Can you manage your property? (High Fence or Large Acreage)

If your property is under high fence then more than likely you are practicing some serious deer management. The monitoring of your deer herd is extremely important to you because you don’t want your deer herd to get out of hand. An over population of deer in a high fence environment can be disastrous. Instead of using hunter sightings as I described in my article for unfenced properties you are probably doing actual deer counts. You have the advantage of not having deer come and go off of your property. You may be doing deer counts by using trail camera surveys, observation cards, spotlighting (where legal) or some other way. If you prefer, instead of tracking hunter sightings you can actually enter your deer counts from your surveys. You can set up a hunter name for camera counts, observation cards, spotlights etc. just to key in your total deer counts. By doing this you will see your doe to buck ratio calculated as well as your fawn recruitment rate. It is also nice to see year by year what your doe to buck ratio has been and what the fawn recruitment rate has been. Just as I described for the unfenced properties you should enter all of your deer harvested information as well. This is valuable information when you are analyzing your deer herd from year to year. In the Advanced Version of the software I also allow you to key in your number of individual Bucks that you have determined as a result of you analyzing your trail camera pictures. All of this information is valuable later when you go to calculate your estimated deer population. Also, you can enter certain antler measurements which allow you to run statistical reports analyzing the antler measurements by age. I don’t ask for all measurements for B&C scoring, I am only interested in measurements that could be used for antler restrictions. These are for each side; # points, main beam length, beam circumference, inside and outside spread and B&C Gross. This could be important for you if you have hunters that are not able to age a deer on the hoof. You may find an antler restriction that may protect most 1 ½ and 2 ½ year old Bucks which you may want to utilize to protect your young Bucks. In the Advanced Version of the software I also have a formula that allows you to calculate your estimated deer population as well as your estimated harvest requirements needed in order to reach your desired deer population and doe to buck ratio. I know this sounds pretty complicated but it will make sense when you read the next articles covering Deer Management. I know there are some people trying to track a lot of this information in spread sheets but that just doesn’t have the flexibility of storing the data in a data base. But if you like doing some of your own spreadsheets we tweaked our software to allow you to export your information that you have entered into your deermanage.com account to a spreadsheet on your own computer. This means that if you enter your harvests and sightings into our software you will be able to export it to a spreadsheet for your own special analysis.

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