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Mature buck last year and this year

BSK said:
mallard239 said:
BSK said:
mallard239 said:
man he blew from 4 to 5!! makes you wonder about all the three year olds we shoot. that makes me wish we could recruit more bucks into the 5 and 6 year old ages even more.
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Getting bucks to 5 years old is fine, but try killing them. Basically, if you haven't gotten them at 4, your odds of getting them at 5+ are very low.

That's one of the downsides of managing for older to mature bucks. With every year older, they're harder to kill.
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agreed, but that is what everyone thought when there were no 3 year olds around. the key seems to be to get as many as you can to a certain age to increase competition and the likelyhood of seeing one, of that age, on his feet, if that is something you care for. when a 3 year old was a rarity on our lease, we never saw one, but i know he was there. now 3 year olds are common and we occasionally see one, while 5 and 6 year olds are very rare and we never see them, and still, i know one or two are there. it's partly a numbers thing.

the real trick may be natural mortality past age three due to rut stress. we may be dramatically underestimating how many bucks the rut itself kills.
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I agree with much of what you wrote mallard239, it is somewhat a numbers game. If you have more of a specific age-class of buck, you odds of killing one increase. However, never forget that with each age older, bucks move less during daylight and are much "smarter" (more experienced) at avoiding hunters. In fact, by 5 1/2, bucks are rarely caught on trail-camera moving during daylight (at least in ridge-and-hollow hardwood areas--agricultural areas are a bit different). In fact, the above pictures may be the only pictures of a 5 1/2 year-old buck I've ever gotten in full daylight, even though I have hundreds of pictures of 5 1/2 year-old bucks. Last year I had a particular 5 1/2 year-old buck that I photographed on over 50 different occasions over a 6 month span--at a myriad of locations: food plots, trails, scrapes, thick cover, etc.--yet not one of those photo occurances was during daylight.

And that's why I'm always excited to see a 4 1/2 year-old buck on camera. 4 1/2 year-old bucks are killable, especially near the rut. 5 1/2+ year-old bucks have proven to by fairly unkillable. Although we photograph 5 1/2+ year-old bucks using our property almost every year, we've killed a grand total of 1 of them. Yet we kill 4 1/2 year-old bucks fairly frequently. In fact, if we limit the data to just 4 1/2 year-old mature bucks and ignore the 5 1/2+ year-old bucks, we kill around 33% of the 4 1/2 year-old bucks that are known to exist (are photographed on the property). The percentage of 5 1/2+ bucks killed would be in the single digits (1 of however many we've photographed, which is probably a dozen or so).

I also like to manage for 4 1/2 year-old bucks versus 5 1/2+ because you can produce a fair number of 4 1/2s. However, 5 1/2+ year-old bucks just can't be produced in any number in a "normal" hunting situation (hunters managing hundreds to a thousand or so acres surrounded by heavily hunted tracts). At best, no matter how many younger bucks hunters pass up, you can get maybe 2-4% of the buck population to 5 1/2+. That's 1 in 50 to 1 in 25 bucks in the population making it to 5 1/2+. That's not many bucks. On the other hand, managing for 4 1/2+ bucks, hunters should be able to get 1 in 10 bucks to that age range (10% of the buck population). At 1 in 10 bucks being a target buck, that's a very huntable situation.

I also agree STRONGLY that the affects of rut stress on old bucks is seriously underestimated. In the Southeast, I believe our brutally hot summers and high numbers of parasites take a real toll on old bucks. I say that because I find it interesting that I have no problems getting 5 1/2 year-old bucks on trail-camera, but virtually impossible to get 6 1/2+ year-old bucks on trail-camera. Now the possibility exists that bucks of that advanced age are wiley enough to avoid the cameras, but could they really "learn" enough in one year to go from being photographed frequently at 5 1/2 to being photographed not at all at 6 1/2? Highly, HIGHLY unlikely. Unfortunately, the real answer is they are probably no longer alive.
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ok, if 2/3 of your 4.5's survive hunting season, but very few 5.5's appear to exist, would you assume many of the 4.5's are dying from natural causes as well? or do the number of 5.5's match the number of surviving 4.5's? can you explain more about what you think may be killing them and what might be done to help more older deer survive?
 
mallard239 said:
ok, if 2/3 of your 4.5's survive hunting season, but very few 5.5's appear to exist, would you assume many of the 4.5's are dying from natural causes as well? or do the number of 5.5's match the number of surviving 4.5's? can you explain more about what you think may be killing them and what might be done to help more older deer survive?
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I believe rut stress and other forms of natural mortality are much harder on deer than we assume. The number of 3 1/2s we get on camera in summer will not match the number of 2 1/2s known to have survived the previous hunting season. The number of 4 1/2s won't match the number of known surviving 3 1/2s, etc. We lose bucks of all ages between the end of hunting season and the following summer, and I strongly suspect most of those losses are natural mortality.

And that's one more reason you can't "stockpile" that many bucks into the oldest age-classes just by passing them up when they are younger. In the vast majority of cases, even those properties managing for mature bucks and shooting nothing less, trail-cameras rarely find a buck age structure with better than 10-15% mature bucks.

Now that's not the case with high-fences or massive Ranches in TX, but in those unique situations, several forms of natural mortality (especially predators and vehicle-deer collisions) are being fairly well controlled.
 
It is simple,you see him line up the crosshair and pull the tigger,Yeah right. LOL

Good luck
 
BigAl said:
He was moving during the day on that pic, so he can be killed. Thats half the battle.
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Yup. In fact that may be the first daylight picture I've ever gotten of a 5 1/2 year-old buck.
 
BigAl said:
He was moving during the day on that pic, so he can be killed. Thats half the battle.
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And if I'm not mistaken, it was during first rifle season, a very opportune time in my eyes. Mature bucks never cease to amaze me. I mainly get them on camera during daylight hours the "one day" myself and other hunters are not in that area. Go figure. :)
 
Andy S. said:
BigAl said:
He was moving during the day on that pic, so he can be killed. Thats half the battle.
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And if I'm not mistaken, it was during first rifle season, a very opportune time in my eyes. Mature bucks never cease to amaze me. I mainly get them on camera during daylight hours the "one day" myself and other hunters are not in that area. Go figure. :)
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I'm still kicking myself over that buck picture. For whatever reason, I get good daylight pictures of mature bucks working scrapes on that very ridge almost every December 2nd. This year, I was going to hunt that ridge on December 2nd but ultimately blew off the hunting trip. The stand I would have hunted that morning is only 15 yards to the right of the buck in the picture! He showed up at 9:30 AM on December 2nd, just like clockwork. :(
 

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