Got Deer???

[TheMad_Poet]

Oddly enuff they don't bother my stuff that much. They nibble off corn tops, but they grow back. Don't bother my tomatoes ever. I live next to a large farm with cattle
and they put up electric fencing they were so bad. I think the hay and cattle feed they put out, plus their gardens fill them up enuffbefor they get to me. My daughter lives in the middle of a small sub a few miles away, and they eat entire large tomato branches!!! My biggest problem are raccoons and possums, that love tomatoes and sweet corn. And the new kid on the block are the sandhill cranes. 2 years ago they pulled up every corn seedling I had and ate the seed off the root end. Wiped out all my corn. And pulled up some of my onion sets- thought it was more corn I guess. They are a much bigger nuisance for me. The state of Michigan has disallowed the use of bait for hunting now, so the herd is on the rise in se MI. I have a blind out back, and love venison, which is so heart healthy, but they are too smart to come out until after dark once bow season starts. Couple yrs ago, in early Aug, I counted 10 bucks go across the back of my yard, single file, led by the largest, in pecking order of size. Pic is out side my Kitchen window under a crab apple tree. You can see my other neighbors patio, and curtains on my kitchen window. That was Aug 27, 2020. Last week I saw tracks in snow under the same tree.

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[worth1]

@TheMad_Poet
Speaking of those crab apples I used to live in Missouri and they had the things everywhere.
Even the hedges at school were crab apples
And I loved the whole pickled spiced crab apples.
The town I lived near to had a state fruit experiment station on the way home.
Mountain Grove.
I think I'll go buy a cheap bag of small apples and do them up right.
Been years since I've seen any.

[karstopography]

Both my kids have one, so do I. Got mine long time ago.

[Setec Astronomy]

We now have a plan with the DNR that there will be an annual cull until we get the herd down to their recommended number of 33 deer per square mile. As of now we have 180 per square mile.

OMG that's insane, 180??? Is that in your residential neighborhood? I was just looking up our area, and in the nature preserve this is some miles away that they are trying to restore the understory by culling the deer, we have recently had about 60/square mile, and their goal was to get down to 10, but they have never gotten it below 20. I just saw 2 in my yard this morning. They haven't posted the results from this year's hunt which just ended a week or two ago.

[worth1]

There are more than 290 head of deer per 1000 acres in Mason and Llano Counties in Texas.
In the 30's there were supposedly only 300,000 deer nation wide.
They were almost wiped out.

[MissS]

@Setec Astronomy The deer here are really really bad. You can't walk out into your yard without gingerly stepping around the deer doo. I clean up more after the deer than I do my dog. They are bottle-necked in this area. We have a lake on one side two highways and a city on the other. They just keep breeding here and are never culled. It is not all residential there is a 20-30 acre parcel owned by GE that is undeveloped that runs along the highway and our subdivision backs up to it. We have a golf course that buffers the other highway and the rest is all residential. There is no hunting allowed in this area because it is a residential neighborhood and GE will not allow the DNR on the property.

[MissS]

My thoughts are, if you kill off the predators, then you have to take over their jobs.

[Uncle_Feist]

Eye for an eye.

[TheMad_Poet]

There are more than 290 head of deer per 1000 acres in Mason and Llano Counties in Texas.
In the 30's there were supposedly only 300,000 deer nation wide.
They were almost wiped out.

I lived in Killeen Texas in 1970, while I was stationed at Ft Hood. We had a swimming hole on a river about 50 miles south of there, nice spot to swim and hang out. Couple times I went hiking around in that area. Nothing to walk a half mile back in and see a 150 deer in an hours time. Many of the farms or ranches in Texas lease their property to hunters. And most hunters like to see lots of deer. But over crowded deer herds lead to sickly animals, because the highest quality food sources are eaten extinction in those areas. Proven fact, around here we saw some serious die offs in recent years on large chunks of land that allowed no hunting. Very sad to find starved deer laying every where. So much healthy meat gone to waste thru ignorance and Disney mentality.

[JRinPA]

[pepperhead212]

That sounds like something they made up for Saturday Night Live!

[MissS]

That's a great idea! On top of that, I think I will put up a sign with the same deer image with a diagonal line through it saying 'No Deer'. That should keep them out of my yard. BRILLIANT!!! I should have thought of this sooner.

[JRinPA]

I heard this joke when I was kid but had never heard a radio rendition. For me it was one of my aunts, at a family reunion. "Just move the signs, it wouldn't be hard and much safer for everyone." In comparison to all of of my cousins, I am far on the young end, so most of them had heard it long before. But I think I knew she was kidding by too many other people trying and failing to keep a straight face. Tough to say, I might have been 6 or as old as 10.

"Donna" played it pretty straight until right up near the end, can hear some giggle coming through.

[Kurt]

Family in PA have decent nite time lighting,my brother-in-law law places cd discs on fishing line.The sun during the day thwarts the squirrels birds etc.At nite the motion lights do the same.I use them in our mango,lychees.Keep the cds away on short line because in high wind they turn into mini choppers.

