My proposal for SC deer seasons

[CWPINST]

I know what my fawn recruitment rate has been and this is in an area that I promise you has more yotes per unit area than SRS. There is a helluva lot more that goes into it than coyotes.

Management at SRS is via indiscriminate killing. You can't manage for recruitment via indiscriminate killing. Management for recruitment is done via selective harvest. Older does are your breadbasket. Their success rates are double that of young does. There's a lot more factors that go into that, but I'm not typing all that on this fone.

SRS is wasting time and effort doing studies that are irrelevant. You wanna do something viable then split the site into 4 sections and perform selective harvest in one area, indiscriminate killing in another, manage the habitat for recruitment in the third and leave the 4th undisturbed then tell me what your recruitment rates are.

Fingers are cold...I'm done for now.

Good points, that is why part of our research was conducted on private clubs.... to see if there could be a difference imposed by varying management practices. Some of these clubs are intensely managed for herd health by very selective harvest, some to a lesser degree. In the end, the results were pretty much the same, not identical, but close. I think that the best recruitment rate was somewhere around .4 or a little better, IIRC. That is one part of the research that I have not been very close to.

[Newhopeboys]

Look dog hunting is a pass time and shouldn't go anywhere. But all these Yankees coming down south running from the cold and trying to change our ways can take their a** back to where they come from.

[Tater]

Good points, that is why part of our research was conducted on private clubs.... to see if there could be a difference imposed by varying management practices. Some of these clubs are intensely managed for herd health by very selective harvest, some to a lesser degree. In the end, the results were pretty much the same, not identical, but close. I think that the best recruitment rate was somewhere around .4 or a little better, IIRC. That is one part of the research that I have not been very close to.

Most people's selective harvest is concerned with bucks by age class, number of pts or the ever ignorant "spread" and their only concern with does is a number to kill. Age, while the most difficult to judge, is the best selection criteria for both bucks and does. A 5 1/2 y/o 6 pt, to me, is a better trophy than a 2 1/2 y/o 16" 10 pt.

The age classes of the does you kill should be directly proportional to your recruitment rate. If it's it's low and you want it come up then shoot young does. If it's high and you want it to come down (because the habitat tells you it needs to come down) shoot older does.

There really is only a short period of time where coyote predation on fawns is a major factor and that is the period of time immediately following birth. Every day a fawn lives it's chance of survival increases. Managing the habitat for recruitment also cuts down on fawn predation due to one of the by-products being an increased rodent population. Coyotes aren't wasters of energy, they're going to take what's easy. Provide them with the rodents and they'll naturally shy away from the tougher meal that is a fawn past a few days age.

[Swamp Rat]

I first started getting real concerned when I saw that DNR's biologists were saying that our deer herd is 30% down over the high it reached several years ago. I have heard two that the overall population decrease is due to two separate but important factors:

1. Reduction in timbering due to the decrease in the housing market. This has resulted in a gradual decrease in the type of habitat that has historically caused upswings in the deer population, the creation of new browse and bedding areas that made deer carrying capacity and sheltering locations increase.
2. Coyotes - no doubt they are a huge impact. I think there is a lot of viability in the SRS study, and personally am willing to alter my harvest to accomodate.

I hate being legislated in what I do when there is no need... people should be allowed to police themselves. The problem is that many of us are not willing to do the self-regulating that may be required. Shoot, I made two serious mistakes in my harvesting this year myself.

My thoughts....

1. Encourage trapping of coyotes by properly licensed trappers.
2. Make the transportation of a LIVE coyote illegal.
3. Reduce (temporarily if applicable or justifiable) DOE harvest to 2 per year per hunter.
4. Reduce doe harvest for out of state hunters to 1 per year. At least for a while. Never more than two.
5. Keep buck limits the way they look like they are going to be already for in-state, 2 per year for out of state.
6. All deer must be tagged, and reported via a dial-in system to DNR or by a means of a check station. Make all processors check stations. Easy enough.

I think the times of unregulated, kill-as-many-as-you-want deer hunting are drawing to a close. Not due to what SC deer hunters have done, but by a weird combination of the increase of a non-native predator and the housing market. We have no control over the latter, likely little control over the former, but we have the option of changing what we do to save the resource.

Painful to some, even to me (one of my brothers is a frequent hunting companion and is an out of state hunter from Savannah, GA)... but it is what it is.

[Tater]

If you seriously want to put a hurting on coyote populations then by all means continue to kill every one you can (as I do and will continue to do). However, targeting them specifically during their whelping season is the single most effective strategy. Don't burn yourself out trying to kill them year round. Take the targets of opportunity that present themselves outside of the whelping season, but go after them hard during the whelping season.

If you think it's cruel to kill the bitch with a den of pups then you are not truly serious about solving this problem and need to find something else to concentrate your efforts on. They hunt damn near continuously during this time and you'll not find a better time to call them in and kill them.

[Capt. Tom]

If you seriously want to put a hurting on coyote populations then by all means continue to kill every one you can (as I do and will continue to do). However, targeting them specifically during their whelping season is the single most effective strategy. Don't burn yourself out trying to kill them year round. Take the targets of opportunity that present themselves outside of the whelping season, but go after them hard during the whelping season.

If you think it's cruel to kill the bitch with a den of pups then you are not truly serious about solving this problem and need to find something else to concentrate your efforts on. They hunt damn near continuously during this time and you'll not find a better time to call them in and kill them.

This guy right here is not as dumb as he looks. Very valid points made in this whole thread.

[TJR]

You should move to Ohio.

This

[TJR]

When does whelping season generally ocurr? Spring?

[Tater]

Yes, spring.

[TJR]

Hold long does it last and when does it come in?

[Tater]

Late April-early May from what I've seen and much like regular ol' dogs the pups will start traveling with the adults around 8 weeks. The males will be around to help with the pups as well.

[CWPINST]

There really is only a short period of time where coyote predation on fawns is a major factor and that is the period of time immediately following birth. Every day a fawn lives it's chance of survival increases. Managing the habitat for recruitment also cuts down on fawn predation due to one of the by-products being an increased rodent population. Coyotes aren't wasters of energy, they're going to take what's easy. Provide them with the rodents and they'll naturally shy away from the tougher meal that is a fawn past a few days age.

Yep the first several weeks are critical. This year is the first year that we lost one to yotes that was older than 9 weeks. It was 10 weeks old. That is in several years of research and 178 fawns collared (not an easy job).