ORIGINAL: Sport 2
Rob,
Predation and other natural causes typically take about 50% of the yearly offspring.
The numbers I ran were for 2 years. In my original statement, I recomended A 2 year hold on doe season. And then the having doe season start again (but having it not run the full 2 weeks of regular season, I would suggest a 3 day season (possibly the last three days of rifle). My suggestion for the 2 year hold was to rebound the deer population only. After that I agree that it would need to be managed by harvesting doe.
But I realize that it will never happen. So I also made a suggestion of greatly reducing th number of tags and reducing the season lenght. This could also work to help restore the deer numbers.
Half of the yearly offspring? Wow. Any numbers supporting this? Is hunting lumped into this, under predation? Just trying to get a better understanding of that statement...
I've really never looked at it that way. We tend to examine the hunter harvest, nuisance permit (both DDP and DMAP) harvest, estimated deer-car collisions, and estimated deaths due to winter and other natural predation, as awhole, but not focused down to the age class level.