Originally Posted by
chazspot
Sean_Paul, that is a very interesting take on the MoCo deer situation and I tend to agree with you. I never knew the history behind the repopulation of deer in the area. Wow! That explains the monsters roaming in MoCo. I have a buddy who lives up against Northwest branch and some of the bucks coming into his backyard over the years are no less the monarchs you see on cover of Field and Stream. No joke. It is also the typical MoCo area that isn't open to hunting, go figure.
Now, over the last few years in the gaithersburg area where I hunt, we rarely see any shooter bucks. I equate that to the overpopulation of does. There are just too many of them for the bucks to have to really roam to mate. I know they are holed up in remote areas along 270 and whatnot, and will not stray very far during the rut. Kind of sucks.
I"ve tried everything, scents, calls, you name it. I also used to hunt near the Rockville quarry before they built it all up with McMansions. The bucks there were HUGE!! I've never seen bigger bucks while hunting then when I hunted there. I miss that place something awful.
The sniper hunts aren't helping the hunters in central MD either. They took a lot last year the lack of deer sightings are proving it.
Across the street from me there is a small scale managed hunt that is done each year. The head of it all told me that you can have 100 does, and 1 buck, and that buck probably will attempt to mate with those 100 does. This is the reason does are targeted so heavily in managed hunts. Where I am, because of this small scale managed hunt, I see a lot more bucks than I used to, because the gender ratio is more even than it once was.