Resident Doe?

From "Resident Does" on the D&DH Forum


DoeEyed
Super Member
From: Door County, WI.


How many does do you think would reside on 57 acres? Our land is a mix of open field, cedar swamp and thick bedding area on the west; open field in the middle behind our house and white pine/white spruce and nine bark plantings on the edge of a swamp on the east. Last year I regularly saw 1 doe with her fawns on the east side of our property. On the west side I would see another doe with fawns come out of the bedding area into the field.

_____________________________

Holly

Go and look on QDMA.org and find their density map and figure out what the overall density of deer is for your area. That'll give you a number of deer per square mile. Let's just assume 25 deer/sq mi for grins.

There are 640 acres to the square mile. 57 acres/640 X 25 = 2.23. That means there are roughly 2-3 deer resident on your property. Of them half are probably doe. The remainder are bucks and half of them are under 1.5 years of age.

That's just a rough guesstimate. If your 57 acres is a Walmart parking lot, there will be less. If you've got a food plot, and some great bedding areas and you largely leave it alone and don't ride ATV's through it, you might have. . .

. . . well look at it this way, I figure I've got about 40 deer/sq mi on my 200 acres. However, I have one food plot that regularly has a herd of 6 deer feeding on less than a quarter acre of clover. I got to figgering one day and I realized I was looking at a deer density of over 15,000/sq mi. on that food plot.

. . . but these figures are all a pile of hooey. Resident doe? Let's assume you have a good place for deer. You have probably 1 herd of 3-6 doe that regularly visit your property on a regular basis. They're not there all the time, but they drop by several times a week. They're there more often than not when there is something good to eat, and less if there isn't. Depending on terrain, amount of food and cover, and how the deer draw up their territories, you may have 2 such groups.

In comparison, I have 200 acres, everything in the world going for me, and I figure I have less than 15 deer on the property on a regular basis, that's 3-5 doe groups in any given year and they roam on and off the property at will. In the space of a weekend during season, I am nearly 100% sure of seeing at least one crew. I know where they like to go. I go to 4 different stands over a weekend (Saturday/Sunday -- Morning/Afternoon). In your case, you've got a quarter of the acreage. Assuming you had the same deer density I have, and the same luck i do, you will be nearly 100% certain of connecting with one doe group every (4X4=) 16 half-day outings. On the other hand, I can tell you that I'm about 80% sure of seeing a herd of doe come by one of my stands on Saturday (just 2 sittings) . Given that success you would be 80% sure of seeing a doe group in 8 half-day outings or about 50-50 luck in 5 outings. Somebody check my math, but I think that's right.

_____________________________




DoeEyed
Super Member
From: Door County, WI.
.
Status: offline Based on what I've seen in the past and shaman's post I would say that I have 2 doe groups that frequent the property on a regular basis and probably one buck. And of course deer that spend most of their time on the neighboring properties that pass thru.

_____________________________

Holly

I was thinking about this conversation as I was waking up this morning, and all those numbers I was throwing out were rolling around in my head. I was running over the last part of my guesstimating and trying to decide if I believe it. Pardon me if I ramble a bit.

Question: If I have 100% success in seeing deer over the weekend will someone with a quarter of the acreage actually have to wait 4 times as long to have the same success?

After considerable mulling, I came back to a weak YES. It has to do with how I qualified the answer. I assumed there was the same deer density and the same amount of hunting luck. I've got a few dozen hunting venues to chose from on that 200 acres. Some are just theoretical spots that would make sense to hunt if I had a mind to. Some are trees where I've put a stand in the past. Only a third are permanent stands or blinds that I am hunting actively. I scout. I make choices. The deer make choices as well, and in the case of this exercise, the choices are sort of boiled down to where they end up in the first and last couple of hours of sunlight during the day.

By limiting the acreage available to the hunter and not limiting the acreage available to the deer, you put a severe handicap on the hunter. So yes, the success of the hunter is going to be attenuated on a smaller plot. Unless. . .

There are a lot of things that can affect the outcome.

1) Higher deer density. You can increase the local deer density by increasing the amount of food and cover available. This is the approach offered by QDM.
2) Better luck. You can call it skill, luck, woodsmanship, whatever. The point is that I stumble through the hunting season making choices and leaving scent as I go. If you can get it done better than I do, you may see more deer. I am of the school of thought that we make our own luck to a large extent.
3) More time in the field. I'm basing this on hunting Saturday and Sunday, morning and afternoon. The more you get out, the better your chances of being successful.
4) Better choices of venue. That article in D&DH on stand burn-out talks about part of it. My feeling is that a hunter has to balance spreading out his individual stand use with getting to know his stands in depth. Over time you get to see the bigger picture of deer movement on your property.

Sorry if I've spun off into the Twilight Zone here. However, this is a theme I have been stuck on all Summer, starting with the Playing with Numbers thread. I am slowly working my way to 30 years in the field. I'm trying to figure out what part of my success is quantifiable, and I think part of it is time in the field and the size of the plot I hunted. Granted, I was as green as green could be back when I started, but I look at the big picture it comes down to pretty much the same overall success rate per hours hunted when you include the limiting factors of where I could hunt and the overall deer density.

Let me see if I can bring this back into a sensible orbit. From the beginning, it did not take very long for me to figure out where the deer were-- you see scat, you see tracks, you see deer. I always had a limit on how much I could hunt, or where I could hunt. I was always an 8-5 working stiff. If I was stuck with two half-days per week, or just 1 (while the kids were babies) it spread my number of successful trips out so that it was very hard to be successful in the space of a season. If I was on the same 40 acre plot all Fall, I was not able to make as many choices as having 2 or 3 places to hunt. Then add in the overall deer density. When I started, seeing a deer was still a novelty. Yesterday I had 4 in my front yard when I went to take in the garbage cans.

The bottom line in all this is probably some big equation of deer hunting success based on deer density and acreage modified by time in the field and some very binary sort of factor for overall deer hunting savvy. The latter would include how often you bathe, how little you watch outdoor television, and being able to correctly identify the business end of a rifle or an arrow.