By Brad Herndon
To arrive at these answers I’m going to use a variety of management situations to make my points. First of all, let’s take what I call the ideal situation for QDM, one that was common 20 years ago in many of our states, but is more difficult to find today. We’ll assume two hunting buddies of average income lease a 300-acre tract of timber one spring that consists of a mix of timber and farm fields in a fertile Midwest state. This particular area has a low deer density, with the herd just starting to expand. These guys are sharp, by the way, and are willing to learn, plus they are disciplined enough to pass some good bucks. Let’s see how QDM works in their situation.
PUTTING TOGETHER THE QDM PUZZLE
These two intelligent whitetail hunters immediately start talking to neighboring landowners and other deer hunters who are already leasing land in their nearby region. After months of talking about the importance of managing deer for not only the maximum health and balance of the herd, but also for the well-being of the natural habitat and farm fields, they have convinced the locals to go along with their line of thinking for a couple of years.
With this time-consuming task done, the two buddies install three one-acre food plots in different locations on their lease. Two plots are planted in Imperial Whitetail Clover, while the third plot is saved for a fall and winter attraction plot using brassicas, turnips, and other products. They also get permission from the landowner to plant a few persimmon, apple and pear trees on a small, brushy, but unused hilltop. While they can’t afford a feeding program, they are able to afford some mineral supplements.
Their next step is to use a couple of surveillance cameras in late summer to help get a handle on the number of deer on their property before their first fall hunting season. This information, coupled with their own observations and scouting, reveal the following figures: They have one 3-1/2 year-old 10-point on their lease, one 2-1/2 year-old buck, and one yearling buck. On the antlerless side they have three mature does, two yearling does, two doe fawns, and two button bucks, for a total of 12 deer. Knowing that the recommended carrying capacity for one square mile for their type of habitat is only 18 deer in their state, they put a harvest plan in place.
First of all, they decide to not shoot any antlered bucks for the first two hunting seasons unless a brute from someplace else just happens to wander through. The first fall they shoot a doe fawn, a yearling doe, and an adult doe. They killed three out of their seven does. The second fall they shoot a doe fawn, a yearling doe, and an adult doe, again three out of seven does on their property.
The third fall season they are fortunate enough to kill the original 3-1/2 year-old buck, which has by now turned into a 5-1/2 year-old, 160-inch bruiser. They also shoot one doe fawn and an adult doe. They now have a total of 13 deer on their property. At the end of four years, they have killed two 5-1/2 year-old bucks and one 4-1/2 year-old buck. By the fifth year they have three button bucks, two yearling bucks, two 2-1/2 yearold bucks, two 3-1/2 year-old bucks, and two 4-1/2 year-old bucks on their property. They also have three doe fawns, two yearling does and three adult does, for a grand total of 19 deer. Interestingly, they have never had to shoot more than three does per year thus far, and their native vegetation is healthy, and their food plots lush.Another plus is that with the great buck/doe ratio, buck movement is absolutely incredible, with many buck sightings per day. Of course, for all this to work out in this example, the neighbors have to be doing the same thing, with the same standards. As you can see, this situation would continue to crank out 4-1/2 and 5-1/2 year-old bucks for years to come for these guys. In this scenario, it only took until the third hunting season (a little over two years from the time they leased the property) for them to tap out a 5-1/2 year-old buck. It would be of interest at this point for each of us to tally up how many 5-1/2 year-old bucks we have killed in our lifetime. I’m betting it won’t be many, if any.
DECEPTIVE QDM “SUCCESS”
I have a friend who has too many deer on his land. The mature timber in his woods contains no suitable browse for whitetails, yet he and his family and friends continue to kill 150- and 160-inch deer year after year. This proves, some might say, that you can have too many whitetails and still have great bucks.
This, simply put, isn’t true for the average QDM manager. My friend is successful growing trophy deer, and is keeping his deer herd healthy for reasons other than sound deer management practices. For instance, for much of the year he spends $245 per week supplying his whitetail herd with a specially formulated food blend in covered feeders. In addition, even though he has large food plots in clover, alfalfa, turnips, and other products, he leaves sizable areas of his corn and soybean fields standing so the deer can feed in them in late summer, fall and winter. To top that off he has built several ponds and wetland areas on his property.
There is nothing wrong with this kind of management, and my friend has spent his adulthood working hard to build up his estate. Nothing was inherited. Still, this is what I call deceptive QDM success. It’s kind of like the deer farmers we read about who grow incredibly huge bucks with high-scoring racks in penned areas simply by using specially formulated deer feed. Although this method can be made to work if you throw enough money at it, how many of us could spend $25,000 or more per year managing one piece of property for deer using this method? I assure you I couldn’t, and most of you reading this couldn’t either.
