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BSK - Cherokee Nat Forest Deer Numbers?

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WMAn

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BSK and others,

Poser and I hunted Monroe County in the Cherokee Nat Forest for bear on Saturday. Having heard the discussion on here and looked at the harvest numbers we knew deer numbers are really low. We expected this to be because a lack of logging has led to wide open woods with little browse.

We were surprised by what we found. Poser hunted for a mile down a road that had recently been bulldozed. You could count the number of deer tracks he spotted in the mud on one hand. I walked one mile of a leaf covered logging road and found one possible scrape.

The deer sign was not a surprise but the cover was. The area was a lot thicker than we thought it would be. There was evidence of a major fire and an abundance of woody browse.

Why is it that those mountains don't hold more deer?
 
One of the reasons that there are few deer is because they depend entirely on mast and browse. There is very little browse because there are few openings for browse to grow. In a bad mast year the deer have very little to eat so fawn production goes way down.
The fire damage you saw was probably due to controlled burns that they do periodically. I don't think they do it for browse production [though it does help] but to keep the leaf litter etc., from building up over the years hoping to prevent serious fire damage to the trees.
 
I haven't worked in the area, so I can't say much about the conditions. That's something I would need to see for myself.
 
bigtex said:
One of the reasons that there are few deer is because they depend entirely on mast and browse. There is very little browse because there are few openings for browse to grow. In a bad mast year the deer have very little to eat so fawn production goes way down.
The fire damage you saw was probably due to controlled burns that they do periodically. I don't think they do it for browse production [though it does help] but to keep the leaf litter etc., from building up over the years hoping to prevent serious fire damage to the trees.
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Yeah, I'm aware of the controlled burns they do. I would be surprised if this was one. Some large trees had burnt bark going up twenty to thirty feet on the tree trunk.
 
Poser said:
Oh, and mad respect to deer hunters in that area -that's tough hunting...
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Yeah, it just sucks. Much of that area and surrounding counties in South East TN are this way. Well, you know - there are exceptions, but for the most part I guess we just don't have enough fertile bottomland and agriculture. What's worse is that because numbers are so low, if you don't bow hunt you basically have (1) opportunity to kill an antlerless deer and that would be during the muzzleloader season. Other than that, you're always gunning for a buck and with deer numbers so low is it any wonder most people shoot the first thing they see with legal sized antlers? It's tough and success is limited.

Think about kids starting out hunting with the deck stacked against them like that. I remember vividly as a teenager being EXTREMELY bummed if I didn't get a doe during the muzzleloader weekend when a doe was allowed to be taken because I knew darn well the chances of me seeing a buck and killing a buck the rest of the year were slim at best! I'm not sure I would still hunt if these were the ONLY type places I had to hunt deer.
 
You also have the tree hugging, feel good type people wanting to save the world and turn MOST of this area into wilderness where, a saw tooth or bull dozer blade will never skin the bark of another tree. I'm not for leveling the place but, some forest management should be put into practice. The open land is only in small pockets and the forest is getting older and leaving less qualitiy browse low enough for wild life to reach it.

I feel like the wild life population is based on what the land can sustain in years when there's an almost total mast failure. Last year was on of those years and I would have been more likely to have found a gold nugget laying on top of the leaves than I would have an acorn. This year the acorns only produced in a "band" around the mountain at a certain elevation. There's no acorns below or above that "band" in elevation.

I have saw some true giant deer in Cherokee, like the 5 huge bucks that were dogging a hot doe one day, three of which were fighting. What makes it hard to hunt Cherokee is that it's tough to stalk the area because of the ever changing wind and the bucks have such a large area to cover in search of a doe that stand hunting can be fruitless as well. Those bucks seem to have a "circle" that may take them days to make.
 
My family has 60 acres in Ocoee. Super low deer population. The mature timber plays a big role in that areas problem, but another thing to consider is deer, bear, and hogs, all eat acorns. And the bears can climb a tree and clear it out before the deer get a chance to even eat them.That along with no browse from mature timber equals no deer. On top of that you cant hunt the bears in south polk because of the Ocoee bear reserve, and that makes for a lot of bears.
 
fulltimefireman said:
My family has 60 acres in Ocoee. Super low deer population. The mature timber plays a big role in that areas problem, but another thing to consider is deer, bear, and hogs, all eat acorns. And the bears can climb a tree and clear it out before the deer get a chance to even eat them.That along with no browse from mature timber equals no deer. On top of that you cant hunt the bears in south polk because of the Ocoee bear reserve, and that makes for a lot of bears.
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Is that the property in Sylco? I see quite a few deer there when I drive through.
 
Another thing to consider is the size of Cherokee, the deer are there but when there's thousands of acres it makes hunting much more difficult. There's just so much area for the deer to travel.
 
Tennessee Sportmans Magazine has an article almost every year either in the October or September issue based on top counties and WMA's for harvesting bucks in the state.If i remeber correctly Cherokee WMA is one of the top 5 or 6 WMA's in the state for harvesting bucks. Granted the land acerage is greater than other WMA' becuase I beleive the numbers were a collaborative of the north and south sections( i would have to double check that). I can't specifically remeber if they break down the antler points or not for the WMA's.I know they did for the county kills.
 
volunteer1 said:
Tennessee Sportmans Magazine has an article almost every year either in the October or September issue based on top counties and WMA's for harvesting bucks in the state.If i remeber correctly Cherokee WMA is one of the top 5 or 6 WMA's in the state for harvesting bucks. Granted the land acerage is greater than other WMA' becuase I beleive the numbers were a collaborative of the north and south sections( i would have to double check that). I can't specifically remeber if they break down the antler points or not for the WMA's.I know they did for the county kills.
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Yeah, but keep in mind Cherokee bucks are bonus bucks. Lots of deer checked out as wma deer that were actually killed somewhere else so it doesn't count towards their statewide limit. Oh wait, surely no one would do that... :o
 
been years since I have been there saw no deer.but saw a bunch of grouse not sure if there are still a lot of grouse there are not
 
Fulltimefireman will probably agree but in my opinion this portion of the Cherokee National Forest is some of the most mismanaged property in the entire state of TN! Potential for this ground is there and twenty years ago deer numbers were better. However, the bear numbers have exploded here causing in my opinion some worthless ground. Now I will state I am not a bear hunter and probably never will be but I see LOTS of bear in this section. Granted it is a bear reserve but when do you admit you have to many animal here with nothing to sustain them? Every tree that had anything resembling an acron this year looks like a helicopter landed in the top of the tree! The bears you see are poor looking and other game animals besides turkey are almost none existant. If it were not for the NWTF spending a little time in here things would be even worse. With all that said, I will say that I do love hunting these mtns and have killed my biggest buck out of these woods and am proud of that.
 
Lots and lots of bears I've said this for a while now. But bear reserves are no longer needed and haven't been for a long time. No managment at all and bears galore make it a crappy place to hunt. N Cherokee is all I have knowledge on. Never hunted south Cherokee. I wish we had some decent sized WMA's to hunt farther east besides n Cherokee.
 

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