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Show Deer hunting compared 3itp 20 years ago,, M( z: By John C. Dickerson , Now that another deer hunting season is past this would be a good time to take a look in retospect. Looking back it would be my judgment that all in all, we had a good year especially if you look at it from the standpoint of outdoor recreation rather than from a total harvest viewpoint. I believe more and more people are beginning to realize that hunting today and hunting 20 years ago are just not the same. In the "good old days" we were harvesting in the neighborhood neigh-borhood of 100,000 deer and this continued for a six to eight year period. At that time we were hunting either sex and a good portion of the harvest was does. We also had fewer hunters about 140,000, which meant we were getting 70 percent hunter success. All these factors together gave us a distorted view of how good our hunting actually was. Most everyone was happy there was very little complaining people were seeing many deer. Nowadays, we have 190,000 hunters, smaller deer ' herds throughout the state in general, we hunt bucks and we have a shrinking habitat base. We still harvest a relatively similar number of bucks in many deer herd units but the doe harvest is completely eliminated and the bucks are distributed among 35 percent more hunters which boils down to a' much lower hunter success. One of the most frequent comments we hear is "where are the bucks? I've seen lot of does and fawns but no bucks ! You guys should close the season down for a few years and let the bucks build up." Most people that say this are concerned that there are not enough bucks around to breed the does, but this isn't the case and our field data supports sup-ports that contention. We conduct doe-fawn doe-fawn ratio counts every summer before the hunts and then again after the hunts, and our figures do not indicate in-dicate that we have a low fawn crop. The statewide average is about 75-80 fawns per 100 does. In our area (Strawberry Reservoir east and Wyoming on the north and Grand County on the south) we average around 75 fawns per 100 does down a bit but not to the extent that we would suspect a lack of breeding bucks. As a matter of fact, it has never been shown anywhere in the United States that a deer population has declined because of a lack of bucks. Unlike whitetail deer, mule deer fawns will not breed the first year, and normally they will have a single fawn at their first birthing. After that, a doe on good range will produce twin fawns, and of these fawns just slightly over 50 percent will be males. So theoretically if we have a good doe base, we should have a good supply of fawns which means a good supply of spike and forked-horn bucks each year. The majority of our harvest is these your Vi year-old deer with a few 2V4 year- old deer taken and very, very few big mature animals harvested. The Book Cliffs deer herd is and has been a mystery to us. We used to have lots of deer there but the herd kept going down and we went to buck only hunting 10 years ago. The "book" says that this type of management will bring your deer herd back in just a few years, but this hasn't been the case. We did see a little increase after five or six years, but then that bad winter of 1978-79 really set us back. The Currant Creek deer herd went exactly the other way. We went to buck only hunting there and after three seasons the herd had increased in-creased to the point that we issued doe permits for one year and then winter kill reduced the numbers. So what is wrong with the Book Cliffs deer herd? That's the $64 question. A few things that have been suggested are coyotes, too many roads, poor ranges, poaching, overhunting, etc. all of these probably have some but no one reason is the sole caii probably a combination of these; - - - A |