C.Killmaster
Georgia Deer Biologist
what would you describe to be the best fawn cover? I myself feel like there's a ton of diversity in the mountains. There's lots of areas that's so thick you can't walk through in he summer that's been untouched for years. Some areas are closed canopy and more open woods without much cover but there's just as much areas that I feel do provide cover. Walking along the Appalachian trail you will see that closed canopy effect. Drop off 10 leads from the top over a few miles and there's tons of diversity and good cover. Let's go to hooch wma. Take Martin branch, trail ridge and look at it in the summer. Should be covered up with deer from controlled burns, logging and storm damage. I see just as many deer there as I do at cut locast gap to horse trough falls in the big mature woods. We have a predator problem. Our woods is capable of at least twice what we have now. If we never touch them again it should support at least double. The mountains will never have what flatlands has population wise. Cut the bears and the population will grow. Bears and yotes proves to much competition for the deer. Yotes are here to stay but reducing bear population would be a lot easier. Ask a poll of hunters state wide, or regionally what the focus should be on managing, bears or deer. I'd say overwhelming majority will say we have to many bears. We all know how many are complaining about lower deer. Problem I see with the bears, few has mentioned it in this thread is that most hunters are seeing bears but so few are shooting. I seen 27 last season and shot 1. We're letting to many bears walk. Just about everybody that lets a bear walk will blast a yote. We're headed in the right direction with removal of doe days but we need a spring season for bears.
You bring up a lot of good points, a lot of which we're learning about through the research we have going on. The problem is the scale of closed canopy forest across a pretty large area. Take a look at the Game Check deer harvest dashboard and compare the deer harvest per square mile to aerial photos in Google maps. When you zoom out at the whole state look at how the dark green areas (totally forested) correspond to lower deer harvest. Southeast Georgia is very similar, but it appears more drastic than the mountains because harvest reporting isn't as compliant there. Also, here's a link to a video I did showing how land use can impact deer populations. While predators may seem the cause of the decline on the surface, the landscape and land use has major impacts on the ability of predators to locate fawns. It's just not as simple as killing more bears or coyotes, I wish it was that easy.
https://gadnrwrd.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/a8c09f55918b41e7af6e54abf1dc3a1c
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