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Hunting News Latest Hunting News When to harvest your doe | When to harvest your doe |
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| Written by Craig Nyhus | |
| Monday, 29 December 2008 | |
 Photo by LSONEWS.com But while field dressing, there was something he hadn’t seen before: a milky-white sack containing a tiny creature not much bigger than a kitten. Finding the deer fetus made the hunter realize he hadn’t killed one deer but two. Had he just robbed the ranch of a future trophy? Other questions followed. Were last season’s fawns weaned before hunters on the ranch started filling doe tags? And is it even necessary to harvest female deer? Deer experts in Texas say yes, absolutely. “Does are overlooked simply because they are not a glamorous thing to hunt,” said Bob Zaiglin, a biologist in Uvalde. “But,” he added, “the old philosophy: ‘If you shoot a doe, where will the next buck come from?’ — that has to go by the wayside. “A habitat will sustain only so many animals, and once it’s saturated with deer, there’s a problem.” To illustrate, renowned biologist Al Brothers of Berclair offered some quick math. “The average mature white-tailed doe will consume five pounds of food a day,” Brothers said. “If the average deer season is 60 days, multiply that by five and that’s 300 pounds of food for that one doe. “Now multiply that by the number of does you need to take off your property. Say it’s 10; that’s 3,000 pounds of food. “But if you take those does now, you leave 3,000 pounds of food out there for the deer you want to survive through the winter.” Brothers, who helped develop the concept of Quality Deer Management in the 1970s, is a co-author of “Producing Quality Whitetails.” Zaiglin chairs the wildlife management department at Southwest Texas Junior College in Uvalde. He also operates a consulting firm, Zaiglin’s Wildlife Resource Management. They agreed that doe harvests are an essential facet of deer management. And it can be done legally in one-buck counties through the state’s Managed Lands Deer Permit program, in which landowners take population surveys and send the data to state biologists. The information is used to form harvest strategies, and doe permits are issued. But don’t worry about separating last year’s fawns from their mothers’ milk, Brothers said. Fawns born in late summer, he said, are generally weaned within 12 weeks, just in time for deer season. “If you take his mamma from him, it won’t hurt him at all,” Zaiglin said. Brothers said that was confirmed in a study Zaiglin co-authored 20 years ago for Texas Tech University. The paper resulted from a lengthy experiment in Webb and Dimmit counties in which Zaiglin and colleagues used radio collars to follow a dozen orphaned fawns until they were 18 months old. The young deer were harvested, and extensive tests on them showed that they matured at about the same rates as deer who were not orphaned. Brothers and Zaiglin noted, however, that there are practical ways to pursue a doe harvest. Both urged hunters to shoot females early in the season to preserve range. “Why wait for those does to be bred?” Zaiglin asked. “Your bucks will be exerting energy on breeding deer that are going to die in late December or early January. “Remove them as soon as possible, but, more importantly, remove them whenever you can — even if they have a fetus in them.” |
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 29 December 2008 ) |
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