Good question 8-point.
This is actually a question we can answer but we don't really know the answer to it. (Tell me I shouldn't be a politician!
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Many hunters today believe passing bucks is similar to putting money in a savings account at your local bank. And much like a savings account, they have faith that those bucks will be there next year with interest earned...the interest of course being a larger set of antlers. Unfortunately mother nature was not born to be a cheif financial officer because truth be known, her bank stinks. Not only is interest earned highly variable (according to habitat) but you never get back the same amount of money you put into it.
Like I said in my first post, it would be nice to believe four bucks saved one year is equal to four older bucks earned the following year. Unfortunately there's a substantial withdrawl that occurs between each year. Data from numerous studies show that in a free-ranging deer herd it is near impossible to have a significant portion (>30%) of your deer herd in the mature age classes.
I believe Dr. Kroll (Bryan correct me if I'm wrong) conducted a decade long study on his private ranch in Iowa. There was little, if any, harvest of young bucks (less than 4-1/2) in an attempt to "flood" the mature age classes with new recruits. The problem was, they never showed up. His trail camera census' revealed that even with extreme management practices, mature age-classes represented something like only 8% of the buck population.
On that same note, we can look at Tennessee harvest data. It's a slightly different dataset than Dr. Kroll's (standing herd data -vs- harvested herd data) but it yields the same conclusions. In 1998, when the state reduced the buck limit from 11 down to 2, Tennessee "saved" some 18,000 yearlings.
One would believe these 18,000 yearlings (or a good portion of them) would show up later in the harvest as older deer. Unfortunately they didn't. We saw a jump of approximately 3,000 deer in the older age-classes. In other words, out of every six deer that were passed-up, only one ended up getting harvested at a later date. When we look at the two datasets, we can't say they each have equal attrition rates but we can say that it doesn't appear that bucks can be stockpiled. Now for the big question...why is that?
Here's my scoop and my scoop alone.
It is often cited in many QDM publications that historical records show that mature deer (5-1/2+) made up a significant portion of the buck population (~30%). This was determined by examining middens from native American archeological sites. Reading this, many folks are lead to believe that a "natural" deer herd should have a fair number of those age classes represented. Well I call horse hockey.
I am not arguing the point that that's what those records revealed, however, the last time I looked out my window I did not see a teepee on the horizon. What I mean by that is that hundreds of years ago, 5-1/2, 6-1/2, 7-1/2, and even 8-1/2 year old bucks were considered the norm in a natural situation. I also know that hundreds of years ago, the deer didn't have to deal with cars, and roads, and barbed wire, and combines, and dogs, and a hundred other stresses they deal with today. My guess is the life expectancy of a buck is today's modern world is no where near what it was in pre-historic times. And I'm not even talking about hunter mortalilty, just the simple stresses of today's world.
To surmise the point I'm getting at, I believe a 5-1/2 or 6-1/2 year old buck today is equivalent to an 8-1/2 or 9-1/2 year old deer of yesteryear. No matter how hard we try, we are not going to achieve greater than 10% of the buck population in the mature age-classes. It's simply a function of modern times.
Anyhow...my two-cents.
