Art Eatman
Moderator In Memoriam
This is sort of an offshoot from the High Fence thread, and is mostly about Central Texas.
I moved back to Austin in 1963. Drouth year; 1/2 the usual rainfall. In March of 1964, a TP&WD article in the newspaper said that the hunter kill in Llano, Mason and Brady Counties, just NW of Austin, was some 15,000 deer. The winter kill was some 17,.000.
Johnson's Trading Post, on Hwy 71 north of Oak Hill, had a big cold room for deer storage. The '63 season average field-dressed weight for bucks was some 120 pounds, with the largest at 146. Their final season of storage before selling out was in 1976. The average weight of field-dressed bucks was around 70 pounds, with the largest at 110.
Why? Too many deer for the habitat. Ranches were being broken up into ranchettes, and many non-hunters were buying in. Residential development reduced the available habitat, crowding the deer onto other lands.
I moved back onto the old family ranch in 1967. Out spotlighting one night, I counted some 50 pairs of eyes. Way too many for 230 acres plus a bit of adjoining open land. What deer I saw in hunting were small. So, I did a culling campaign (about which I did not inform TP&WD, as this was before they allowed such actions.) for about three years. I can tell you that gutting a deer in August in central Texas is not truly joyous. But I shot does and mature spikes and scraggle-horn bucks. Did bunches of barbecue parties.
By the fourth year, 1971/1972, body weights were up some 30% and more. Decent antlers. No mature spikes or scraggle horns. I'd gotten the herd down toward the carrying capacity of the land--just as my grandfather had taught me to do with cattle, some thirty years before.
We're low in wolves, bears, cougars and screw worm flies. If we don't manage the deer herd, we wind up with populations too large for the carrying capacity of the land--and runty little greyhound-sized deer. The worst enemy of a healthy deer herd is the anti-hunter. "Ignorance and emotion are the true enemies of a healthy species."
I moved back to Austin in 1963. Drouth year; 1/2 the usual rainfall. In March of 1964, a TP&WD article in the newspaper said that the hunter kill in Llano, Mason and Brady Counties, just NW of Austin, was some 15,000 deer. The winter kill was some 17,.000.
Johnson's Trading Post, on Hwy 71 north of Oak Hill, had a big cold room for deer storage. The '63 season average field-dressed weight for bucks was some 120 pounds, with the largest at 146. Their final season of storage before selling out was in 1976. The average weight of field-dressed bucks was around 70 pounds, with the largest at 110.
Why? Too many deer for the habitat. Ranches were being broken up into ranchettes, and many non-hunters were buying in. Residential development reduced the available habitat, crowding the deer onto other lands.
I moved back onto the old family ranch in 1967. Out spotlighting one night, I counted some 50 pairs of eyes. Way too many for 230 acres plus a bit of adjoining open land. What deer I saw in hunting were small. So, I did a culling campaign (about which I did not inform TP&WD, as this was before they allowed such actions.) for about three years. I can tell you that gutting a deer in August in central Texas is not truly joyous. But I shot does and mature spikes and scraggle-horn bucks. Did bunches of barbecue parties.
By the fourth year, 1971/1972, body weights were up some 30% and more. Decent antlers. No mature spikes or scraggle horns. I'd gotten the herd down toward the carrying capacity of the land--just as my grandfather had taught me to do with cattle, some thirty years before.
We're low in wolves, bears, cougars and screw worm flies. If we don't manage the deer herd, we wind up with populations too large for the carrying capacity of the land--and runty little greyhound-sized deer. The worst enemy of a healthy deer herd is the anti-hunter. "Ignorance and emotion are the true enemies of a healthy species."
