Ep. 496: Backwoods University – Mississippi Deer History, Part 2

00:00:05
Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast. I’m your host, Lake Pickle. And when we last talked, we were roughly 50 years into a story that started over 100 years ago, back in the early 1900s in the state of Mississippi. And that is the incredible story of the whitetail deer recovery after almost being wiped out due to habitat loss, market hunting, and a lot of other factors. This week is the final and, might I say, triumphant chapter of this story. I promise you it’s worth your time. Let’s get into it. Before we dive into this one, let’s do a quick, fast, and in a hurry recap so we can be sure that everybody is caught up. So, pre-settlement state of Mississippi had a healthy deer population, along with a lot of other healthy wildlife populations. Black bears, wild turkeys, quail, just to hit a few of the highlights. However, we fast forward to the early 1900s when Mississippi is a fairly settled state with a growing population, the lack of wildlife law, the growing number of market hunters, it was all beginning to take a toll. In 1929, the famed Aldo Leopold came down to Mississippi and did a wildlife report in which he reported a statewide whitetail deer population of 1,200 individual deer. FYI, that’s a scary low number. Like, almost wiped out low number. In the year 1932, a formal game and fish agency was established, thanks to the hard efforts of conservationists such as Fannie Cook and others like her for getting that across the line. Restocking and restoration efforts for deer started almost immediately. And my goodness, were they clunky with the side of trial and error. Bringing in deer from other states, such as Wisconsin, bringing in deer from Mexico, Michigan box traps, game wardens that had to supply their own gun and vehicle.

00:02:14
Speaker 2: It was full effort and full ideas. But you know what?

00:02:18
Speaker 3: It worked.

00:02:18
Speaker 1: By the year 1951, they had seen enough growth in the population that they had allowed some hunting to come back into the system. And to top it all off, they had had their first recorded harvest of a Boone and Crockett buck. And that’s right where we left off. And that’s also right where we’re going to pick up. Back with my friend William McKinley, the Deer Program Coordinator for the state of Mississippi.

00:02:39
Speaker 2: Here’s William.

00:02:40
Speaker 3: This deer herd has been steadily increasing for a lot of years. It’s had a few ups and downs, but it’s one of the greatest restoration efforts in the history of wildlife conservation is the deer restoration efforts in the southeast and particularly here in Mississippi.

00:02:56
Speaker 1: If you take someone, you get a little bit younger than me, someone that’s grown up and they’ve grown up hunting and they’re in their 20s or late teens, a very highly populated deer state is what they know. And to think about where we came from, it’s wild. It’s almost a foreign thought.

00:03:13
Speaker 3: It’s all they’ve ever seen. They went out and there were deer and they saw deer and they saw deer most times they went hunting. It used to not be like that, guys.

00:03:22
Speaker 1: Yeah. As y’all have heard me say on this show a number of times, you can’t truly love or appreciate something that you don’t understand.

00:03:29
Speaker 2: Not fully, anyway.

00:03:31
Speaker 1: And that’s a big reason why I find it so important to keep reaching back into history and digging up these old stories. It’s stories of wildlife history, stories of conservation, stories that truly show how far we have come as a hunting community. These are important stories, my friends.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: Very important.

00:03:48
Speaker 1: When we left off with William last time, he was just mentioning the first recorded Boone and Crockett buck that had been killed in Mississippi in 1951. And that’s right where this story picks back up.

00:03:59
Speaker 3: Shortly thereafter, there was another Boone and Crockett deer. He was found dead, but he was in Lowndes County. And he was a non-typical 205-inch deer found.

00:04:11
Speaker 2: Holy smokes.

00:04:12
Speaker 3: So, yeah. And so, suddenly some deer started getting old.

