Which?

[BBF]

Which one of the Carolinas has the highest deer population?

[mannyrock]

 
  Just a guess, but I would say South Carolina.  Much lower human population, far fewer large cities and suburbs, massive fields of crops, and lots and lots of swamp land.  I hunted there once many years ago.  There were lots and lots of deer, but they were all small-bodied.  125 pounders.  Worse, when I was there, a guy killed under his stand (NO LIE) a cane-break rattler, that was as thick around as my arm and 7 feet long.  This was in November.  He spend the rest of the afternoon skinning it out at camp.  We were hunting near Dillon, SC.
 
   I was so scared after I saw that snake, that I never stepped off the logging roads into the palmettos again!  And, I never went back to hunt again.
 
  I am sure that each state has a website, giving the estimated deer population every year.
 
Regards,   Mannyrock

[BBF]

Thanks, I'm contemplatin' depending on how summer goes and how my Doe draw works out plus a few other maybes.

[SHOOTALL]

I think I would agree with SC they have very liberal limits and a long season. I would consider your hunt though , will it be with a guide service , on private land or do you have to access to or public land. I would find a density map for the areas you plan to hunt and compare that way. What may happen is the state has good numbers but the area you can hunt is low in number of deer where another state may be low but the area you can hunt is a area with good deer numbers. As example in Va the modern gun season in the western part is 2 weeks and numbers are low compared to the east half where seasons are 7 weeks. Rut also matters here. As does a full moon as there is plenty of food in most cases. Also check on CWD .

[mcwoodduck]

I am not sure,
But I can tell you the NC hunting license for out of state is about $140 for a 6 day license & $10 for a public land pass.  My last one had a big game tags for 2 bucks, 2 does, and 2 options (either antlered or anterless) for a total of 6 deer.
My guess is if SC has a similar amount of deer on the tags then they have the same or more, of they offer less then I would say they have fewer deer.   

[SHOOTALL]

A guy was telling me in SC you hunt for several mos. and can kill one a day or more . Not sure if true but that's a lot of deer. 

[BBF]

There is a noticeable difference in Outfitter cost between the two States.
 
 I'm not a trophy hunter so I prefer Doe or small buck anytime. I don't even have a place to hang up a set of antlers.
 
I'm not sure how my Version of Homeland Defense would react to half a dozend deer bodies in the truck I'm guessing it would take a long time to get that squared away and my freezer is not big. Two deer would be plenty for us.

[mcwoodduck]

There is a noticeable difference in Outfitter cost between the two States.
 
 I'm not a trophy hunter so I prefer Doe or small buck anytime. I don't even have a place to hang up a set of antlers.
 
I'm not sure how my Version of Homeland Defense would react to half a dozend deer bodies in the truck I'm guessing it would take a long time to get that squared away and my freezer is not big. Two deer would be plenty for us.

I knew a guy in NC that shot his 5 or 6 deer a year, his wife shot her 5 or 6 and he got a couple more in bow and front stuffer seasons.    He never bought beef, and had a phesant game farm so never bought Chicken either.  Some othe hte hunters did not take their game. 

[Land_Owner]

Land mass:

North Carolina    53,818.51 square miles (sm's)
South Carolina    32,020.20 sm's

NC is 70% larger than SC.  Larger land mass potentially equals more deer.

I have hunted the Western Piedmont of SC (Union County) for the past 19-straight seasons.  It annually costs me $100 for a 10-day non-res. hunting license, $75 for a non-res. big game license, and $20 for four (4) doe tags, a seasonal total of $195 for 10-day license/permit/tags.  I may take up to 5-antlered bucks max., 2 deer per day max., 10 deer per season max. provided the deer participate in full, which has NEVER been a reality.  I killed 8 deer in 4 days this past season though...altogether not bad at all.

[mannyrock]

 
    I don't know how things stand now, but a few years ago, South Carolina had the longest deer hunting season in the U.S.  It literally went for months.
 
    West Tennessee is also crawling with deer, with pretty long black powder and rifle seasons as well.   When I moved away from there 7 years ago, you could take up to 23 deer a year, depending on the seasons and tags you hunted.   Five or six deer a year for a hunter was not considered unusual.  If you can find some private land to hunt on in Fayette County, about 30 miles west of Memphis, or Bolivar County, about 60 miles west of Memphis, you will kill alot of game.
 
    I owned a 45 acre farm in Fayette County for 14 years (three miles south of the town called Macon.)    One week, my wife killed four bucks, just by walking to the back 20 acres and shooting from the same big tree stand every morning.  (I had planted a half acre of Imperial Whitetail clover, and it was knee high.)   She let all of the does go, until late in the season.  Fayette County has lots of deer because there is almost no public land whatseover, and there are still lots of huge rowcrop farms, with hardwood swamps mixed in between.
 
