Over the past several years, I have been
watching the quality of the bucks on my farm deteriorate. When I bought it in
2002 and 2003, the farm held many whoppers. I felt like I had snuck into my mother's
kitchen and stolen the cookie jar. I thought, "It couldn’t possibly be
this good without anyone else noticing, could it?" And I had huge visions
of how much better it would be in subsequent years when I started to manage the
land.
Several things can cause a downturn in antler size, so it's difficult to pinpoint the true reason for a decline. However, the second trend I have watched — a herd with more old bucks — seems to shed a bit more light on the situation. The poor quality is not because I don’t have mature bucks and not because I don’t feed them (they have plenty of year-round nutrition). I have old bucks with scrubby antlers and few with good racks, despite a good age structure and lots of year-round nutrition. That is an interesting puzzle. During much of this past season, I averaged seeing roughly one mature buck — those 4.5 years or older — per day. I saw 19 different bucks. That would normally be reason for celebration, but unfortunately, nearly all of them had small antlers, and some were disgustingly small — scoring less than 100 inches. I wasn’t hunting Florida. I was hunting Iowa. They were definitely not the kind of bucks I would hope to see at 4, 5 and 6 years old.
DEFINING
THE NO-CULL FACTOR During the past two years, I have run my problem past several hardcore deer hunters, outfitters and managers. We laugh about how the best bucks seem to show up in unmanaged settings and how we have succeeded in managing our way down to 140-inch deer. It seems the more we do to improve our farms, the smaller the mature bucks get. I’m sure that is not exactly the case, but it certainly feels that way. It's what Al Collins, owner of lots of land and successful deer manager from northern Indiana, calls the “no-cull factor.” Collins sees it on his farms all the time. Because hunters are not culling out mature bucks that have small antlers — there are some in every herd, regardless of where they are — such deer are taking over our farms. We have made these properties so attractive to deer that we have created havens. These nasty old bucks have all the food, cover and security they could want. Why would they leave? Additionally, I have read in several places and seen firsthand that when a buck gets older, his range shrinks. Now we have bucks we really don’t want, and they have no intention of leaving. We also have a limited number of precious either-sex tags with which to control them, and we don’t want to waste those tags on ugly bucks. The ugly ones live forever. They have no reason to leave. We have given them everything they want. They have all the does, and they dominate the local action. And we are stuck with their ugly butts.
SCHOOL-YARD
BULLIES When I was a child, my friends and I had
to deal with several school-yard bullies when we went out for recess. For my
part, I simply stayed away from them at all costs. My head was on a swivel; I
was always trying to stay one step ahead of those thugs. We all avoided the
part of the playground where the bullies held court. Granted, they were little
bitty third-graders, but to an even smaller third-grader, they were thugs. They
owned the schoolyard because they were aggressive and mean, and most of us were
timid by comparison. I had no interest in confronting them to find out where that
conflict might end. I was already pretty sure it would end with me in the
nurse’s office with a bloody nose. Here is the question of the day: what do you
think would have happened if there had been five or six bullies on the
playground leaving very little room for the rest of us to play? Undoubtedly, I
would have pressed the teacher daily to let me help her clean the chalkboard erasers
rather than take a chance in the mean world outside. Hmm, could that equate to
the whitetail woods? Now, back to this matter of ugly mature bucks. These old
bucks have become dominant partly because of their age and attitude. When the
rut occurs, they hold sway over a piece of real estate and keep all other breeding-age
bucks away. They come swaggering out into a food plot each evening, ears pinned
back, daring all the other bucks to put up or shut up. They make way like the
parting of the Red Sea. Even nice young bucks with much better antlers get out
of Dodge when the sheriff shows up. No other buck wants to mess with these
bullies because they are mean and ornery — like that crusty old man behind the counter
at the coffee shop who always growls at you when you walk in. Other bucks seem
afraid to even move in their presence lest they attract too much attention. Younger
3- and 4-year-old bucks with better antlers move away from these areas during
the rut because they are tired of being bullied and pushed around. If they
weren’t leaving, I would see them. They are moving off the farm to places where
I can’t protect them. The most likely result of this cycle of not culling bucks
is an obvious shift toward a herd dominated by ugly bullies, which is what I am
seeing. As mentioned, I saw 19 bucks I figured were 4.5 years or older this
past season. Only two of them would have come close to 150 inches. I saw some
bigger young bucks, but no large old bucks.
