't do anything about that. You know deer on the the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Alabama no matter how well you manage it, they're never going to be as big as deer from Saskatchewan that's physics. That's never going to change but when you remove that variable of temperature latitude everything else that we see with deer and the variation in body size antler size is based on food availability plain and simple.

Bonner Powell 30:46

And there are ways to facilitate dough harvest and I, you know, I'd like for y'all to talk about those just a little bit facilitate dough harvest, make it fun, take a little bit of stress off of yourself if you're one of the only people hunting the property that kind of thing I get questions all the time harvest early harvest late you know should I kill my does first part of the season? Should I kill them after the post-rut, you know, all of that what do I do with my deer? All of these are questions that we get all the time I mean do you have any common answers for those Bronson that you just give people off the cuff?

Dr. Bronson Strickland 31:24

Yeah I I would say one of the biggest ones well first of all if you if you have a it really depends on are you chasing a particular buck? And and buddy I I get it you know people want to see bucks they want to harvest bucks I totally understand that but let's not devote the entire season to that and neglect the maintenance of that of that population. So it could be very simple I mean that there's there could be a hundred ways to do this. It could be that really put pressure on your bow hunters on your property wear out those with all the opportunities you have then and even have a change of philosophy like this a lot of people look for opening day of youth muzzle odor primitive rifle season in the South as that's going to be a good day for some bucks to hit the ground and good opportunity. What a wonderful opportunity dough are not acclimated to so many people on the property you might be able to knock out 50% of your dough harvest on the opening weekend of rifle season in two or three days. Yeah take advantage of that.

Bonner Powell 32:35

A couple dough days are fantastic get buddies together you know eat good food shoot some dough hang out you know cold beverages in the evening that's right yeah I just think there's a there's a lot of ways to make it easier at and I you know a lot of people early late discussion for me my typical answer is you know I'd I'd rather get them early but at the same time it doesn't matter just get it done one way or another. You know it's kind of like you know should I do my chores you know I've got to do a certain number of things over the you know over the fall time for my wife to be happy with me so that she knows I got my chores done. Should I do them early or should I do them late? It doesn't really matter because I got to get them all done. You know so at a certain point, you know, just get it all done shoot the dose and reach your harvest goals and I mean have fun doing it. I mean there's plenty of ways to donate deer whether it's people just down the road you mentioned the hungry people earlier Bronson if you don't know any of the hungry people there's definitely ways that you can donate deer to get those two people that are in need. And I mean man what better way to have a good time hang out with your buddies kill a bunch of does and then at the end of it I get to have this warm fuzzy feeling because I'm going to give a lot of this meat to people that need it that people that don't have you know I love you know service in the community and everything but maybe sometimes I'm not you know as outgoing enough to go out and just meet different people and help different people that are in need but I can definitely shoot a couple extra dough and you know donate those. Absolutely.

Moriah Boggess 34:21

I'm all for the early harvest or whatever makes sense to somebody but I there's there's also some questions around dough harvest that you hear that's like should you try to shoot old does or young does should you shoot them early or late some people feel really strongly or or bad I don't know if this is like a they feel this in a moral sense or what but they feel bad that if they shoot one late season they're killing the fetuses too. But from a deer management perspective that really doesn't matter that deer would have been bred you can shoot her early she would have been bred or you can shoot her late after she's bred there's really no population difference. But at the end of the day there's a lot of questions around deer harvest and I think all of us probably enjoy thinking through those as deer nuts and you know we can all o overanalyze stuff you know I think we're all guilty of that at some point just because that's what the world we live in. But for the average landowner whenever those questions come up my thought process and sometimes response is always I'm always at least thinking that question, that level of analyzation of how we harvest dough the when, the who, all that is so far beyond the higher priority of simply doing it just to put a you know a different way is that that's we're not near you in most cases we're not to that point where we even need to be worrying about having that discussion because we would have to be having a baseline of harvest that is shooting enough doughs before we start to say, okay, now we can sit back with our cold beverage at night and really break down how we're doing this and overanalyze and all and that is fun. But I I think that analysis by paralysis sometimes gets people with the dough harvest thing. And maybe maybe we're just looking for excuses right maybe we just want to want to think and talk more than we act but in most cases it's just not necessary to think about it.