PICKING LEASING AREAS IS IMPORTANT
Now let’s go to another example similar in lease size to my first example of QDM, this one well-documented because I know the two hunters well. The year is 2000 and two family members lease 280 acres in Indiana. The deer herd on this property is at the carrying capacity of the land, so no mistakes can be made.
The first year these QDM managers take soil tests, lime and fertilize the soil, and plant three food plots averaging slightly less than one acre in size. Imperial Whitetail Clover and Whitetail Extreme are planted. The hunters look over their native habitat and see it is suffering damage, with a browse line being slightly visible. Although there is some brush inside the timber, most of it consists of browse deer don’t favor, such as paw paw bushes.
Because this particular region contains no property that has been leased, these QDM managers spend the first year as villains in the area and catch a lot of flak from the local hunters for “stealing their hunting place.” By the third year, however, the locals see the handwriting
on the wall, become friendly, and lease their own land. They graduate from shooting yearling bucks to 2-1/2 year-old bucks, and occasionally tag a 3-1/2 year old buck. The locals are happy because they are killing their best bucks ever, and are seeing quantities of deer.
Well, our original leasers aren’t happy, despite the fact one of them bow killed a 162-inch-gross 12-pointer, and the other one tapped out a couple of bucks that scored from 135 to 145 inches. The reason they are disappointed is the fact they kill eight or ten mature does per year, yet they are immediately replaced with doe from neighboring properties. Despite efforts to inform other hunters of an approaching habitat destruction crisis, their pleas go in one ear and out the other.
By the fifth year of their lease, these QDM managers start to see spike bucks with increasing frequency, something they never saw in the territory several years back. Also alarming is the fact mature bucks are starting to be infested with ticks, something these hunters had never witnessed before. Their browse line by now stands out like a sore thumb, and the body weight of the bucks start to plummet. On the sixth year of leasing, one of the hunters takes a great “holdover” buck probably 6-1/2 years of age, or older, that grosses 167 inches and has great mass. Disappointingly, its coat is barely salvageable to do a shoulder mount because
ticks are literally dropping off of it like rain.
After a decade of QDM on their property, their sightings of bucks are considerable, but it isn’t often that they see one that grosses 130 inches or more. Average field-dressed weights of 3-1/2 year-old bucks have dropped from 180-185 pounds field-dressed, to 140-145 pounds. Two bucks with three-inch spikes were sighted with blood-covered antlers (shedding their velvet) in
October and all older age class bucks are infested with ticks.
Hunting has changed for the other hunters in the area as well. They claim all the 105- to 120-inch bucks they are seeing in the region are 2-1/2 year-olds, and are wondering where the 3-1/2 year-old bucks in the 130-135 inch range have gone they were so happy shooting. Sadly, they can’t be convinced those “2-1/2 year-old bucks” are really unhealthy 3-1/2 year-olds, despite the fact it can be proven using accurate aging methods. Moreover, the other hunters in the region are starting to shoot smaller bucks again because “there aren’t any big bucks left.” Unfortunately, in this situation, the result of 10 years of quality deer management by these two hunters did not turn out well. They simply couldn’t do enough on their one piece of land to offset what happened on the surrounding properties. After 10 years, their entire region of the county consisted of over-browsed timber, the deer herds’ health was declining, and antler size certainly suffered. Farmers were upset as well since they were losing thousands of dollars per year because of lower corn and soybean yields.
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS
As you can see in these three examples, we have different answers about how long QDM takes to work depending on the situation where it is carried out by whitetail hunters. In our first example, QDM worked quickly, in just over a two-year period. This model, incidentally, can happen in a big-time way. For example, when QDM was just getting started, Buffalo County, Wis. had only one Pope & Young entry from 1992 and three entries from 1993.
By banding together at that time, deer managers and landowners in this hilly, rich-soiled county in the west central part of the state collectively put together a QDM program that produced close to unbelievable results. Because the Whitetail Institute was on the leading edge of QDM, its products were extensively used in this region’s food plots. My wife, Carol, and I tracked the 10-year period in Buffalo County from 1994 to 2003 and the results showed during this period that Buffalo County entered 210 bucks into the typical category of the Pope & Young record book alone! To put these numbers in perspective, this means this one county, only 685 square miles in size, grew more book bucks in this 10-year period than the all-time totals in at least 20 other states! This example certainly carries a lot of weight when it comes to a small region producing a quantity of tall-tined brutes by utilizing sound deer management practices. In our second example, management wasn’t according to the book, but it worked because of the nutritional value of a great product called the greenback. As a capitalist, I’m on the side of the guy with money. While a few individuals do accumulate wealth in an illegal method, the vast majority of people with money are ethical, exceptionally intelligent, have worked incredibly long hours, taken risks, and have succeeded after what is normally decades of time. That being said, most of us are in the average income bracket and, with a few exceptions such as hunt clubs, can’t manage deer that way.
