Lack of doe harvest a trend nationwide

Bogart, Ga. — The lack of antlerless deer harvest to help balance out the herd is not only a problem in Ohio but it is in most of the United States.

That was the general takeaway from a recent National Deer Association (NDA) podcast in the organization’s “Deer Season 365” series.

“As you shoot more does and the (deer) herd gets healthier, you’ll also see corresponding antler growth for the bucks,” said Kip Adams, the NDA’s chief conservation officer.

Most of the U.S. is in an historically high time of buck harvest, Adams said.

“The standing crop of bucks have better age structure than in any of our lifetimes,” he said.

Conversely, the doe harvest is way down in most places.

“Nationally, that’s not a good thing,” Adams said. “The average hunter has many more antlerless tags available than they are using.”

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NDA CEO Nick Pinizzotto weighed in with his opinion on why hunters don’t shoot more does.

“Part of it is just putting it off,” he said. “But, what we’re really talking about here is someone waiting for a particular deer.”

Statistics show that 60% of the nation’s hunters won’t shoot a deer this year, according to Adams. And, of the number of deer that are harvested only 18% will be does.

“I get it. There’s lots of nice bucks everywhere,” he said. “But, that’s what we’re trying to correct.”

Pinizzotto, who lives and hunts in Pennsylvania, said he laments that hunters are missing the larger point of it all.

“I think a lot of people are missing out on just being out there and enjoying the hunt,” he said. “It’s easy to see how it can happen.”

Because deer are prolific breeders, it is necessary to take a proportion of antlerless deer out of the population each year in order to balance the herd, said Adams.

Hunters are often reluctant to shoot a doe for many reasons, among them being he or she don’t want to spook that target buck. Or, the hunter believes that taking too many does off a property actually hurts the overall population.

“It’s human nature to think that more is always better,” Pinizzotto said. “But, that’s not how it works in nature.”

Another potential problem of having too many deer on the landscape is disease, chiefly chronic wasting disease (CWD) and epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD).

“We’re having some fairly severe EHD outbreaks and that can happen when you have too many deer in a small area,” Pinizzotto said. “So, if you don’t (harvest antlerless deer) Mother Nature will do it for you.”

The deer experts who spoke on the podcast said deer harvest strategies should be made on a local level for each individual property owner.

“It’s still the responsibility of the hunter to gauge the number of deer and the available food in an area,” said Lyndsay Thomas Jr., communications chief for the NDA.

Ohio’s deer management authorities have been asking hunters for the past five years at least to shoot more does.

Adams agrees.

“There’s a lot of people in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan for example that need to be shooting more does than bucks,” he said.

The NDA experts identified a couple of barriers to more doe harvests for hunters who don’t have a proper outlet for the venison and a lack of processors for the meat. The NDA on its website has a list of processors across the country.

The NDA panel examined particular areas of the U.S. when it comes to antlerless deer harvest using statistics from 2023. They found generally that states in the southeast U.S. do better than their northern counterparts, mentioning Louisiana and Mississippi in particular.

It is a mixed bag in the northeast, they said, with the trend line generally going down in the amount of antlerless harvest.

Pennsylvania is an exception, said Thomas, who added that the Keystone State leads the nation in the number of does harvested per square mile.

“But, even I will tell you we need to step up the antlerless harvest here,” said Adams, who lives and hunts in Pennsylvania.

In the Midwest, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are in desperate need of more antlerless kills, according to the NDA panel.

“The (natural resource) agencies in those states have been asking hunters to take more does but they just can’t get it done,” said Thomas.

The state of Iowa, a renowned deer hunting state, does a good job in balancing the harvest there between antlered deer and antlerless, Thomas said.

“The hunters there do their part,” said Adams. “They get after the antlerless deer.”

Another statistic that might help hunters shoot more does is that in the U.S. one in seven households is food insecure, said Adams.

“This would be the perfect way for hunters to help out (with hunger) and make hunters the champions of society,” he said.