I’m just back from one of my favorite hunting trips of the year, one where I never do any actual hunting. It’s the annual meeting of the Southeast Deer Study Group, a two-day barrage of 36 PowerPoint presentations and 20 poster-board exhibits updating the latest in whitetail science and management issues. This is a gathering of professional wildlife biologists, professors and college students from all over the country (not just the Southeast), and though they are almost all deer hunters, at this meeting they speak to each other in the language of science. Over the years I’ve attended, I’ve learned to translate jargon like “spatio-temporal” (space and time), “neonates” (fawns), “hazard ratio” (risk level), “mortality event” (it died), and “Bayesian framework” (actually, still no clue on this one). This is how I knew a presentation on Spatio-Temporal Individual Specialization of Mature Male White-Tailed Deer was likely to be far more cool than its title.
QDMA attends this annual meeting to listen in, translate, and then provide deer hunters with the most useful and interesting information. There were several noteworthy presentations at the 2016 meeting, and we’ll be talking about some of them in more detail in coming issues of Quality Whitetails magazine. To make sure you receive them, become a QDMA member today. For now, here are 10 snapshots of data I gathered for you.
27% – The difference between daylight and night movements of 19 bucks and 19 does on weekends after the start of rifle season in Alabama. Kevyn Wiskirchen of Auburn University tracked the GPS-collared deer on four study sites, two of which are WMAs. Though daylight movement was 27 percent less than night movements on weekends, the rates for day and night were essentially the same on weekdays during the same period. In fact, the lowest point of overall weekly deer movement rates was immediately following weekends in hunting season. The highest? Thursdays and Fridays before the hunters returned in force. Go ahead now and request vacation days from work on every Thursday this fall.
2,226 – Number of bucks “culled” over a seven-year study on more than 20,000 acres on the Comanche Ranch in Texas – including “moderate” and “intensive” culling treatment areas where bucks of certain ages that didn’t meet specific antler criteria were removed. The intensive treatment removed so many bucks that it resulted in a sex ratio of only one buck per six does, but neither moderate nor intensive treatments resulted in a decrease in the proportion of smaller-antlered bucks meeting the culling criteria. Results are still being examined, but Masa Ohnishi of the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M-Kingsville suggested that if culling produces any benefits, they require many years – if not decades – to become noticeable due to the low numbers of fawns sired over time by individual bucks. And this is in a scientific study using harvest techniques far more efficient and intensive than could ever be replicated by recreational hunters.
Side comment: This is another in a series of studies that has undermined the supposed benefits of “culling” deer. As QDMA teaches, the best approach is very simple: Set a realistic age-based harvest goal for bucks based on your experience and QDM progress, then kill bucks that meet it. Adjust the goal upwards, if you want, as you build buck age structure and advance in experience. Read more – https://www.qdma.com/articles/10-stats-from-new-deer-research