Seriously,why on earth would there be fawns on private land but not state forests?Lack of fawns means lack of quality habitat.

i just got thru with mr.ch who owns 3500 acres of privateland.heb is near renovo.


he said last 3 years hisfawns have dropped huge amount.

he feeds his deergrowing all kinds of feed and does not kill a fawn.

he said he saw around 12 fawns for about for about 75 deer.

when he had lots of deer he had lot of fawns.
he feels in his opinion is coyotes and bears doing it,he said they are killing fawns bigtime on his private land.

i think he said they trapped/shot 19 coyotes last winter and about 6 so far this winter..

he also said he had 7 bears o his property this winter.

You simply are not telling the truth. I said it was impossible for the shift in sampling to cause a 5% decrease if breeding rates increased in most WMUs as was predicted.

In your example you doubled the sample size in the areas with low breeding rates with no logical reason for doing so, since sample sizes decreased in the majority of the WMUs. Furthermore, with fewer doe producing fawns and low breeding rates sample sizes would decrease in areas with low breeding rates.

You examples proved nothing because they don't reflect what really happened in the state. You just fabricated numbers to get the desired results, which is something you accuse me of constantly. But ,you actually did it for all to see.

Lack of fawns also means few OW deer. Remember Alt said ARs wouldn't shorten the breeding window and flood the predators with fawns in the spring. Obviously that didn't happen and now predation is a much bigger factor than it was before.

That's not obvious at all bb.Sprouls's observation are far from concrete scientific evaluations.If you remember,he ain't seeing any fawns because all the roadhunters and crews are killin em all off.

The PGC data shows the breeding window hasn't changed and with fewer doe producing fawns the effects of predation would naturally increase.

that was a real scientific answer,DOUGE

Your scientific answer is that the hunters are killing them all and that the coyotes are eating the rest.Two studies have been done in 2G(the fawn mortality and doe mortality studies)that show you're wrong.

if hunters were killing them all coyotes couldnt eat the rest because they
would not be there scientificlly

Sproul, I believe it when you say you're not seeing fawns but lets think about this for a minute:

The fawn study showed that bears and coyotes do kill a significant number of fawns but the majority still make it. The fawns studied however, were caught as healthy fawns of various ages until sometime in June when they simply got too big and fast to catch. The study did not address or include stillborns or those that died very quickly. RSB has suggested that the number of those is significant in areas of poor habitat.

The adult doe study showed that hunters killed some but not nearly enough to reduce the herd. 8% one year and 15% the next died by hunting mortality. We all know that the biologists involved admit the number may be somewhat low because hunters may have been afraid to shoot collared deer but even if the numbers were off a good bit, we have to admit that only 8 and 15% is very low.

We have to accept that something else is working to keep the numbers down too. I think RSB's suggestion that does that survive the wnter but are malnourished or stressed are likely to abort their fawns or the fawns won't survive after birth. That, and predator mortalitywould certainly explain part of why you see does without fawns with such regularity.

The other point RSB made about fawns being more vulnerable in areas of poor habitat also makes a lot of sense.

Yes, doe hunters kill momma but when you see mommas without babies all summer, something else is killing the fawnsbesides hunters.