I was desperate. I was down to my last few days of hunting for the year, and my freezer would have been chirping if it was a smoke detector. The woods seemed desolate, too. I tried everything from food plots to mid-day sits in swamps, but nothing worked. Then came my last afternoon hunt, then my last 15 minutes of legal shooting light. I was about to begin packing my gear when I looked up. There they were: all the deer that had evaded me all week. They quit dodging me 15 minutes too soon.
In the dimming light, I used my binoculars first. Five deer appeared to be all antlerless. The biggest one was on full alert, standing guard as the others chowed on food plot, and she seemed to be spring-loaded and ready to flee at the slightest itch. I noticed something odd about her ear, too. It had a deep notch from an old battle, and the flap of loose ear shown white. Years passed as I tried to get my rifle into position and my eye to the scope without her seeing the movement.
I’m not dramatizing. Deer hunting at Grace Acres, in southeast Georgia’s coastal flatwoods, is the most difficult I’ve experienced. Our region supports lighter deer densities than other areas of the state, and for some reason the deer are the most spooky I have seen anywhere. They are hunted heavily in our vicinity, both by still-hunters and by those driving deer with dogs. We manage hunting pressure as carefully as we can, and yet these deer are as touchy as mouse traps.
What a sense of relief and gratitude when the doe dropped where she stood. Venison procured as the buzzer sounded! I watched the doe in the scope for a few minutes, still skeptical my struggle was really over. Then I climbed down from my ladder stand and got an up-close look at her.
Lessons of Doe Age
When I processed my doe, I found she was draped in body-cavity fat. Another sign of health: I found two fetuses in the reproductive tract, which I measured and back-dated to October 29. We’ve always said our rut peak hits around Halloween, and this doe gave us more supporting data. She had some kind of infection on one side of her jaw, and she had clearly been doing most of her chewing with the other side, but the wear on that side suggested she was older than 5½. I sent two of her incisor teeth for cementum aging and got back a precise age estimate: 9½ years old.
This is now the oldest lab-confirmed deer I’ve ever killed. She was one year older than the 8½-year-old doe I killed the previous season. And that’s what has me wondering: Are we not shooting enough does at Grace Acres? If this many does are reaching advanced age, it suggests a population that skews older and may be overpopulated. Adding to the evidence, in spring 2024 I found a doe skeleton revealed by prescribed fire (photo below). Her jawbone showed significantly more tooth wear than either of the two does I shot, as if she died of old age.
“A doe harvest skewed toward older does suggests either you’re not applying enough harvest pressure, or you have little to no fawn recruitment,” said my NDA teammate Kip Adams. “Those are two very different situations, and that’s why we suggest annual observation surveys to know whether your fawn recruitment rates are changing.”
Interpreting All The Evidence
For a few reasons, I don’t think either of these situations is the case at Grace Acres, and here’s why. First, I selected those two old does because they appeared to be the biggest, most alert, and oldest deer among a group of several antlerless deer. That doesn’t give me an unbiased cross-section of doe age among our doe population – it gives me a harvest skewed toward older deer.
Second, those are the only two does I’ve taken at Grace Acres in the past two seasons, and it’s not because I passed up other opportunities to take does. I worked hard to get those two. As I said, deer density is relatively light in Georgia’s Sea Island Flatwoods. More times than not, we see zero deer in a sit. But we also work to make sure low sighting rates aren’t caused by predictable hunting pressure.
Third, fawn recruitment is stable. This coastal habitat isn’t the most productive, and we’re never going to see the fawn recruitment rates of better soils, but most does we see are accompanied by one fawn each fall. My 9½-year-old doe was carrying twins, and that in itself is unusual for her age. We’ve seen no indication that fawn survival or recruitment is an issue.
Fourth, all signs point to abundant forage for the number of deer in the area. Our food plots are attractive but not overbrowsed. Natural deer forages in our forested burn units are plentiful and browsed consistently but lightly. Body fat, especially kidney fat, is thick on the deer we kill and has been for many seasons, in both good and bad acorn years.
A Rule of Thumb for Doe Age
In short, all the evidence suggests we are in a good place. The habitat probably couldn’t support a whole lot more deer in good condition, so fawn recruitment is where it needs to be. But in an area with more fertile soils and more productive deer populations, you don’t want to see a lot of 8½- and 9½-year-old does on your skinning pole.
“I use a rule of thumb that as long as hunting effort (man hours per season) and fawn recruitment rates are similar, then your doe harvest should include around 25 to 30% does that are 4½-plus years old,” said Kip. “Less than 20%, and you may be overharvesting does. More than 40% and you may be underharvesting them. We teach this in our Deer Steward courses, and I monitor it annually on my place in Pennsylvania.”
It’s important to pay attention to the age of the does you harvest, but you also need to consider other context clues and gather additional data that helps with interpretation. Two does in two seasons is a small sample size, and if I went by the average age alone, I’d think we were underharvesting does. We could definitely afford to take a few more, but we are not underharvesting, and we are not overpopulated.
So, I believe my 9½-year-old doe was a win, not a warning sign. I enjoyed venison roast and venison tacos in the same week I wrote this article. I labeled the jawbones, strung them together on a wire, and put them on display in my collection of treasured items. And I was encouraged for this new deer season knowing one less grouchy, sharp-nosed old doe was waiting to bust me!
