How many does should you harvest? It’s a perennial question for our organization and many deer hunters. Here are 12 signs to look for that indicate you need to take more than you have been.
Managing deer populations for optimal health is about balance, as depicted in the scene above. If deer numbers are in balance with available forage and cover, or if available forage outweighs deer numbers, little or no doe harvest is necessary. But few hunters or deer populations are in that condition. If the scales tip toward heavy deer numbers, quality forage grows scarce. Doe harvest combined with habitat improvement prevents the scales from tipping in that direction.
Full Buck Tags, Empty Doe Tags
One of the best ways to manage doe harvest across time is a very simple one: Take a doe for every buck you kill. In some places, hunters need to take two does for every buck until they get caught up. But if you always take at least one doe per buck, you’ll likely never deal with an unbalanced buck:doe ratio or deer density that’s too high for available food. (Deer in some areas, such as northern New England and fringe whitetail habitat in the western U.S., aren’t productive enough to warrant a doe harvested for every buck, but these areas are the exceptions rather than the rule.)
If you can think back over recent hunting seasons and recall all the buck tags you punched, but you can’t remember the last time you tagged a doe, that’s a good sign you need to take more does where you hunt. Only 41% of hunters shoot a deer annually, and only 18% shoot more than one. That leaves a lot of unused doe tags each year.
Rattling and Grunt Calls Rarely Work
If you rattle antlers until your knuckles are skinned and grunt until you are hoarse without drawing a response from bucks, you probably need to take more does. First of all, there may not be many bucks in the area if they’ve been hit hard for many seasons. But in normal populations, bucks respond to sounds of fighting and grunting because they need to compete for breeding opportunities. When the adult buck:doe ratio favors does, a buck doesn’t have to hunt for long to find the next estrus doe and breeding opportunity. I mean, why fight if you don’t have to?
Where I hunt in Georgia, we used to have this problem. As we began to harvest an appropriate number of does while passing up a few yearling and 2½-year-old bucks, we balanced the buck:doe ratio. One of the first rewards was seeing bucks charge through the brush in response to rattling antlers and grunt calls.
Browse Lines
An obvious and glaring warning sign that gets overlooked often: a browse line in the woods. Strangely enough, they seem to hide in plain sight, because most people don’t even notice them until they’ve been shown. Simply, a browse line results when deer have inadequate forage and strip most green plant material from the ground to the highest point they can stretch to reach (or even stand on hind legs). People have sent me trail-camera photos of interesting deer they wanted me to see, and all I can see is the glaring browse line in the background.
In the worst cases, a browse line looks as if a laser-guided, razor-equipped drone flew through the woods, slicing off leaves at a very specific height. Deer will eat mature leaves off tree limbs, strip leaves off vines, and gnaw sprouts from previously browsed stumps. At first they decline to eat most non-native plants, but eventually hunger drives them to choke those down, too. Of course, this destroys fawning cover, nesting cover and brood-rearing cover at the same time.
This is up there with the worst red flags you can see. You have too many deer and not enough food. You need to reduce deer numbers while increasing forage through habitat management until browse lines vanish.
Older Does in the Harvest
If you are already taking a few does, their jawbone age can help you determine if you need to take even more or maybe less. If there are a lot of really old does in your harvest, it’s a sign that does are living a long time and stacking up numbers in advanced ages. It’s a sign doe harvest is lagging behind deer productivity.
Our Deer Steward classes teach a specific guideline where this is concerned. As long as hunting effort (man hours per season) and fawn recruitment rates are similar, your doe harvest should include around 25 to 30% does that are 4½-plus years old. Less than 20% is a sign of a really young population, and you may be over-harvesting does. More than 40% and you may be under-harvesting them.
Kidney Fat
Healthy deer build up and maintain body fat that is especially important for winter survival. The abdominal cavity is the first place fat stores accumulate, so when you field-dress deer in fall, you should see ample fat in the pelvic area, under the spine, as well as under the skin. In fact, the percentage of fat covering the kidneys is a reliable indicator of health that scientists can actually measure.
You can just measure with a quick glance. If you can barely recognize or locate the kidneys because they are encased in deep globs of fat, that’s a great sign! On the other hand, if the kidneys are naked or only sparsely covered in fat, that deer is not in great health or prepared for winter. If this is a common diagnosis among deer harvested in your area, take more does, and improve the habitat.
Food Plot Cages
Put a simple browse exclosure in every one of your food plots. If the wire cage fills up with forage, but there’s only crop stubble and deer tracks outside the cage, then you don’t have enough deer food in that season and maybe all year long. This is one of the easiest tests you can do to learn if you need to reduce deer numbers through increased doe harvest. You can also place these cages in forested areas to measure browse pressure on natural forage.