  Best, Mannyrock
 
 

[BBF]

Thanks for the replies, I'll be thinkin' it over.

[minecreek127]

A guy was telling me in SC you hunt for several mos. and can kill one a day or more . Not sure if true but that's a lot of deer. 

 It depends.

In most of the lower part of the state there is essentially no limit whatsoever on bucks. Technically you could start out on opening day (August 15th) and take as many bucks a day as you wanted all the way through to Jan 1 when the season ends.

 In the upper part of the state the season is shorter (starts Sept 15th archery/Oct 1 muzzleloader/Oct11 firearms) and there is a 10 deer limit with no more than 5 bucks per year.

 In a couple small areas of the state the seasons and/or limits are different than the two primary seasons.

 In the Low Country, where they have the longer seasons, the amount of public land is somewhat limited compared to the Up State.  You have a large swath with the Francis Marion National Forest, but even parts of it is restricted to certain kinds of hunting. There is far more public land in the UP State with the Sumter National Forest, and numerous small tracts, but in both cases the majority of the land is private or hunt club land.

 As for the population, it wouldn't surprise me if North Carolina had a higher overall population because they are a much larger state, but we harvest more deer.  In 2010 NCD had their second highest harvest ever with around 175k deer.  In 2011 we harvested 226k, which is a 30% decrease from what we killed in the 1980's and 1990's. 

 If you are seriously interested in hunting SC I would suggest going to the SCDNR webpage http://www.dnr.sc.gov/ and finding the email for Charles Ruth.   He is the deer and turkey guru for SCDNR, and is extremely accessible, and will likely send you any information you desire.

[mannyrock]

 
   Great Post MineCreek.
 
    When I was at the hunting camp in SC, one guy killed three spikes in one day, and nobody said a word.
 
  Mannyrock

[BBF]

   .
........................ one guy killed three spikes in one day, and nobody said a word.
 
  Mannyrock

Umm, that post could be taken in two different ways.

[SHOOTALL]

well Va has seven weeks East of the Blur Ridge mts and 2 weeks West of it. A lot of public land west and enough east. You 2 a day ,can take 3 bucks and 84 deer total in the east if you buy doe bonus tags as you go and they keep issuing them. But like landowners stated the deer here seldom cooperate .
 
 Think about that 168 back straps in the freezer

[BBF]

This reminds me of an oldtimer I met many years ago in the Cariboo Region of British Columbia. He was reminiscing about the fact that you could shoot as many as ten deer just within a 10 minute drive from the little town he lived in. At the time I talked to him you were lucky to see one solitary deer on that particular hill and he couldn't figure out why.

[Land_Owner]

SC continues to conduct public surveys in regard to proposed legislation to enact restrictions on the number of deer allowed to be taken and the creation of additional revenue in an ailing economy.  There was statewide legislation under consideration last year that was not enacted but would have a.) limited the number of bucks per person per season, b.) established a tag/fee generation system per buck taken, and c.) required contact with the SCDNR for each buck taken.  Over time, through "desensitizing" of the Public, legislation of this nature has a greater potential to be enacted.  The State DNR sees the numbers which indicate the "Pareto principle" is active and 20 percent of the deer hunters harvest 80 percent of the deer; some few hunters in the low country indicated as harvesting in the 100's.

[SHOOTALL]

This reminds me of an oldtimer I met many years ago in the Cariboo Region of British Columbia. He was reminiscing about the fact that you could shoot as many as ten deer just within a 10 minute drive from the little town he lived in. At the time I talked to him you were lucky to see one solitary deer on that particular hill and he couldn't figure out why.

We don't have that problem , the cities are full of deer many in Va. offer bow hunting seasons in city/town limits . The dept. of game use air guns to dispatch them some say. I often see 10-15 deer come by on deer drives. It's nothing for farmers to get tags to shoot at night and year round. The deer often eat an acre of beans a night . It's funny to hear people in places with lower populations talk of how noble deer are and such majestic game animals etc. here they are often consider pest no more majestic than a rat. In the old days farmers would gut shoot them with a 22 mag. so they would go off and die. That's not a good practice for sure but it illustrates the magnitude of the problem.

[minecreek127]

We don't have that problem , the cities are full of deer many in Va. offer bow hunting seasons in city/town limits . The dept. of game use air guns to dispatch them some say. I often see 10-15 deer come by on deer drives. It's nothing for farmers to get tags to shoot at night and year round. The deer often eat an acre of beans a night . It's funny to hear people in places with lower populations talk of how noble deer are and such majestic game animals etc. here they are often consider pest no more majestic than a rat. In the old days farmers would gut shoot them with a 22 mag. so they would go off and die. That's not a good practice for sure but it illustrates the magnitude of the problem.

 Yes, in places here it's like that.

