Doe Days in East Central TX

[pepaw]

I understand Leon County may have "doe days" next season.
Anyone else in TX have these already and what is your impression?
We had tight restrictions on doe harvests (2 per 250 acres) last season, but I worry about one extreme to the other now.

pepaw

[venado]

pepaw, would you explain specifically what "doe days" means? If it means that there are days where anyone may hunt does without respect to land size it certainly appears that it will be a move to the "other extreme" in an area where there were limits on the harvest.

[Altjaeger]

As practiced in other East Texas counties what it means is that does maybe be shot without permits for the four days of the Thanksgiving weekend. Considering the season includes approximately nine weekends and over 60 days I suspect the 4 day season is an overall plus. Just as with bucks in those counties it is up to the land owner to regulate his individual harvest.

Houston county went to this 2 years ago and killing does is not allowed in the National forest, only private lands. Before that hunters could apply for tags on the NF but does were restricted to large landowners with a state approved plan. Small landowners complained they were shut out of hunting their land for does. The answer was to implement the Thanksgiving weekend hunt but pull tags from the national forest to compensate. As a hunter of the national forest I and my camp are now locked out. Guess someone takes it in the shorts no matter what they do.:(

[pepaw]

Thanks, Altjaeger.
Venado,
This year we were reaching the point where I encouraged the bowhunting nephew and his buddy to each take does (which do not require permits in bow season) to increase the harvest of does.
Unfortunately, it appears our local herd is where it was 25 years ago where the buck harvest is still very high and doe numbers high. At that point, the doe permits were handed out generously and populations of does were brought done to "normal numbers", but overall buck harvest was still too high.
With the 13 inch minimum the last two years, I was hopeful we would have a nice carryover of young bucks. But so far this spring we have seen huge herds of does with a very few small bucks. Hopefully, they are just lying low in bachelor groups while the tender horns are growing.
Unsure if this doe days is a done deal, but I don't think it will be a beneficial plan in our hard hunted area. More permits on a per acreage basis seems more like a sound management plan to me.


pepaw

[Laturkeyhtr]

We used to have doe days here. At first back in the 70's or so, it was one or two days. Before we went to tags last year, Lincoln Parish was up to some 18 or so doe days. Now with the tags each hunter is allowed 3 of each sex.

I initiated a DMAP club some 15 years or so ago, which we were asked to harvest one doe per every 100 acres we had in it. Our acreage varied over the years, with a high of over 10,000 acres but 5800 is probably closer to what it was over the years. We NEVER harvested the states recommendation! Too many hunters thought we were going to get rid of them. We were even challenged by our State Deer Study Leader to see if we could hurt the population. We can't or at least we haven't !! I seriously doubt that very few places can truly hurt the population. As Myerick says "hit em hard".

[venado]

Your situations are different than mine, but at my place we have made a significant reduction in 3 seasons of serious doe killing. Down here recruitment can be as low as 0.2 and rarely as high as 1.0. We have been in drought conditions and our recruitment is near the 0.3 level even with a reduced herd.

[Herne]

Oh Mike, believe me you can get numbers down - even muntjac. Given tactics determination and time. Its not a quick fix, but as you know, we have long doe seasons, very often at the exclusion of bucks with some species, you can get to where you need to be in short order.

For example, I have on occasion concentrated on shooting only mature does, forget the not pregnant yearling, because that reduces recruitment.

But, at the end of the day what matters is not how many you shoot in absolute terms, but how many you leave WRT to the carrying capacity. You saw our country, and you can see that we can carry a deer to 25 acres with no trouble, even including the basic farming stock of a cow per acre. But I doubt Paul could do that in his bit of TX.

The mistake I made I think was allowing a complacency over carrying capacity carry over into sex ratio. If I had my time again, with the territorial deer, I'd look a lot harder on sex ratio - not because of the matter of recruitment (I was confident I could shoot enough if I wanted to, or could find the resources if someone else were to do it) but because a wide doe ratio makes hunting quality bucks more difficult because of the increased competition. The quality of that land, and careful selection and a minimal cull of older males ensure there were actually a lot about, but hunting them successfully at commercial rates with no artificial aids in the rut was less easy. Still something like 75% of all bucks shot (by clients)were medal class. Possibly we could have done better?