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Tennessee Hunting Forums
Quality Deer Management
Growing Mature Bucks
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<blockquote data-quote="BSK" data-source="post: 5499219" data-attributes="member: 17"><p>As TheLBLman mentioned, be very careful about culling yearlings based on antler quality. Because they are so young, yearling buck antler development is based heavily on just one summer's food resources. Normally, we have a spike yearling incidence rate of only around 30% (30% of yearlings are spikes). This year, because of the drought, over 70% of our yearlings are spikes. If you started whacking spike yearlings, you would just about kill off the entire year's crop of young bucks.</p><p></p><p>Now if hunters want to add "mangement bucks" into the picture, I have no problem with that. For landowners that are managing for maximum antler quality I even recommend it. Bottom-end 2 1/2s and 3 1/2s are far less likely to ever be a top-end mature bucks, hence adding them to the "hit list" gives hunters more bucks to target (as the list of top-end mature bucks is usually quite short).</p><p></p><p>The below buck is an example. The first picture is a big fork-horn as a 2 1/2 year-old. The second picture is him as a 3 1/2 year-old. He's never going to be a top-end mature buck. Placing him on the "hit list" to give hunters another buck to shoot for makes sense. He's just "taking up space" and will never be what hunters want no matter how old he gets.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="BSK, post: 5499219, member: 17"] As TheLBLman mentioned, be very careful about culling yearlings based on antler quality. Because they are so young, yearling buck antler development is based heavily on just one summer's food resources. Normally, we have a spike yearling incidence rate of only around 30% (30% of yearlings are spikes). This year, because of the drought, over 70% of our yearlings are spikes. If you started whacking spike yearlings, you would just about kill off the entire year's crop of young bucks. Now if hunters want to add "mangement bucks" into the picture, I have no problem with that. For landowners that are managing for maximum antler quality I even recommend it. Bottom-end 2 1/2s and 3 1/2s are far less likely to ever be a top-end mature bucks, hence adding them to the "hit list" gives hunters more bucks to target (as the list of top-end mature bucks is usually quite short). The below buck is an example. The first picture is a big fork-horn as a 2 1/2 year-old. The second picture is him as a 3 1/2 year-old. He's never going to be a top-end mature buck. Placing him on the "hit list" to give hunters another buck to shoot for makes sense. He's just "taking up space" and will never be what hunters want no matter how old he gets. [/QUOTE]
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