 I used to belong to a club for one season where the majority of the property was farmland. One of the landowner's requirements was that we could not put any restrictions on the harvest.  If it walked he wanted it killed, as they were eating him out of house and home.

 We ended up killing as a club over 70 deer on his 375 acres and we still lost the lease the next year because we did not kill enough to satisfy him.

[Land_Owner]

Balancing farming interests against deer hunting interests will always be the legislature's playground.  Numbers count and acreage is one such measure.  Were I a farmer, not a hunter, making a family living off of the (numbers count) acres of bean seed I paid for, scraped the ground bare to receive, fertilized, limed, planted, anticipated a financial wind-fall profit from, and the critters were eating it as fast as it germinated, I too would want eradication of the beasts to protect my blood, sweat, tears and financial interest in the crop. 

Farmers supplementing financial crop damage losses through hunting lease income on properties less than but not equal to the legislatively proscribed minimum number of acres and expecting pro-rata results, i.e. less animals equals more crop, in a wild procreating deer population that is seasonal hunted in daylight hours is doomed to failure from the start.  Legislation stipulates the minimum number of acres to "qualify" for tags, eradication hunts, and other "special interest".  If the property is too small, the "favor" of the State's benevolence is not granted.

Eradication means HARD hunting; Game Commission permission/perhaps participation; minimum threshold numbers of required acreage; legal spotlighting; Summer hunts; Fall hunts; Winter hunts; Spring hunts; multiple hunters each hunt (10-20 isn't extreme).  Who does this these days?  The Game Commission (GC) knows.  Certainly most Wildlife Biologists and GC LEO's have trained by participating in one or another of these hunts and not just for depredation.  Teaching morphology and biology, studying diseases, and interests of like import are within the State's jurisdiction.

Being small sucks. 

[D Fischer]

I am not sure,
But I can tell you the NC hunting license for out of state is about $140 for a 6 day license & $10 for a public land pass.  My last one had a big game tags for 2 bucks, 2 does, and 2 options (either antlered or anterless) for a total of 6 deer.
My guess is if SC has a similar amount of deer on the tags then they have the same or more, of they offer less then I would say they have fewer deer.

$10 for a public land pass? You have to be kidding! I guess that if your a non-resident just passing thru you have to have a pass to get out of your car in a rest area?

[SHOOTALL]

In Va. the land pass is Federal , National Forest . Of course there is one for state forest also. Passing thru. is free unless you speed or litter    Then you will follow the instruction on the road side sign "KEEP VA. GREEN" no not trees green backs paid in fines....................
BTW if you travel in Va. and use I-295 around Richmond and Petersburg DON"T SPEED !

[BBF]

I wish to digress slightly.
 In a very recent Canada Yahoo Poll  the question was asked: "Do you still feel safe traveling in the USA."
 
Almost 40% replied with NO.

[SHOOTALL]

Well BBF I have lived here all my life and there are places here I don't feel safe traveling thru. Mostly places that restrict my having a gun. In those places the criminals know we are unarmed and a good target.

[BBF]

Traveling via car marks you as a visitor on the spot and since we seldom bring firearms into the USA and even less so handguns we are easy victims.

[minecreek127]

Balancing farming interests against deer hunting interests will always be the legislature's playground.  Numbers count and acreage is one such measure.  Were I a farmer, not a hunter, making a family living off of the (numbers count) acres of bean seed I paid for, scraped the ground bare to receive, fertilized, limed, planted, anticipated a financial wind-fall profit from, and the critters were eating it as fast as it germinated, I too would want eradication of the beasts to protect my blood, sweat, tears and financial interest in the crop. 

Farmers supplementing financial crop damage losses through hunting lease income on properties less than but not equal to the legislatively proscribed minimum number of acres and expecting pro-rata results, i.e. less animals equals more crop, in a wild procreating deer population that is seasonal hunted in daylight hours is doomed to failure from the start.  Legislation stipulates the minimum number of acres to "qualify" for tags, eradication hunts, and other "special interest".  If the property is too small, the "favor" of the State's benevolence is not granted.

Eradication means HARD hunting; Game Commission permission/perhaps participation; minimum threshold numbers of required acreage; legal spotlighting; Summer hunts; Fall hunts; Winter hunts; Spring hunts; multiple hunters each hunt (10-20 isn't extreme).  Who does this these days?  The Game Commission (GC) knows.  Certainly most Wildlife Biologists and GC LEO's have trained by participating in one or another of these hunts and not just for depredation.  Teaching morphology and biology, studying diseases, and interests of like import are within the State's jurisdiction.

Being small sucks.

 Yes it does.

 Sad thing is the land owner had depredation permits and maxed them out.  With that and us killing deer a lot of us were not comfortable killing it didn't really make a dent in his eyes.