Deer are Eating Crap Forage
Scouting for deer sign usually means looking for tracks, beds, rubs, and scrapes. If it’s not part of your scouting routine, you should also add signs of browsing on plants. Not only can you learn what deer are eating, you can learn if their diet is a sign of trouble. If deer are eating low-quality, tough-to-digest plants or plant parts, it’s a sign you have too many deer for available food.
This chronic condition can be a problem all year long in the worst situations, or it might only be a problem part of the year. Winter, for example, is the season of lowest food availability. Green forage is gone, and deer rely on woody browse like dormant buds and stems. But if winter browse is lacking, they’ll eat really poor foods, like cedar and conifer needles, or non-native plants like English ivy and Chinese privet.
You don’t want to see signs like this in any season. If you’re seeing it all year long, then you really have a problem. Tip the scales toward balance by reducing deer density and increasing forage and browse availability.
The Rut is a Dud
Do you witness bucks chasing does each fall? Are there lots of rubs and scrapes in the woods? What about buck fights? If the rut arrives and departs each fall without you witnessing these indicators, you might need to harvest more does.
These rut behaviors we witness as hunters are motivated by competition among bucks to locate, tend and breed estrus does. That’s why they fill the woods with sign of their presence and breeding status. That’s why they vocalize and chase after does. That’s why they are irritated by the presence of other bucks. But when does outnumber bucks significantly, less competition is required. A buck can easily find estrus does because plenty are available and few other bucks are around to grab them first. Taking more does to balance the buck:doe ratio will help intensify the local rut and make bucks more visible to you.
By the way, this is also why you should ignore people who advise stockpiling or protecting does to “draw more bucks to the area.” That’s bad advice that doesn’t work.
Non-Native Plants Rule
If the land where you hunt is infested with non-native plant species – like thickets of Chinese privet, autumn olive, multiflora rose, Japanese barberry, English ivy, cogongrass or a long list of others – then the carrying capacity for deer is very low. Deer won’t eat most of these species, and the ones they do eat are very poor quality forage.
Until you control these species, they’ll continue to dominate openings and suppress valuable native forages. You’ll need to maintain deer densities fairly low to maintain deer health, so doe harvest is important. But the sooner you control non-natives and begin restoring the native plant community, the sooner you can support more deer in good health.
Internal Parasites Are Abundant
Just like humans, deer are less able to fight off diseases, infection and parasites when they are in poor health. They just don’t have the physical constitution for their natural immune defense systems to operate effectively. If you commonly find abdominal worms, stomach worms, lung worms, liver flukes, or other internal parasites when field-dressing your deer, that’s a sign you need to take more does.
Note: Bot fly larvae in the nasal passages are more random and not strongly tied to physical health. It’s parasites living in and among the internal organs that become abundant when deer populations exceed carrying capacity.
Tick-Infested Deer
Speaking of parasites, ticks can also be a good indicator of an imbalance between deer and habitat. Do you see fawns with eyes encrusted shut by ticks? Do you see deer with the fringes of their ears gnawed away by ticks, or bucks sporting fat ticks on their antlers? Doe harvest might very well be a solution.
As with any other parasite, deer are more vulnerable to tick infestations when they are not in the best health to begin with. Also, deer serve as a stage in the tick life cycle. The higher the deer density, the higher the tick reproduction. This is why ticks and cases of Lyme disease are more abundant in suburban areas or any woodlands where deer are not managed through hunting.
A great combination for fighting ticks is doe harvest combined with a good prescribed fire plan. For obvious reasons, prescribed fire sets back tick densities. As long as deer density is also reduced, ticks have a hard time thriving.
You Hunt in a CWD Management Zone
A CWD Management Zone is a unique situation where habitat, food, rut factors and similar considerations are now less important. Maintaining a low prevalence rate of chronic wasting disease in local deer is the priority. Keeping deer density at a healthy level not only slows deer-to-deer spread of CWD but also maintains deer health and productivity at optimal output. The long-term sustainability of hunter harvest depends on this health and productivity.
We can continue to enjoy productive hunting in CWD zones for the foreseeable future as long as hunters work to help fight the disease, slow the spread, and support herd health. Adequate doe harvest is a key ingredient. So, if you hunt in a CWD management zone, follow your state wildlife agency’s guidance on doe harvest. Fill your doe tags whenever you can, and submit each harvested deer for CWD testing.