[Ken4230]

Well the cull did not go as well as planned. Perhaps it was too cold for the hunter's to sit out there. They managed to cull 17 deer. So now the DNR is sending in a group. They have 40 tags and will be issued more if they want them. We now have a plan with the DNR that there will be an annual cull until we get the herd down to their recommended number of 33 deer per square mile. As of now we have 180 per square mile. This is great! Maybe in a year or two we can start to replace all of our landscaping that has been destroyed.

In the early seventies my cousin and I were sitting in the county judges office discussing the damage deer was doing to the bean crop. A plan was developed to kill as many as we could in one day. We had a lot of help, at least 40 or more farmers/people. I sat in a row behind a burlap screen with a 22 rifle.

We killed everything we saw, large and small, mostly does. They never spooked, would look up and then go right back to eating. We would take a break to load up the deer and take them to the men processing them. We killed 90+ deer in that 150 acre field. Was up till daylight distributing all the meat. Did so well that we moved to another farm several miles away and did the same thing with the same results.

Nowadays we would never get out of jail if we tried this.

[Ken4230]

My thoughts are, if you kill off the predators, then you have to take over their jobs.

We have failed miserably at the job and now Mother Nature is going to do the job for us. It will not be pretty. CWD will eventually eliminate 80% to 90% of the Cervid population. Even now, I think the raccoons in our area are coming down with Distemper. We have a huge amount of coons around here, not afraid of humans and easily seen in daytime. Classic signs of Distemper, although I have only found 1 dead.

My family has been in the hunting and fishing club business for over 90 years. I am the last one, all the kids and grandboys are city boys. I do have a granddaughter who hunts with me and once accused me of "rat holing" a deer stand which she now claims. The best on the Livingston farm. She videoed a 12 pointer and thought it was too young to kill and it was. I was really proud of her and told her so. I think it survived.

[GoDawgs]

The garden is in that lull between summer and fall stuff. Just some peppers and a few okra now and then to pick. I haven't posted much the past few days as there hasn't really been anything to post about... until now. Deer.

Three nights ago some deer discovered the sweet potato vines and munched a bit but left everything else alone. Two nights ago they came back for more sweet potato vine. And again last night. That's OK because the sweets are about made and ready for digging in about two weeks. No way to protect the vines anyway unless I surrounded the bed with netting. This is what they look like this morning. Just sticks!

24.08.24 Deer munch on sweet potato vines.JPG

Then one said to the others, "Oh look! BEANS!" and they munched half of the Blue Ribbon bush beans I'm trying to grow for seed and this is what I discovered yesterday morning. I will reseed those skips with my last beans because the plants are probably too young to recover.

24.08.24 Deer munch on Blue Ribbon beans.JPG

They also got the lower half of some pole beans.

24.08.24 Deer munch on pole beans.JPG

Fortunately they hadn't discovered the Contender bush bean bed. As an extra note, you can see that those older dark beans from '19 came up later than the '22 beans. I had almost given up on them!

24.08.24 Older Contenders finally coming up.JPG

So yesterday I put netting tunnels over the two bean beds and also the net enclosure around the Big Red Ripper cow pea patch.

24.08.24 Deer munch protection.JPG

Shame on me for not acting as soon as the first munch was discovered. There's been no problem at all with deer this year and I thought maybe the first munch was a one off event. Complacency can be dangerous. Lesson learned. First munch always leads to more.

[ddsack]

Oh my, isn't that a downer, when they destroy a crop you've been tending and waiting for! So sorry for you.

Our deer population seems to be down this year, not getting the usual 7/8 that used to graze north of the house every evening for the past 15 years. I think maybe this due to finally losing the old crippled doe during the winter. She had a shoulder injury ever since we first saw her, which made one of her front legs useless for support, but she managed to raise a fawn every year, even twins. She made our woods her territory and kept bringing her offspring close to the house and people. Some times I could see them sleeping in the brush close to my bedroom window when the leaves fell. I think losing the matriarch made her daughters finally scatter, there was only one bold yearling that hung out near the old horse barn earlier in the summer , and one doe with a fawn that was seen a couple of times, but no more pasture full of deer. I had none coming up to munch on my flower bed next to the house. Last year they even came onto the cement pad under the overhead deck and ate up my potted begonias. I finally had to put up a deer netting barrier around the perimeter of the deck/garden that closed off the main entrance to the house at night. Used shepard hooks to hold the netting next to the garden, then stretched across the cement pad opening and looped over small hooks set into the siding of the attached garage. This year, after buying new deer netting in a heavier gauge, I have not needed to take it out of the package! It will be interesting to see if any return in the fall.

[bboomer]

My thoughts are, if you kill off the predators, then you have to take over their jobs.

Agreed, although I wish predators would be left alone. In Wisconsin, unless you are hunting with a bow or crossbow, the hunting season is very short. When my son attended college in Stevens Point, we would sometimes go north to visit during deer season. The freeway was packed with hunters. It was like an invading army. The deer population is huge so why not let hunters have at them? The same goes for geese. I don't hunt but some people love it. Let em go and hunt down these pests! And let the predators be.

[bower]

"First munch always leads to more." Words of wisdom @GoDawgs .