Doe harvest in Unit B

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caretaker
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Doe harvest in Unit B

Post by caretaker »

Having hunted Unit B most of my life I have seen us move from if you see a deer don`t tell a dayum soul. Not even yer ol huntin dawg. As time went along we were blessed with being able to take a buck then two or three. The doe were still off limits. As more time went along we were allowed to take a doe with a bow or even a smoke pole. Now we are allowed to take a doe or two in certain counties on certain days( if we ain`t pissed the two buck crowd off )with a rifle.

BSK and Diehard what do you think the future of harvesting doe in Unit B will be. Are we maxed out? Can unit B support more doe? Will the deer population keep expanding east. More Unit A counties becoming Unit L and Unit B becoming Unit A? I know disease and starvation are issues as well as habitat (human population). I also have noticed that deer can live in numbers in suburbs. In am waiting for them to do like the crows and coons and start making visits to B.K. or Micky D`s.
I`m just here for the girl`s wet teeshirt and mud wrestling contest.

M.T. Pockets
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Diehard
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Re: Doe harvest in Unit B

Post by Diehard »

There are pockets in Unit B that hold large numbers of deer. Unfortunately, they are isolated pockets. The eastern portion of Unit B has vast areas of timber, great for bears, not so great for deer. Unit B lacks significant agriculture that is beneficial to deer. We have extremely poor habitat over much of Unit B. We have agriculture, but it is not the type that benefits wildlife. Fescue cow pasture and tobacco fields just don't support many deer. When you look at the private land in Unit B, the tracts are much smaller than in the other parts of the state. Unit B has significant hunting pressure. It is rare to find a landowner here that doesn't hunt or have family that hunts. Pressure is everywhere during season, and in many places that pressure is year around. The human population in Unit B is much more spread out than in the other units. Many areas of unit A and Unit L are very sparsely populated. The same can't be said for most of Unit B.

If you add up all those factors, I am afraid Unit B counties will never make it to the population levels we see in Unit L or even in Unit A.

You can see this reflected in some of the reg changes this year. For example, North Cumberland is much more restrictive than it has been in years past.

When the deer project began, it was thought that the eastern part of the state was the best place to bring the population back (after all, that is the only place we had deer at the time). They soon found out that the land use practices in Middle and West Tennessee favored deer over the land use in the east.
Suck it up.....buttercup!
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caretaker
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Re: Doe harvest in Unit B

Post by caretaker »

That is about what I figured. We are basically maxed out.
I`m just here for the girl`s wet teeshirt and mud wrestling contest.

M.T. Pockets
BSK
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Re: Doe harvest in Unit B

Post by BSK »

As Diehard said, there are currently pockets of good deer density in Unit B, but they are almost always linked to pockets of good habitat. Habitat quality is always going to be the limiting factor. Many full-canopy forest areas in TN produce less than 50 pounds of deer forage per acre per year. It takes 2,000 pounds of forage per year to feed a single adult deer. At 50 pounds per acre, it takes 40 acres just to feed one deer for a year, or in other words, a square mile can feed just 16 deer. I've measured forage production in forested parts of TN that produce less than 10 pounds of forage per acre. That means a square mile can only support about 3 deer! No matter what the regulations are, an area with a carrying capacity of 3 deer per square mile is never going to hold deer at the level hunters would find desirable or even acceptable.
"Know where you stand and stand there" Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into" Jonathan Swift
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