As we approach the upcoming whitetail deer hunting season its time to spend a little range time with the Mossberg Patriot rifles I plan on hunting with this year. Those include a .270 Win, .30-06 Springfield and 7mm PRC. Each is topped with a Trijicon AccuPoint scope and is sighted in with Hornady Precision Hunter ammo. I am also plan on hunting with three of my Taurus Raging Hunter revolvers in .44 Mag, .454 Casull and .460 S&W Mag. Each is topped with a Trijicon SRO red-dot sight and sighted in with Hornady’s Custom XTP loads. All six guns from a hunting rest will shoot less than 2-inch groups at 100 yards, and, less than in 1-inch groups from a solid bench rest.
I plan to hunt whitetails this fall in Missouri, Oklahoma, Alberta and on numerous Texas properties shooting numerous bucks and does. If you are wondering what I am going to do will all the venison I take, it will be fully utilized by my family and family members which now includes three married grandsons. All four grandsons and my granddaughter hunt, but unfortunately have limited time to do so. So, I will be supplementing their larder with some venison. Each year I also provide venison to other families, some of which I know and who have come to “expect it” of me, and, some which I have not yet met. Every possible ounce of edible venison from the deer I take is fully utilized. Now to my granddaughter is tanning all the hides to use in numerous projects she works with and on.
This coming fall on my personal lease where we are under a Texas Managed Lands Deer Permit (MLD Permit), each member will be required to take numerous does as part of our lease agreement. I am currently awaiting what that number will be, but, based on last year’s surprisingly good fawn survival rate I suspect it could be possibly as many as nine or more. Too, each member normally gets to take five or so bucks. One can be the biggest buck found plus four “management” bucks, primarily mature bucks with eight-points or less. With these harvested deer, the hunter is not allowed to use tags from the hunting licenses, but have to use tags issued by the landowner. Thus those taken under the MLD Permit are in addition to whatever the bag limits are, on properties not under the special permit.
As a wildlife biologist I work with several properties where I help with their removing a sufficient number of does, and to a lesser extent bucks to keep the population at a level the habitat can support in the worst of times rather than the best of times.
Earlier I mentioned “management bucks” and “cull bucks”. What is a “management” or “cull” buck? Both categories are really somewhat hard to describe because what on some properties might be considered a “management” or “cull” buck, due to lesser antlers might on another property be considered monstrous.
Over the past fifty years, as a professional wildlife biologist, long involved in whitetail deer research and management I have written a considerable number of “quality deer management programs” that included annual harvest recommendations for both does and bucks.
Early on I occasionally recommended buck harvest numbers for both big mature bucks, and “management bucks” or a total number of bucks that should be taken each hunting season, farther broken down into those two categories. I seldom if ever place the “cull” moniker on individual bucks regardless of their antler size, although I did set up “culling programs” on many places. These referred to the taking of both bucks and does, to lower the overall deer population to a level the habitat could support in the worst of nutrition times.
This said, I often heard hunters and others refer to eight point bucks as “management eight points” and how they tried to remove every management eight point they could find, which they deemed three years old or older. I never really agreed with taking “management eights”. The primary reason being I had seen a goodly number of bucks that had 10 or more points as 3-years olds that if they rutted really hard and got run down, the following year went from a 140 or better Boone and Crockett (B&C) scoring buck with an impressive rack revert to the prettiest 120-B&C point 8-point the following year. Then if he did not “rut himself down” again, as a 5-year old buck again have an extremely impressive rack, likely scoring 160-B&C or better. If a “we shoot all management 8’s” program was in place, that buck would likely never have lived to again become a monstrously antlered buck. For that reason, I often discouraged hunters on the properties I managed to shoot such bucks. If a buck once he matured had 8-points two or more consecutive years, then I suggested they remove him.
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