00:04:17
Speaker 1: So just in the 1950s, Mississippi had a recorded Boone and Crockett deer killed and a 205 inch deer non-typical that was found dead. Now, one thing that is very important to point out is that both of these deer died in areas where there had already been deer present. What I mean by this is that these big bucks weren’t getting killed in areas where new introductions or restocking efforts had happened recently. Rather, in areas that were already holding small populations of deer And when protection was added, some of these deer were able to reach older age classes. Now, I’m not saying that’s the only factor, but it was definitely one of them. Small side note here, but wouldn’t y’all like to have seen that first hunter that killed the Boone and Crockett buck? I just know it had to be a sight. And I also would bet my house that that buck got driven all around the county with the tailgate down.

00:05:09
Speaker 2: Anyways, let’s carry on.

00:05:11
Speaker 3: Now we’re going to move up to about 1960. Okay. And we’re beginning to deal with too many deer in some places already along the Mississippi River. So some of the clubs there in Washington, Bolivar County area, we’re already beginning to see some overpopulation effects. They allowed the first antlerless deer season that we had had since deer seasons began back in 1910. So now they’re allowing the harvest of a few antlerless deer, a few does getting killed. And that season they shot 163 does along a few clubs on the Mississippi River. It was controversial, to say the least.

00:05:55
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:05:57
Speaker 1: I imagine, because you go this so long of a stretch and no deer, low numbers.

00:06:01
Speaker 2: I still remember.

00:06:02
Speaker 1: I remember my dad, my uncle, and my grandfather, I remember they would call them doe days. Did you ever hear that?

00:06:10
Speaker 3: I grew up in the doe day era.

00:06:12
Speaker 1: Doe days.

00:06:12
Speaker 3: Yeah. You could never see a doe on those two days. oh i heard those stories too oh man i would hunt hunt hunt so hard it always failed during christmas holidays i was in grade school then and man i would hunt hunt hunt and i could never see a doe on doe day they’d close i’d see 20 and.

00:06:31
Speaker 1: See now it would be fun to go and talk to a few folks that hunt that are you know younger and say say something about a doe day but huh well you just Is that a day you feel like shooting a.

00:06:42
Speaker 2: Doe when the season’s open?

00:06:44
Speaker 3: The foreign top?

00:06:45
Speaker 1: So anyway, sorry, I digress. 163 does were killed along the Mississippi River.

00:06:52
Speaker 3: And their body weights were poor. Their body weight’s showing some of the old data I looked at, and you know, that’s what I do. I look at data. I love deer data. And looking at some of that data, those deer were quite small during that time. They were well underweight for what Mississippi River deer are today.

00:07:12
Speaker 1: For the record, in that first allowed doe hunt along the Mississippi River, mature does were weighing under 100 pounds. Compared to today, where a mature doe along the Mississippi River is on average going to be around 125 pounds. So when William says that their body weights were poor, he means it. But talk about a population that is picking up some serious steam. By the 1960s, you already have some areas that are dealing with populations that are flat out too dense. And another important detail. Just like the area where the Boone and Crockett buck had been killed and the 205-inch non-typical had been found dead, these areas where there were already deer populations that were too dense were also areas that already had deer. So it makes sense that they would be further along in their management journey than areas where there had been deer introduced or restocked in recent years.

00:08:02
Speaker 3: Over harvest of bucks and under no harvest of antlerless deer. Now, most of the state did not need to be harvesting does then by any means. This was very isolated and site specific. So you had these few properties that began to harvest a few antlerless deer. By the next year, they harvested 372 on some of those properties, antlerless deer. But These either-sex hunts, once again, they weren’t very popular, guys, but those areas were realizing the need for it, the deer. They weren’t seeing very many bucks. They were killing a lot of their bucks early, and we even saw this on some of our WMAs as late as the early 90s on Sunflower WMA, for instance. We were doing health checks in the spring just before my time, before I started, and could not find a doe that had been bred. So many of the bucks were getting harvested prior to the breeding season that we could not find a doe all the way looking into does everywhere. But we could not find a bred doe going all the way into July. I don’t know how many days, but most of the counties were operating under a week or less deer season with some of these areas that had deer, you know. this is one of the original areas that still had deer. So it was going to be in that one to two week window. Very short, certainly not the 141 days that you can hunt deer in Mississippi today. You know, we allow people to hunt deer 39% of the whole year. You can shoot a deer.

