Deer Count

Sept. 15 2009

We finally got some rain, about 3.5 inches. Everything greened up quickly, and looks nice. I've been wanting to collect herd data on our deer population, so last week we've been conducting some "deer counts." It's pretty accurate if you follow all the guidelines for the census. Anyway, one of the reasons for doing this is so that we can harvest the appropriate amount of animals each year. This ensures that all the animals have enough to eat and are healthy and so on. I've contacted Texas Parks and Wildlife for some info and spoke with the wildlife biologist in charge of our area. She had some really good information. They can help us make management decisions and harvest amounts each year. To help with some of the quotas, we can get deer permits that allow licensed hunters to exceed their number of tags and and we'd get a longer hunting season. All of this requires detailed information on our animals, which we'd need to keep records of. These permits and extended seasons probably wouldn't take effect until next year, that's if we need it too. The biologist said she could come out and do a site visit sometime in November, but with the info we collect before then, she can give us some recommendations. She knows this area well because she does this stuff for Katherine and Kyle too. We're all sad about what happened to Friday. El and I can relate.