THE
PROBLEM WITH HIGH-GRADING My neighbor calls it
“high-grading” — removing genetically superior deer before they reach maturity,
leaving only the ugly to survive, thrive and live a long life. High-grading is
at the heart of this ugly-bully problem for a couple of reasons. In managed
settings, most hunters are actually trophy hunters. They give lip service to
all the things they are supposed to say, but when it comes down to it, they do
not intend to finish the season with their buck tag still in their pocket. They
want a trophy for the wall. In most cases, they don’t consider how old the buck
is when they shoot it — just how much bone he has on his head. As a result,
they shoot the very best easy bucks in the herd. The easiest trophy is a
genetically superior buck when he is still young. I have seen 135- to 150-inch
2-year olds on our farm, and 165- to 185-inch 3-year olds. These are genetic freaks
— the Michael Jordans and Shaquille O’Neals of the deer woods. These are the
deer we should protect so they can reach full maturity and express their
potential, yet they are actually the bucks most “deer managers” devote their
energy toward trying to kill. And compared to 4-year-old and older bucks, they
are easy to kill. During the rut, these 2- and 3-year-old bucks cover a lot of
ground during daylight, making them extremely vulnerable. To someone looking
only for a good trophy rack, they are easy marks. In areas with intense trophy hunting
pressure, where even normally casual hunters are trying to shoot good bucks,
it's possible to almost exterminate the best young bucks each year. If you
aren’t guilty of this, it's likely your neighbors are, so if these great young
bucks are leaving your farm, they are likely getting whacked. Obviously,
keeping them on your farm is the answer. It comes back to those ugly bullies
again, but I'm getting ahead of myself. In unmanaged settings, hunters are
often satisfied with shooting anything, and they don’t make a point of cherry-picking
genetically superior bucks. If the overall pressure is modest, several bucks
from all age classes (with various levels of genetic potential) will live
another year. Hunters in these settings make no effort to distinguish between
which buck lives based on antler size — only opportunity. They shoot what steps
out. This is why a lot of great bucks seem to come from unmanaged areas in our
part of the state. In most managed areas, genetically superior bucks are shot
when they are 2 or 3, leaving the ugly bucks to live another year. It is not
surprising the mature herd in these areas then favors poor antlers. It's one
thing to understand what is happening but another to unravel and solve it. I
remember one time listening to Harry Jacobson say that managing deer is easy,
but managing people is the real challenge. No truer words have been spoken.
GENETIC
RAMIFICATIONS I’ve studied genetics in free-ranging
deer. Every biologist I talked to said it is impossible for someone to affect
the genetics of deer they hunt simply by killing a few cull bucks each year.
Yet it is not unthinkable that on a wider scale, removing all — or nearly all —
genetically superior bucks from the herd before they can pass on those genes to
more than a handful of does could have long-term effects on the future quality
of bucks. That is just a guess on my part, but it seems logical. Genetics can
change mysteriously as they skip generations. An ugly buck can produce
good-looking offspring. Jacobson had such a buck in his breeding program at
Mississippi State when he taught there as a professor. That buck didn’t score
more than 135 inches, yet he produced many exceptional offspring with much better
antlers. So it's not so simple to say that by high grading we are causing a
deterioration of our buck herd. However, there's no doubt it can’t be helping matters,
either.
THE
HUNTER'S VIEWPOINT Maybe the continued presence of
these ugly bullies isn’t directly causing a downward spiral in herd genetics, and
maybe it is. However, there's no disputing that they are space eaters. They are
taking up space on my farm that another buck would occupy, and it's likely that
other buck would have better antlers. So the obvious conclusion as a serious
deer manager is to make the appropriate change to my management plan. I need to
remove as many of these bucks as I can as quickly as I can. Hopefully, I'll see
them replaced by bucks with better genetics. As difficult as that might sound,
it's actually the easy part of the equation. The second step is to talk my neighbors
and their neighbors into passing up great young bucks. I would love to see more
of them deciding to shoot or pass based on age rather than antler size.
However, that would mean that some hunters accustomed to shooting a buck every
year would have to occasionally end the season without filling a tag. Though I
am friends with all of my neighbors, I suspect halfway through that mission I
will feel like a salmon trying to run up Niagara Falls.
HOW
TO REMOVE THE BULLIES You can wait for them to die of old
age, I guess, or you can tackle the problem head on. Ideally, you are early
into your management experiment and can head the problem off before your
property looks like mine. The answer is both simple and hard. You have to remove
ugly bullies. Unfortunately, most deer hunters are not yet good enough at aging
deer on the hoof that you can trust them to decide this for themselves. That is,
you can’t turn a group of your buddies loose on your property and expect them
to shoot your cull bucks while you save your tags for mature trophy deer. I
tried it, letting a friend hunt my farm for management deer a few years ago,
and he shot a 170-inch 9- pointer. When I asked him about the hunt, before I
saw the deer, he said he was sure the buck was at least 3.5 years old. That was
not the right answer. He was supposed to shoot only old bucks (4.5 or older) that
were never going to get bigger. I don’t need 170-inch deer killed. I can do
that myself. I need 130-inch deer killed. It is really difficult for someone to
pass up a great buck in the hopes of shooting something smaller but older if
you're not there to keep him honest. The mind plays funny tricks when the eyes
are fixed on a great buck. Buck fever can justify almost anything. You have two
solutions. You shoot the cull bucks instead of the mature trophies, or you sit
with your management-buck hunters to make sure they shoot the right deer.
CONCLUSION
You
need to remove ugly bullies. In fact, I took my own advice this past season and
shot two of them. They were mature— 5 or 6 years old. Neither was a true monster
by Iowa standards, but I was more than happy to shoot them and more than
satisfied with the season when it ended. However, there are still several more
I didn’t shoot. Some of them were much smaller, and next season, I'm going to
have to figure out what to do with them. The only answer I've come up with is
to invite my friends to get gun tags and sit with me in the tree. When a buck
comes along that I don’t want to shoot but needs to be removed, I will cut my
friends loose. They will know it's a management hunt, and everything should
work smoothly. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