00:09:37
Speaker 2: I get it.

00:09:37
Speaker 1: And just, I mean, just this whole, like the whole, just looking at where we were and where we’re at now, it is, it is wild. It would be, man, I mean, obviously you can’t do it, but, It would have been wild to get a perspective of one of those guys to kill one of those first 163 does. You know, I mean, I would just have to imagine if you’ve lived all this time being a deer hunter and even when they say yes you can do that one of those guys that shot those does it probably felt like they were doing something so wrong.

00:10:06
Speaker 3: Oh you know that just felt dirty.

00:10:10
Speaker 1: Now The comparison I’m about to make is not apples to apples, but I do think this will draw a clear picture of what some of these hunters might’ve been dealing with back when that first doe hunt was put on the table.

00:10:20
Speaker 2: You ready?

00:10:22
Speaker 1: So in many areas in the country today, and in the Southeast here especially, turkey hunting is very culturally important. And in recent years, you may have heard the term turkey decline being tossed around. So humor me for a second and imagine somebody comes up to you leading up to the spring turkey season and says, You know what? The turkey numbers are actually too high, and we need to thin them out a bit. So this season, we’re going to have us a hen hunt. How many of y’all would be on board with shooting a hen turkey? Speaking just for myself here, I don’t think I could do it. I flat out don’t think I could do it. It would feel too wrong. It wouldn’t matter how many times someone told me it was the right thing to do. It wouldn’t matter if they told me it really needed to thin the numbers out. I just don’t think I could do it. And I think that some of these early deer hunters found themselves in a similar mindset. No matter what the science told him, it probably felt just a little bit dirty to shoot a doe back then, even though it was necessary. And also, I feel the need to emphasize that this supposed hen turkey hunt that I’ve mentioned is a complete fabrication in the name of making an example.

00:11:25
Speaker 3: I am by no.

00:11:25
Speaker 1: Means actually endorsing people go around and shoot hen turkeys.

00:11:29
Speaker 2: Please don’t.

00:11:30
Speaker 1: But anyway, let’s carry on.

00:11:32
Speaker 3: As we move on into a year later, 1962, where these either sex hunts began to expand a few other places. Claiborne County got included and the Knoxville National Wildlife Refuge got included. So it was serving as a refuge as well. Um, by the way, one of the longest standing deer herd data sets we’ve got is from the Knoxville National Wildlife Refuge. It’s just a great data set to watch over time. And, uh, It’s such a valuable asset to us to be able to look at that data and how the deer herd has changed over time. We move into 1963. So there’s a disease out there that many people hear the name of today, and it brings a complete different correlation. Like when I say anthrax. When I say anthrax, what do y’all think of right out of the gate? Anthrax?

00:12:24
Speaker 1: I don’t know about y’all, but when I hear the word anthrax, the first thing that comes to my mind doesn’t have anything to do with white-tailed deer or deer hunting. All I associate that word with is some sort of bioterror attack. Is William about to somehow tie anthrax to white-tailed deer in Mississippi?

