Yes, but that mismanagement is small compared to all the state forest, natural areas and TVA or Corps lake parcels without quotas and under the same deer seasons and limit. Not only is there no limit to the number of hunters on these public parcels, there's a significant # of hunters from outside of Unit L, even nonresidents, that come for the opportunity to put up to three does a day in the freezer. And we can't blame them. The mismanagement lies at the feet of the TWRA and the TFWC.
no doubt...and it is easy to solve with the check-in and out solution that I previously covered in the public lands topic. Other areas do it.
One might wonder why all the folks whose hunting land borders these public tracts in Unit L haven't complained more. My guess is that more than we think use the mismanagement as an excuse to use feeders to help keep deer on their property and from being over-hunted.
I hunt up there and I agree...
Just started this thread so I may be redundant here. You clearly never hunted Natchez Trace from the 70's to the 90's. Juveniles would kill 120+ in a weekend. The problem was the herd was overpopulated, everyone shot every buck they saw, and it was rare to have a 3.5 year old killed, buck or doe. At some point TWRA went in and killed every deer they could find and stopped quota hunts in order to build an older herd with trophy bucks. Don't think it ever worked though. The park was formed due to poor soil. Poor soil does not produce trophy bucks.
This is exactly why I didn't tag a doe or 2 in Benton County. I would have but couldn't take it home across the river. Driving 4 hours to pick up a doe is not something I want to do
Although it was not sport hunting but market hunting that wiped out the whitetails. No limits, no legal harvest means. Market hunters shot every deer they could find to sell to the East Coast meat markets. No laws existed about how deer could be killed. They were slaughtered wholesale, including jack-hunting (night hunting with focused lanterns - basically an early form of spotlighting). In reality, it was the invention of the refrigerated boxcar that wiped out the white-tailed deer in the late 1800s. The ability to transport hundreds of thousands of deer carcasses to the East Coast without them spoiling was the death knell of deer, as well as the ability to sell wild game meat commercially.
It can mean they are overpopulated. However, when and where these large groups occur determines whether it means something or not. I have successfully used antlerless group size as a determinant of habitat quality herd balance in many areas of the Southeast.
I feel for farmers who experience major reductions in crop yield due to deer depredation. HOWEVER, farmers didn't pay for the restoration and management of deer. We hunters did and do. Allowing farmers to slaughter local deer herds for monetary reasons should only be allowed as an absolute last resort. I would prefer to see farmers required to prove they have tried everything else involving legal hunting before being issued depredation permits, and those must be tracked carefully.
I border one of these and I certainly complained! Little good it did me...
I'll give my former county warden along with whoever else helped him stand his ground for his actions regarding a depredation permit on the primary property I hunt. The number one reason I was allowed access to the property is because they wouldn't issue the farmer a depredation permit if the landowner would not allow hunting, which was the case on this property for a couple of years. They have a permit now, but don't kill but maybe 10-15 during the summer now because we've done a decent job knocking back the herd through hunting. They still lose some beans to the deer, but nothing like they did the first couple years we hunted the property.
And this is EXACTLY the way it should be bowhunterfanatic. Farmers should have to prove they have tried every legal means (legal hunting) to reduce deer density before being issued depredation permits.
