Originally Posted by Clover7

3 members. Allowed 2 guests each. The area isn't over hunted, but they come in every weekend. Sometimes they have 2 guests, sometimes just 1.

***IMHO allowing a person to have 2 guests any time they are on the property is too many people. That would mean that at any given time if you're also there that there could be at least 10 people and that is getting to be more like hunting public land. If all of you are happy with that scenario, then so be it, but I would limit it to no more than one guest at a time if I was involved with managing the property.

I was thinking the same thing on the 20-30 mile area. Although, I do know of a record buck killed a few years ago that was seen on camera by every club within an 8 mile radius. It was killed about 4 miles from us, and we had him on our cameras as well. (just a side story).

***Bucks will travel like that, as I mentioned, but it is normally during the rut when they have one thing on their mind and that is breeding as many does as they can during that time of the year. If they have forage and cover, there is no need for them to cover large areas the rest of the year.

In Louisiana, in one of the best deer parishes in the state. Property was designed by ducks unlimited as a wild life habitat. We have small ponds, big ponds, thick timber, light timber, oak flats, small ridges, shallow bottoms, 24 acres of food plots... damn near everything a deer would want or need - although we're not the only club in the area that was designed this way.

***Sounds like a great piece of property.

As far as taking the does, that's what I was thinking. More on the conservative side of 6 or so, but I'm no expert and currently I cannot confirm the exact number of deer or does (as stated above) - just going by what they've told me. Does on our property are pretty large too, 150-170lb is not uncommon.

***IMHO 60+ deer is too many for 500 acres no matter how good it is and I think the doe to buck ratio needs to be brought down to more like a 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 than what it appears to be from what you mentioned.

We do have late rut here every year for some reason. Back in the 70's they imported deer from other areas hoping to change the rut cycle. It didn't help. They were rutting last year into late january, and that's pretty much every year.

***That is not uncommon in the southern states, as the rut is timed mainly by the photoperiod at the latitiude where the animal lives. In south Texas where I used to hunt we didn't get serious on big buck until about Christmas time and then for the next several weeks on into the new year. The rut is timed in an area so that when fawns are born they have the best chance at survival. Our rut in Mi is generally about the last few days of October on into the first couple weeks of November and it tapers off quickly. That means that most fawns are born in late May to the middle of June as the temperatures are favorable for them and the vegetation is greening up so the does have good forage to produce milk for the first couple months of the fawn's life.

As far as the spikes go, all 8 that I watched last year had to be born late, because they were very small. That's what had me wondering that if they stayed around, and produced their first real set of horns, we should have at the very least 8 basket racks roaming around the area. And they should show up on most of our cameras. I can accurately estimate we had around 15 of these type of deer on the property last year that were seen by hunters. I may be jumping the gun thinking they're gone since I only just put out my cameras last week - but if they don't show up, then I'd tend to believe a change in strategy could be in order.

EDIT: These spikes I'm referring to are basically button bucks. The only way to tell they were bucks was to put a scope on them. This is how young they were.

***Those would be fawns born that year if they just have buttons and not actually horns protruding from their pedicels. Once in a while a fawn that is born earlier than most in an area and has a very good first six months may break through and try to sprout, but you need to look closely to distinguish button bucks from does, especially during late doe hunts where anything without visible horns is legal to shoot.

I have 1 long horn spike on camera from a few days ago. From the side, they look to be about 8-10 inches long and straight (this is just a guess). Looking head on, the horns have grown straight up 3inches or so, and have a slight outward curve to them. Pretty sure this is the first set of horns, but I accidentally deleted the picture before really looking at the details to attempt to size its body. There were no other deer around in the pictures to compare it to.