00:12:40
Speaker 3: I’m absolutely going to tie that to deer. Before it was involved in any type of terrorist attack, anthrax, those spores… They actually came in, they think, in the 1700s into the Delta on some of the ships, some of the barges going up the Mississippi. And infected livestock were pushed off as they died, pushed off the barge. Wherever they landed, the spores would accumulate in the soil and eventually come up during perfect conditions, and we still see that. It’s still there. And it’s a few isolated places in the state, but Bolivar County has one of those populations around Beulah Island, around the Port of Rosedale. We had a breakout as recent as 2011, but it was quashed pretty quickly due to rain. So these spores are in the soil. They’re there insisted for decades and a perfect condition of usually it involves a drought and a flood simultaneous. How can you have that? Well, you have the Mississippi River at flood stage and you have Mississippi in a drought. The water starts receding. It’s mixed the spores up. It leaves them on the plants. And when the first deer or two start picking it up, it’s very fatal. Anthrax, it causes bleeding from the orifices, and it is fatal to the deer. And we only see it every few decades, thankfully. And it tends to be localized. tallahatchie la flora county’s found it but this particular happened in a high deer population around beulah island and they estimate 70 of the deer herd died holy smokes boom just like that uh they think it’s transmitted by biting flies like the big horse flies that are getting on deer at time of year they’re moving from one infected deer to uninfected they’re giving it to them and uh this anthrax was moving through that deer herd at a very rapid, but right down the road, you had another property that had been keeping there that had actually had some antlerless harvest and was taking deer herds down, and they had less deer on purpose because of a few antlerless hunts. They suffered very little mortality at all. Congregating those deer together and having very high densities, it just increased. It appeared to have increased that mortality rate from anthrax. We had another big breakout in the 90s, by the way, where some of our biologists that just recently retired worked that and An estimated 90% of the deer died on the island during that time. Good grief.

00:15:20
Speaker 1: And I bet the people that hunted around there probably scared them to death.

00:15:24
Speaker 2: They thought they were about to lose all they’d gained.

00:15:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they had. They had lost a lot. But the deer came back. Deer are so resilient, guys. Just a few of them, and they will repopulate. They’re increasing by… In a healthy herd, about a third a year increase. In a super healthy, some of these early herds, they were increasing by about half a year. And so in two years, population was doubling two to three years. So pretty awesome how fast they can grow in an area.

00:15:58
Speaker 1: Man, talk about a plot twist you couldn’t see coming. Of all the things, after several years of rebuilding a deer herd essentially from the ground up, they lose almost 90% of what they had gained from an anthrax outbreak. How crazy is that? One thing I do know from my own dealings with wildlife management and knowing several folks that operate in that space, you can never count out the wild factor, meaning that you’re trying to manage nature, and nature at its core is wild. And it can throw you curveballs that are virtually impossible to see coming. Case in point, this anthrax outbreak. However, thankfully, like William mentioned, white-tailed deer are very resilient and were able to bounce back. And one more cool little fact that William shared about this particular outbreak is that the people that hunted that area policed themselves into bringing their limits down. Meaning, they didn’t get a regulation put on them by the state. Rather, they took it to their own hands to not kill as many and allow the population to rebound. Hunters are the original wildlife conservationists.

00:17:01
Speaker 2: That’s a fact.

00:17:03
Speaker 3: So… We faced setbacks throughout this restoration efforts and overall continue moving. Those herds came back. There was still some deer there. Luckily, that was an isolated outbreak. But by the early to mid-70s, we’re beginning to get deer population, overpopulation issues in multiple areas. Some of these places that got restocked in the 50s are now beginning to see too many deer. And y’all mentioned doe days earlier. We didn’t. There were no doe days back then. It was, in many cases, you just harvested bucks, but you harvested any legal buck you saw. Let’s see here. Antlerless kills were ranging up to about 8,000, killing about 8,000 does in the late 60s. So continually shooting a few more antlerless deer a year. And as we keep moving, 1966… So what was that last deer population I mentioned, about 25,000? 25,000, yeah. And that was back in the 40s. That was right around the turn of 50. By 66, it was estimated to be 240,000. So, hey, that restoration’s working.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: Let’s focus in on that little detail.

00:18:19
Speaker 1: The estimated deer population right around the turn of 1950 was 25,000 individual deer. And I think anyone would agree that that was a win worth hanging their hat on, having come from 1,200 deer just in 1929. However, the wins just kept coming. By 1966, the estimated population was 240,000.

00:18:42
Speaker 2: Let that sink in.

