RE: Earn A Buck?
"Overpopulation of deer" is at it's heart a subjective statement. Again, in the unit I hunt, the overall population is virtually unchanged from several years ago. It is the OVERWINTER TARGET for population that has been reduced, so therefore the unit is now considered "overpopulated".
SCHL44 made a great point in that depending on where you are in a particular unit, you could have plenty of deer or very few. I do know this: crop damage claims have declined over the past 7 years, so how the DNR now considers the unit overpopulated is rather curious. Is it more car-deer collisions? Seems like that is the result of more cars, not more deer. I think at the heart of the problem is the SAK model they use for calculating deer population. Too many flaws, too many subjective variables added.
Having said that, I tagged two does last year...the only deer I had the opportunity to shoot due to limited time. This year we plan on harvesting more does, since in our little area, the antlerless population is a little ahead of where we want it to be. But EAB will do one thing: dissuade a large number of the non-hardcore hunters who otherwise might venture into the woods to at least shoot A deer. So unless the rest of us are gonna shoot three or four, I don't see how EAB will cut the population in an area that already has an antlerless harvest of over 65% of the total.