Daver, I understood your post and I didn't mean to infer that you had shot that many deer or even that your friends had done anything illegal or even terribly bad, except to have bought into the DNR mantra of kill more does. I certainly do not have the answer to your question about how many deer is the right number, but you are certainly correct, it is very complicated. I do however believe that the opinions of the deer hunters, who are the main financial supporters of the IDNR, are being pushed aside for the wants of different special interest groups such as Farm Bureau and the auto insurance industry, neither of which contribute to the IDNR to help maintain our outdoor heritage.
It is interesting that you spoke of the neighbor who had hit 8 deer over the years. If you questioned him I would bet that he did not hit any of those deer next to his or your farm, so how would killing more does on his farm help, but more likely near a metro area or on a highway where he wasn't looking for or expecting to see deer. On the IDNR site it shows that in 1994 there were 10,438 deer hit by cars and 663 accidents per billion miles driven. In 2008 that number went to 10,961 deer hit but only 602 per billion miles driven. The 2008 numbers are lower than they have been for 14 years but I haven't seen my insurance rates go down to the levels of 1994. I wonder why that is? Does this mean that we have found the magic number of deer , because the IDNR wants levels down to about the same as the mid 1990's, or does the insurance numbers really have nothing to do with the deer population? I personally have lived on this farm since 1994 and drive to work in Fairfield 5 and sometimes six days a week, a 65 mile round trip, at dawn and dusk spring and fall and winter and I will admit that I have hit 1 deer during those 300,000 miles. That doesn't account for all the other pleasure driving and what my wife drives, and I would bet that most people are in the same boat, especially those who live in rural areas. How many deer have you ever seen hit by cars on gravel roads out in the county?
I just looked up some more numbers, I like numbers because they don't have anything to do with opinions. Iowa has 56,276 square miles and if we reach the stated goal of even 175,000 deer that only represents 3.1 deer per square mile. Now I understand that some of that area is taken up by cities and lakes and other thing that don't make good habitat for deer, even thought the urban deer population is still growing. Now if we harvest just 2 deer per square mile that only means a harvest of 112,552 deer, but it also means that the white tail deer is now on the endangered species list with only 62,448 deer or 1.1 per square mile left in the State. We have to start thinking in whole numbers and not about a small area where we see 30 or 40 deer in a field. We can't have our deer herd "managed" on the basis of some of the very limited higher population areas. If we have 400,000 hunters trying to harvest even 1 deer apiece and the total harvest is around 140,000 deer then there are too few deer. It has always seemed so silly and counter productive to continue to make more antler less tags available in the southern counties when they haven't even came close to selling out for years and the harvest keeps dropping. As of today there are still 1518 doe tags available out of the 3600 originally available in Davis county and the surrounding counties are much the same.
In 1994 we harvested 87,231 deer and they ate corn and beans then and in 2000 we harvested 126,535 and deer ate corn then and in 2008 we harvested 142,194 and deer ate corn then also. My point is that deer have always eaten corn and other crops but it wasn't until after 2000 that it became enough of a problem to create all the extra seasons, and extra doe tags, and all the other changes we have seen. But now that the harvest has dropped to nearly the 2000 level we should be cutting back on all those extra population control measures or soon we won't have a population that even half of our current hunter numbers can hunt successfully.
One last point, as of today the
total harvest number is only 115,823 deer for almost 400,000 licenses issued. What does that mean to you?