From the last example, perhaps the most important lessons can be learned about QDM. Even though these two hunters managed almost exactly like the successful ones in the first example, they experienced disappointing results. Unfortunately, they made the mistake of leasing land in a region where the local hunters were not familiar with the catastrophic results of too-high deer densities. Continued under-harvesting of doe, and the fact no one else in the region planted food plots during this time were the fatal nails driven in the QDM coffin. This situation is tragic, and is just now starting to occur in more and more areas of our nation with exploding whitetail numbers. Some of this is on public land, and much of it is on private land.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR QDM?
It would be interesting to take a survey and see what percentage of you reading this article fit in each example I used. If you fit in the wildly successful first example, you’re obviously relaxed and smiling, sitting in your easy chair admiring your wall-mounted trophies. If you fit in the second example, you’re probably still happy, but with the current recession raging on, cutting back on some of those high-dollar expenses might be starting to look more inviting.
If, lastly, you fall in the third example where QDM didn’t work out for various reasons, such as the wrong lease location, mistakes on your part, poaching, or other factors such as EHD, then you may be disgusted. Well, tune in to the next issue of Whitetail News where I will discuss how to save QDM in your area. When finished with this upcoming article, all readers should end up feeling good about themselves, knowing that they can, and are, making a positive difference in God’s great creation.
Keeping Track Of Deer Numbers
To ever pull off a successful quality deer management program, it’s important to keep the native habitat in good condition, and then put nutritional icing on the cake for your whitetails by implementing quality food plots, plus minerals. In order to do this, the deer herd size must be kept within the carrying capacity of the land. State regions, type of soil, presence of farm fields,
and a lot of other factors determine what the carrying capacity of a piece of property is, but in the end, the definition of carrying capacity is this: It’s the number of deer a given parcel can support in good physical condition over an extended period of time without adversely impacting the natural habitat.
More than anything else, just running numbers on deer production should convince you of the importance of shooting doe. A rule to go by regarding doe is that a doe fawn reaching 70 pounds body weight can come into estrus and can be impregnated. This cycle can occur in November, December or January. Secondly, a yearling doe (1-1/2-years old) that is bred will normally have a single fawn. After that, healthy adult doe will usually have twins, with male and female births close to 50/50. Triplets occur, but it doesn’t happen often. Let me give you an idea of how fast whitetail deer can multiply. If you have a tract of land with only two doe fawns, two yearling does and two adult does on it and every doe is bred yearly, five years later you would have almost
100 deer on this property! This is without any hunting, or natural deaths occurring.
Make yourself sit down and really study this out and start tallying the figures and you will see that my numbers are correct. And also keep in mind that after five years, the population increases exponentially, absolutely exploding overnight. I can assure you it is a lot more pleasurable shooting five doe per year to keep your herd in balance than it is to shoot, remove and properly
process 20, 30 or 40 does per year.
CULTURAL CARRYING CAPACITY OF THE LAND
My discussion above about controlling deer numbers is considered what is the biological carrying capacity of the land. Another issue a quality deer manager must address in many situations is the cultural carrying capacity of the land. In my simple terms, this simply means the number of deer the neighbors will tolerate. Neighbors will most often mean farmers, although it can at times be people in a nearby suburban area.
For example, when there were few deer in Indiana I used to go round and round with a farmer who claimed “Those deer are costing me $10,000 a year!” They weren’t, and he knew it. He just wanted to eradicate anything that would eat a grain of corn. I still talk to that farmer and I’m compassionate with him because I know today he may be losing $10,000 to $15,000 per year to deer damage.
Although he doesn’t want to spend his time doing it, he now obtains quantities of deer depredation permits and spends countless evenings in the summer shooting deer. He also legally passes these permits out to other individuals so they can shoot deer on his land and help control the deer numbers.
Having too many deer wasn’t his fault, nor was it the fault of Indiana’s DNR. They have issued liberal doe tags over the past 20 years. Instead, the fault primarily lies with the deer hunters who just wanted to see more and more deer without any regard to what they were doing to the natural habitat, and to farm fields. It was, from a majority standpoint, the deer hunter’s mistake, but one that can be corrected.
Regarding suburban housing additions near land managed for deer, high deer densities can result in destruction of gardens and expensive shrubbery, and also result in an increased number of deer/vehicle collisions. Summing up, an astute quality deer manager should always be aware of the importance of controlling both the biological and cultural capacity of the land, and when in doubt about what to do, err on the side of caution.