Bonner Powell 36:28

Yeah definitely more people need to have the you know the Nike mentality just do it you know get it done you know but I don't know I don't know how you really address that with people that don't think dough harvest is important. I mean it's just really really tough.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 36:48

Well I I think it can be certainly property specific the composition of the hunters and are the you know is it a big bow hunting property rifle hunting property but but let's also keep this in mind to people that that listen to the stuff we and others like us talk about and we we have all this evidence now for huntability of a property and disturbance and hunting pressure and how that changes buck behavior. People have heard that and have seen that and understand that and so they're trying to reconcile you know Mariah I hear you we we want to do this but at the same time I also heard you on the other podcast talk about the disturbance and hunting pressure and and and changing behavior. And so I think that's again where you have to weigh out cost benefit short term this year, long term years from now and this is one way. There's a bunch of ways to do it. You know but the the reason I talked about like opening weekend a rifle season is let's have an event let's let's make it an acute event versus chronic you know disturbance like that. So let's have that big effort let's go ahead knock out 5060 whatever percent of the does we need to kill and then what I like and I'm biased right here and what I like but you know we're the ones also looking at the numbers on the harvest sheet if you don't get it all done then I actually really like that closing weekend of deer season, gun season, whatever, is to also kill some more then because as y'all know, what a wonderful time to assess carcass condition at the end of deer season. So now that is informing us more accurately on this relationship that we're talking about. Do we have enough food on the property or not? For us in Mississippi that's going to be the, you know, January 31st is going to close. So that is going to be our last data point we're getting on what is their body size, do they still have fat on their carcass, et cetera, that we would miss if we just shot all of our does on November 15th. So I think of getting most of it done bow season opening week in a gun season and I'm all for you. You want to sit back and we want to hunt the rut. We don't want to be shooting does off plots, this, that, and the other rut great. Wonderful. You know, in our context in the South then you might have anywhere from four weeks to eight weeks where you don't need to concentrate as much on dough harvest. But then don't have the issue that a lot of people do burnout. I killed all those does I've already got three in the freezer I've been buck hunting you know it's like a lot of turkey hunters go, my gosh I cannot wait until turkey season's over because I'm ready to sleep in one day. People get fatigued you know but hunting in a long and a long deer season but don't neglect that opportunity towards the end of the season To harvest more and that helps you fill your quota. It's also very influential with us looking at data and being able to interpret what's going on with your deer population. So that there's a lot of opportunity to get it done.

Bonner Powell 40:16

So what you're saying is, Bronson, you really like to party the opening weekend of deer season and the closing weekend of deer season.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 40:25

I want to be at that skin and shed. Yeah. At both those times.

Moriah Boggess 40:32

I'll play devil's advocate for a second, and this is where you and I might differ a little bit, Bronson. I think having some at late season is important, but personally I've seen so many people put it off. They put they'll put off 50% or more of their harvest to that last weekend. And then almost always in that situation, they just don't make it. And then it's always, well, we'll do better next year. And then the next year comes around. They got some really nice bucks on camera. They're kind of shy with their dough harvest. They put it off again, and it's this never-ending loop. What you said there, if they falled it to a T, I think they would achieve it because they would knock out most of theirs on the opening weekend of Rifle. But I've I've I've been burned before uh working with people that say, yeah, we'll do that, and then they get to the end and it doesn't happen. And then I'm sitting there.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 41:20

Mariah, I'm just saying what should be done. I'm not saying what's gonna be done.

Exceptions, Final Takeaways, and Wrap-Up

Moriah Boggess 41:24

Oh yeah. I'm playing it the other way. I'm like, I know what's gonna happen if we do it this way. So yeah, putting it off sometimes can come back to bite you in the butt.

Bonner Powell 41:35

Yeah, and just, you know, just for you know, any listeners that are like, well, I I don't I don't think this really applies to me. You know, there are areas of states, areas across the southeast that have extremely low deer densities, and maybe, maybe you're in an area where, you know, you need to put off dough harvest or, you know, not harvest as many. I think it's important that we say that just because we kind of, you know, we we're painted with a broad brush here because most of the areas across the southeast have too many deer. But I know I've worked in areas where I was like, dang, like they really, like, you know, we couldn't get enough harvest data because they couldn't kill enough deer. And then you start looking at observation data and you're like, my gosh, like they're seeing a deer per four hours. Like there there are some places where there just aren't any deer, but if you're trying to talk yourself into being one of those people, you're not. You're not. You either know or you don't. But I I, you know, I do think it's important that we do say that, just that there are some areas across the southeast that are not eat up with deer.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 42:45

I I'm glad you brought that up because it does depend, as irritating as people find that statement. But that that's a good example of qualifying that. Every place is not the same. And they're absolutely, even in the southeast, even in Mississippi, there are places where they don't need to stand on the deer population. Yeah. A few a few doughs may be completely adequate. There may be even be situations they don't need to have a dough harvest. But but that it is so context specific. Yeah.

Moriah Boggess 43:21

Well. Okay. Till next time on the dough harvest. I think there's more we can probably add to that conversation in breaking down the why in the future. It's a big topic. That's right.

Dr. Bronson Strickland 43:36

But but it is it is critically important. That again, I'll say it again. Peep people roll their eyes and they get tired of hearing a deer biologist talk about dough harvest. I know. But the reason deer biologists always talk about dough harvests is because it is so important.

Moriah Boggess 43:53

Thanks for listening to the Wildlife Investments Podcast. For more information on these topics or to see some of the projects our team is working on, follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Wildlife Investments or visit wildlifeinvestments.com.