Fellas I am not sure about you but I am beginning to believe we need to rethink this doe harvest issue especially after looking at some of the data on the DNR site. We may have bought into a program or mindset that is about to become problematic.
I just spent some time on the DNR site trying to find some real numbers and can't. From a population graph it appears that the population goal is about 275,000 total deer and it is very confusing as to how many deer they say we currently have but I think it is somewhere arround 300,000 deer. Then the numbers get even more confusing and disheartening. In 2005 it looks like there were 326,639 hunters who purchased 391,864 licenses and killed 211, 451 deer. According to their information in 1986 there were about 130,000 deer with 62,702 harvested by 141,030 hunters or licensed, I am not sure which, but it amounted to about a 45% sucess ratio. the numbers for 2005 works out to about a 54% sucess ratio. Now comes the problem as I see it. If we take our aproxmate current numbers of hunters and call it 326,639 and turn them loose on the current estimated deer population of 275,000 and given a sucess ratio of 50% that is a kill of 137,500 deer and with the current doe harvest ratio of 60% that means that we kill 82,500 does leaving only 55,000 does in the entire remaining population with 82,500 bucks surviving. My question is how many years of that can we stand? The other big problem that I see is that we now have over 300,000 hunters chasing less than 300,000 deer. So this question is who wants to sit out a year or go back to a lottery system for any kind of license because based on these kind of numbers there just aren't enough to go arround. We have 3 times the number of hunters than in 1986 but we only have about twice the number of deer. Now granted I may have misunderstood the information on the site but that was about as good as I could get and if anyone else can interperate the data better please correct me. I would love to see some easy to understand numbers.
I also looked at the number of anterless licenses available for Davis County, my home, and found it was 3300 not counting the any sex tags that are used there. There were still over 1200 of them left. To date there have been 979 anterless deer reported so of the 2000 anterless tags sold almost 50% are accounted for. There have also been 997 bucks reported so currently the harvest is almost 1 to 1. Right now Davis County has accounted for about 2000 of the 107,824 deer reported. The numbers are just about the same for Van Buren County except some what larger. I just don't see all of this as very encouraging for the future, especially considering that every doe killed this year removes at least 3 deer from next years potential harvest. This is just the way my limited mind works so please help me if you can.