00:18:43
Speaker 1: Regardless of hitting a few setbacks like anthrax outbreaks and whatnot, in that short amount of time, the populations had grown over eight times in size. I think it’s safe to say that the restoration efforts We’re working.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: Let’s put that in context. We harvested 279,000 last season. So we’re saying we harvested more deer last season than what the state had in 1966. I want to keep bringing that into comparison.

00:19:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. Because it sounds like a big number until you say that.

00:19:15
Speaker 3: Until you say that and you go, oh, yeah. By 69, we had an open deer season in every county, and the herd was estimated at 275,000 and the kill that year the harvest was about 26,000 deer so that would have been 69 so I was born in 74 so just before I was born and I harvested my first deer when I was a little guy I was seven years old guys and I’ll get to that in a minute when we get into the 80s so shortly before I’m born, the deer herd is we’re harvesting more deer than what were out there when I was born. So to think of that, to think of how many deer are out there now, it was hypothesized in 1970 by our agency, biologist folks, that the herd would eventually reach about a half a million deer and that harvest would level off at about 100,000 animals. Well, we kind of blew that out of the water. Yeah. As we’re now at one and a half million and harvesting well over a quarter million deer a year. Yeah. So by 1975, so the year after I was born, the herd has now doubled again and we’re at 500,000 deer. And still tracking up, still tracking up. Still no antlerless harvest in most of the areas of the state. Isolated individual areas allowing it still, like along the Mississippi River, a few of the refuge areas now.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: So you’re saying that there’s deer hunting in every county, but antlerless not. There’s deer hunting, but it’s buck only over most of the area. These numbers, when put in context, really are astounding. I mean, Just the fact that William pointed out that currently Mississippi as a state is harvesting on a yearly basis more deer than what was even out there in 1974 when he was born.

00:21:15
Speaker 2: What a wild stat.

00:21:17
Speaker 1: We’re going to progress forward with this, but before we do, we’re going to hear one of the most entertaining tales to come out of this entire history of whitetail deer in Mississippi. And I’m being dead serious.

00:21:28
Speaker 2: This is a humdinger.

00:21:29
Speaker 1: Clay Newcomb’s bear grease deer stories don’t have nothing on what William is about to share with us, and I hope y’all are ready. Let me give a little bit of context before he takes off. In that last little bit there, he mentioned that most areas in the state still didn’t allow any antlerless deer harvest, as in, you weren’t allowed to shoot does, with the exception of a few isolated areas with overly high populations. This story is about one of the first permitted doe hunts in one of these spots.

00:22:02
Speaker 3: Let’s talk about one of those. Leaf River. We’ve already spoke quite a bit about Leaf River. It was one of our first refuges. Deer were put there. They were put and then captured and relocated. It was one of the hubs, one of the sources, you know. Well, let’s call it a stopover point. But that herd keeps building on Leaf River. It’s building up. It’s building up. It’s building up. We began to allow buck hunting on the bulk of Leaf River, antlered buck only. And at that point, a legal buck had to have four inches or greater spikes.

00:22:38
Speaker 2: Was it pretty regulated?

00:22:40
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. It was regulated, but you could hunt. It was open hunting.

00:22:43
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:22:45
Speaker 3: But no does hunted on it. And hunters began to report, biologists at that point were talking to them, and they began to report, hey, you know, we’re seeing about nine does for every buck that we’re seeing. So, wow, his habitat was getting hammered. Body weights were down low. Our agency decided in 1965 to implement the first antlerless deer season in January of 1966 on public ground. Controversial again, to say the least, guys. But you got an opportunity to go shoot a doe for the first time ever. It was a little over 30,000, 33,000 to be exact, acres open to hunting. Mm-hmm. It’s advertised one day either sex deer hunt. One day. One day. One day. 3,311 hunters checked in. 3,311, guys. A hunter per 10 acres showed up to hunt on this antlerless hunt. So, think of the number of hunters there and then think of the hunting methods at the time. So, dogs were not allowed. It was all still hunting during that time. But, I mean… Wow, think if dogs were turned loose. But think of the weapon of choice at that time almost, I’m sure, was primarily shotgun and buckshot. Yeah. I’m sure that the guy that had the lever action 30-30 stood out. You know, I mean, he was like the, you know, wow, he got a rifle.

