Hunting & Fishing Drought Effects in Central Texas

[jeffbird]

This year my wife and I will hunt for culling purposes in a bird sanctuary in the suburbs near Austin, Texas. (I also hunt on a very large ranch in South Texas where I am working on learning deer management.)

The culling is to suppress deer density. The landowner, a bird conservation group, is aggressive on culling, since the deer browse the emergent oak trees, which support caterpillars in the spring, which are the primary food source for an endangered songbird, the Golden-Cheeked warbler.

Anyway, the browsing has been especially agressive with the area going through its worst drought in modern history.

Here is a picture showing a very emaciated deer which found the corn within 24 hours of set-up of a temporary feeder and game camera to prepare for the culling.

A couple of other interesting pictures.
A tarantula, which I did not even know were near Austin.

And a gray fox.

 

[BOLTRIPPER]

Re: Drought Effects in Central Texas

that's pitiful

 

[Ishikawa]

Re: Drought Effects in Central Texas

The deer on our lease aren't looking so great either. We decided to try and supplement them slightly with as much protein as we could afford over the summer....but some of them still look spindly. Our landowners won't let us kill off the does that we need to balance the population...so I usually like taking a spike with my AK just for meat and some population control. Doesn't seem to help...wish i could do more...plus I like the meat.

Let me know if you need any help or would like an extra hand processing. Will you be donating the meat to local charity or just packing the freezer? Hmmmm...bet you could make a mint selling it to Cool River

 

[jeffbird]

Re: Drought Effects in Central Texas

Does the landowner not allow you to shoot any does, or just not enough to bring the ratio into balance? Where are you hunting?

 

[Ishikawa]

Re: Drought Effects in Central Texas

Yeah...they're traditional Germans that have their own "science". We need to trim the population by 40% at my best guess...but we an only fill one buck tag and does are questionable year to year.

Further out from town than yourself...we're just west of Fredericksburg.

 

[cbosshog79]

Re: Drought Effects in Central Texas

Those does look a little poor, but that is not that out of the ordinary at this point. Remember they have most likely had fawns nursing pretty hard until here recently.

With that said, the general central texas area is vastly overpopulated and numbers need to be drawn down. There is too much competition between the wildlife and livestock (sheep and goats in particular) in that part of the Texas and the stress has been evident for way longer than I have been hunting.

We owned a ranch in the Brady area for a few years and had to do a ton of management work there due to over browsing for years and poor management practices on the part of lease hunters for the better part of three decades. It was just my dad and I hunting that 1,600 acres for three years, bow hunting only and we took an average of 55 deer a year off of it. Even after pulling a total of 160+/- deer off of a 1,600 acre ranch and feeding an average of 4,000 pounds of protien and 5,000 pounds of corn a month for two years we still had deer that looked like that at this time of the year. We wern't in a bad area either, and were across the fence from the Treadwell ranch which has been in a couple of monster bucks video's. In other words, it will take more than a year or two to get the heard back to a healthy state in a majority of the region.

Do what you can and take advantage of the opportunity those kinds of situations don't open up very often, but don't expect to see results over night...

Cody