Here at Naval Air Station PAX River, MD...where I'm stationed, our local on-base DNR folks do weekly night time spotlight deer counts starting in July and going through early September. The purpose is to gain an understanding as to what they expect the total herd size to be on the base...and therefore what to set the "harvest objective" to be for the upcoming season. At this point they estimate our objective to be 140 deer harvested from the base this year. Last year the objective was 109 and we took 119.
I went on the count last night and we counted 58 deer between 8 and 11 p.m. This was actually a low count as most of the time we get into the 70's. Of the 58 total, 14 of them were bucks and we saw a few fawns still in spots. The rest were does....which is unusual for us as our buck/doe ratio is normally much closer to 1/1 or 1/1.5. At any rate...of the bucks that we did see several were 10 pointers with very impressive racks in both width and height. The very first one was free of his velvet while the others had either all or some of it left. It was an exciting night that really got me pumped up for the season opener on the 15th of September.
I could kick myself in the butt for not bringing my camera with me.
All the best,
Craig