00:24:22
Speaker 2: Look at this guy.

00:24:24
Speaker 3: When the smoke settled, there was a line of cars from miles to check deer in. They’re checking deer in all day. And deer are coming in and they checked 322 deer. Actually come through the check station, pulled jawbone, weighed them, got all the data from them. And they’re still, it’s getting late at night and it’s well after dark and the line of cars is miles long to still check deer in. And they said, okay, this is enough data. Just go down to cars and see what they got and write it down. When the smoke settled, 904 deer killed in one day.

00:25:03
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.

00:25:05
Speaker 3: So that was not popular. It was popular for those that came. But after that, it was believed that that completely demolished the deer herd down there. Well, You know, I talked to one of our biologists. He was on that night and, you know, I heard some of his stories and he was like, you know, we thought we killed them all. That wasn’t what we was trying to do. We was just trying to get some deer taken out, trying to get them back in balance with the habitat and We were nervous. We were quite nervous. We’re sitting there. It’s midnight. We’re sitting there thinking across the table. None of us have left yet, and we said, okay, go hop in that old Suburban out there and grab a few of these old spotlights, and let’s go ride down the road and just see what we see. And they hadn’t went very far, and they had already counted 100 deer, and they said, oh, you think we’re going to be all right? So there was still a lot of deer left out there.

00:25:59
Speaker 2: I’ll tell you where my head went.

00:26:01
Speaker 1: All of us in here, I know, have gone through the process of weighing deer, cut out the jawbone, and all that stuff. Can you imagine pulling jawbones from 300?

00:26:09
Speaker 3: Yeah. You want to take a guess at what the one-year-old does we’re weighing? One-year-old does. Were they sub-50? No, they were 68. But the adult does, I mean, everything was in the 70s. Yeah. Adult bucks were running– three-year-old and older bucks were averaging, you know, 110, 115 pounds. Tiny. Tiny.

00:26:33
Speaker 2: Just tiny.

00:26:34
Speaker 3: Yeah. Remember, just– 25 years earlier, 30 years earlier, these were deer that came out of the Mississippi River bottom, a lot of them, and put there. And then overpopulation drive that down over those years. We’re still learning how to manage deer today. But they had a huge learning curve then of looking. And we still, you know, when we make recommendations, I tell a lot of our younger biologists that you’ve got to make folks believe the science. And they have to believe it to implement it. That was going on then just as well. People resisted to change then, and they still are now. I mean, that’s just our human nature. It takes a while. Many people want to see it for themselves, and I’m like that to a great degree. But that’s just one little excerpt in history there. But think of that. They estimate that they took half the deer.

00:27:34
Speaker 1: To be fully clear, the goal for those biologists at that specific hunt was indeed to take out about half of the deer due to the overpopulation. However, if you can’t tell by the comedy and outlandish nature of that story, I think every biologist that was present that day would tell you that none of them expected to take out half in a single day.

00:27:54
Speaker 2: I told y’all this was a.

00:27:55
Speaker 1: Humdinger of a deer story. Open hunting to the first ever doe harvest on public ground. One day, either sex deer hunt. 33,000 acres of hunting, 3,311 hunters check in. That’s roughly 100 per 10 acres. Miles of cars waiting to check in a deer. And when it’s all said and done, 904 deer killed in a single day. And remember, this took place at what was considered the ground zero for the whole deer restocking effort. It’s these kinds of stories in our hunting history that I believe are way too important and flat out entertaining to get lost over time. Think about how wild it must have been to have been there and experienced it. Think about how much has changed since then. Think about where we’re at now.

00:28:43
Speaker 2: It’s just too cool.

