You Can’t Manage Deer By the Mouthful

The key to buck management in a QDM program is setting reasonable harvest criteria based on age – and then having the patience and fortitude to restrain yourself from taking younger bucks. Many hunters who don’t have the patience or fortitude look for loopholes that will allow them to take any buck they want and still believe they are doing QDM. If their favorite loophole is discredited, they tend to look for another.

Whenever I discredit the “G-word” loophole, for example, I often hear responses like this:

“Okay, so I can’t manage [the G-word]. But if I see a buck that isn’t going to amount to anything, removing him will free up nutritional resources for better bucks.”

If this is true where you hunt, then you are hunting one crappy piece of dirt.

I believe you would have to be talking about a catastrophic situation, both in terms of high deer density and extremely low habitat quality, for the removal of one buck to increase nutrition for another buck – even when measured on the scale of a buck’s lifetime. This is one of those falsehoods that comes from taking truths about population management and applying them to individual deer.

Increasing nutrition happens at the population level. You increase nutrition for individuals not by managing individual mouthfuls but by managing food supply for the entire population. To do this, you increase habitat quality and reduce deer density until density is at or below the balance point. In a QDM program, you reduce deer density by harvesting does, not by killing bucks (which is why whitetail density went on skyrocketing through all the years of traditional buck-only hunting).

Increasing nutrition doesn’t just mean plant an acre of food plots. It doesn’t just mean build a feed trough. It should involve field and forest management techniques to increase the quantity and quality of spring and summer forage and winter browse. When you increase nutrition on this scale, and when deer density is balanced with these resources, you get measurable gains in body weights, fawn survival, deer health, and antler size. Yes, one deer consumes a lot of forage over time, but killing bucks is the least effective way to manage supply and demand in this system.

I bowhunt a couple of suburban tracts where deer density is high and habitat quality is not optimal. Yet, even here, you can find plenty of deer food. It’s not the highest-quality deer food in the world, but it’s deer food. It’s blackberry leaves, honeysuckle, greenbriar, pokeweed, American beautyberry, and other forbs; it’s sprouts and saplings of oaks, maples, poplars and other trees; and there’s a long list of even lower-quality plants available that deer will eat. Yes, deer body weights would improve and average antler size would climb if deer density was reduced and habitat quality was increased on a broad scale, offering more of these plants and others of higher quality – but it’s not like deer are fighting over mouthfuls of food. It’s not like killing one buck would put its actual future mouthfuls of food in the mouth of another buck. There’s enough food to go around and keep rumens full – it’s just not top-quality food. Every deer is limited by this ceiling, and the ceiling must be raised for the entire population. Removing a buck doesn’t even begin to bump the needle.

The loophole-seeker may respond that cover is also an important resource, and removing a buck frees up quality cover. Again: If there is so little cover available that bucks are waiting in line to bed down, you have a problem that goes far beyond a dispute between two individual deer. All local deer need more cover.

If you are concerned there isn’t enough top-quality nutrition or cover to go around among local deer, go to work on your habitat. And if deer density exceeds the nutritional balance point, take a doe.

Plug the Loopholes

If you find yourself looking for ways to justify the taking of a buck when you aren’t sure it meets your QDM criteria, or you know it doesn’t, then consider two possibilities:

1) You may have set your starting harvest criteria too high. If you start out gunning for 5 1/2-year-old bucks, and the oldest buck around is 2 1/2, it’s no wonder you are frustrated and running out of patience.

2) Maybe you aren’t ready for, or really interested in, QDM. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But if you want to give QDM an honest effort, there is only one, valid, easy-to-remember reason to harvest bucks: Because they have reached the target age that is the goal of the individual hunter or group of hunters — and 2 1/2 years is a legitimate and appropriate goal when you are starting out. If the buck’s age meets your goal, and its size makes you a happy hunter, take it.  Once you see and are able to choose among multiple bucks in your target age group, slide the scale. Protect the next older class.

This is an exciting moment in a QDM program, because it represents progress and achievement. It’s a moment that will arrive much more slowly if bucks are leaking through loopholes.

© Copyright 2011, Lindsay Thomas Jr. and QDM Works

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