Stan I feel your deer pain. For those who lease my land to hunt, they are given a quota of deer they must kill. The farmer who rents it for farming and I both got tired of the hunters waiting for the "big" buck and passing on multiple lesser bucks and taking no does at all. The smallest farm has a 20 deer quota and the largest farm has a 60 deer quota. Show me the tags for deer checked in and a photo. Most hunters have learned to thin out the does early and donate them to the food bank. But I do not care how many they take more will just move in. You still need to try.
About 20 years ago we had a deer drive that killed 53 deer in one morning on the larger farm and there were many, many more deer left that we never moved from one last section of woods. The deer eat everything they can reach in the Winter. What they can do to a row of beans would make you think the planter was stopped up, only it was not. They are so bad that the outside rows of beans and corn will be almost completely harvested by them long before the farmer gets a chance. The number of crop depredation permits that these farms have, which allow you to shoot deer anytime, is a number I will not share. People think you get joy from using them but honestly you just get sick of it. The heard would be much healthier if you just reduced their number by 50% and allowed them to build back slowly. Right now they are at or in most years over the carrying capacity of the land.
We have had hot spots of deer die off, near me, where every deer in a mile or more radius died almost all at once. Talking 50-75 deer, of all ages and conditions, all just die. And the next year the numbers were exactly the same. If the wolves would just eat deer and leave the other livestock alone I'd be happy for their help. But things never seem to work out that easy. And about the second calf I lost might get me in the mood to act poorly. Again nothing works perfectly.
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