00:28:44
Speaker 3: 1970s. In 77, I harvest a 43,608 deer. 43,000. So to put into perspective, you know, we’re shooting 279,000 now. We were issuing deer camp permits back then. If you established a deer hunting camp, you got a permit through the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission.

00:29:12
Speaker 2: Is that where the name deer camp came from originally?

00:29:14
Speaker 3: I think so. At least for us, it is.

00:29:16
Speaker 2: Now, that’s a cool piece of trivia right there.

00:29:18
Speaker 3: Issue a deer camp.

00:29:19
Speaker 1: Admittedly, this piece of the story isn’t so much valuable for the wildlife science or wildlife management side, but it’s a dang cool piece of history for hunting culture. I myself, and probably a lot of y’all out there, have been going to, hunting in, being a part of, and hearing about deer camps since virtually my whole life. But I’ve never really questioned where the terminology came from. And at least for the Mississippi deer hunters, now we know. We can thank the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission for it.

00:29:49
Speaker 2: Deer camps. Who knew?

00:29:51
Speaker 3: By the late 1970s, 79, 80, y’all know what DMAP is, right?

00:29:57
Speaker 2: Absolutely.

00:29:57
Speaker 3: The Deer Management Assistance Program. Well, that was formed right after those deer camps were beginning to be issued. So we were seeing overpopulation issues in Kemper and Lauderdale and Knoxville County area and over a great portion of the state, but they were very high over in that part of the world. electric meals area, that little communities through there. We developed a research project, MSU and the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission, that would allow antlerless harvest on a property, and then the hunters would actually collect data from those deer and turn around and give it back so that they could make a more informed decision on your property. And right now you go, well, yeah, duh, we turn it in, we pull jawbones. Yeah, it was totally new then. so some of our biologists go there they’re having a meeting in Kemper County I hear the stories that they were in a station wagon and they left the station wagon running when they went in to talk because they were afraid that it was about to get hostile because they were going there to talk about harvesting does in east central Mississippi and uh it was uh Well, controversial again, to say the least. People are passionate about deer, guys. And that’s a good thing because look where it’s got us. So DMAP was birthed right there in East Kemper County on a few properties that are still in DMAP, by the way. Many of them are. That’s cool. That started then. And it began a program of an interaction between the Game and Fish Commission, the biologist with the Game and Fish Commission, helping to manage properties on an individual basis. And that continues today. And it’s been copied by a lot of states out there.

00:31:45
Speaker 1: To this day, you know, if I’m talking to another hunter that’s from a different state that’s not familiar, if I get on the topic of things that the state of Mississippi does as far as wildlife management that I’m proud of, you know, things that, you know, worth, this is worth a keynote.

00:32:00
Speaker 2: This is worth bringing up. I always bring up DMAP.

00:32:03
Speaker 3: It’s worth bringing up.

00:32:04
Speaker 1: Because it’s so incredible. Like it’s so incredible. I mean, one, it’s like kind of a proof’s in the pudding kind of thing. Like it’s like how well it has worked, but it’s in such a, it’s worked so well. And it’s so smart, you know, to break it down on a property basis and to, kind of break that wall between agency and hunter and making it where it works as a partnership, you know. But yeah, DMAP is, it’s incredible how well it’s worked. DMAP, which stands for Deer Management Assistance Program, was one of the best things to come out of this whole Mississippi whitetail deer comeback story. It was a vital part of the journey, as you just heard. One of the coolest parts about it, in my opinion, if you remember, think once again back to the Fannie Cook episode. I know I reference it a lot, But it’s kind of like the North Star for everything involving wildlife conservation and restoration for the state of Mississippi. But in that episode, we talked about how both Aldo Leopold and Fannie Cook noted that there must be a partnership, an alliance, so to speak, between hunters and the game agency. It was important when the agency was established. It was important through this entire restoration process. And this DMAP program is a very practical way of seeing this partnership play out. a co-op between hunters and game agency, working side by side, hand in hand, managing deer together. It’s awesome, plain and simple, and it still works to this very day. William even told me that he still works with a property that has been enrolled in DMAP since 1981. If that’s not proof that something works, I don’t know what is.

