ORIGINAL: germain
If you guys have 100 acres with surrounding land open to the slaughter and you still have a decent amount of deer you must also have plenty of cover.It's still hard to keep a decent herd under those conditions if the land around you is indeed open to hunting.Deer have a home range bigger then 100 acres.
ORIGINAL: ddear
If you only have 100 acres you have little if any control of the herd in that area.
ORIGINAL: muzzyman88
I agree that 100 acres is definitly not enough to control a deer heard in your area.
I definately understand that 100 acres is not enough to effectively manage all of the buck population that crosses our land from time to time. What we have done however seems to be working, although not to the degree that it would if we had 1000 acres managed this way. This is why we did the logging this year, to make the small patch we have even better. I don't know what to say to ddear when he claims that we are not shooting only 3 1/2 year bucks, and that we don't kill them consistently every year, that truly is all we kill other than does except for one small 5 point I shot in 2000 that showed up with a blown off leg, and it has been 6 seasons now that we have done it. We collectively have killed at least one 3 1/2 year buck per year this way although I have personally only taken one myself. We had one year that we killed 3 (2002), that was the year I killed my buck down there that was a 115" class 8 point.
Our land is a funnel that includes a cedar swamp, apple orchard, and heavy bedding cover between all the major farms and crop areas that surround it. It also has a bit of open mature hardwoods around it as well to the south. The deer consistently use our property as cover for moving from place to place during the day and for bedding. I wish I had pics of all the bucks taken, however I don't because I am not always down there when they actually kill bucks since I only archery hunt it and sometimes manage to get in the second weekend of rifle season.