00:33:44
Speaker 3: Just a great program. And it has paid off with data that we had that no other state had, and we were able to better manage this deer herd. And so back on those restocking efforts, most folks don’t realize we were still restocking deer all the way up to 1980. Really? Yes.

00:34:06
Speaker 2: I had no idea.

00:34:07
Speaker 3: So when I got hired, I’m a district biologist in District 3, and I was covering the Delta area. And that included some of the hill line counties, and I’m over that area. And one of the law enforcement officers who was, I think he was a captain then, he has since retired. He had several years in then. But he had a deer. He took me to his house one day in Yazoo County, and he showed me a deer that had the original metal ear tag on it. that he harvested in Holmes County, legally, back in that time. That was one of the restocked deer when they opened season. It had little metal tags in their ears, little metal pinch tags, and he had it mounted there, and he had no idea at the time he harvested a really nice buck, and it was one of the original restocked deer. Bringing it to a personal issue, we hit 1980. Mm-hmm. restoration efforts coming to a close and my little seven-year-old self at the time six-year-old self had no idea what was going on on the big picture i just knew that dad was going to take me hunting and and we were hunting over in uh we were hunting in around macon in knoxville county between macon and brooksville big ranch over there that my uncle was the overseer on that stretched between Macon and Brooksville. I grew up hunting that. We, man, some of the best days of my life looking back in my early childhood were Christmas break. We were over there almost every day in his little blue Datsun truck with the hole in the floorboard. You watched what you dropped because it’d fall out on the highway. We would head over, we would hunt. And, uh, you know, I was, I was little, I mean, I was I took my first deer when I was seven years old, 20 gauge shotgun. I probably won 75 pounds soaking wet, even with my rubber boots on. So we’re sitting over there in a brush pile. I’m hunting with my uncle’s 20 gauge number three buck. And I had shot it a few times on the dove field with dad, you know, him being right there beside me. And the stock was too long. And so I had to tuck it under my armpit and lean down on it. And we’re sitting there in a brush pile over this big cleared field that they were converting for cattle. And they had windrowed everything up and we’re not far from the wood line at the end of the windrow. So they’re kind of walking around, coming into the field. They’d walk around the windrow. Dad’s sitting there with his old Remington automatic rifle that Hung about every second shot. We’re sitting there and a spike walked out. And he was within shotgun range. And Dad’s whispering, shoot him. Shoot him. And I aimed and aimed. And I’m not shooting a shotgun now. Aimed and aimed and aimed and aimed and aimed. And I pulled the trigger and rolled him up. And I had a biggest black eye where that gun hit me right there in the eye. I wore it with pride, guys. I sure did. I got my first deer, and I was tickled pink. But, yeah, from there started a career in this. I harvested a deer every year from that point forward. Some years just one, some years a few more than one. And since then, I mean, I still, I’m an avid hunter today, but that area, we grew up in Winston County. And I was between Louisville and Macon, and we had virtually no deer around the house then. We had a lot of ground to hunt, but this was the early 80s. And as I got into middle school, I would go out. I would start walking. I would find the deer track. I had a lot of land to hunt behind the house and neighbors. A lot of people let you hunt then, and that’s now lands leased up. But As I was moving through, if I found a deer track, I came back and told Dad about it. when I got to really go to get a chance at shooting something. But I tell y’all what, those deer behind my house knew they were hunted. So they’re like, he’s here again. Oh boy, I would sit and I sit on the ground next to a little pine somewhere, sit here, sit there, find for one cross since rain, sit there on it for three days and, you know, back and forth. And I’d come back telling dad I saw one. And just a different world now. you know, that same area of the world, we’re having trouble keeping them out of the garden.

00:38:40
Speaker 1: Just a little side note, and this is my own opinion, but I think we as hunters, anglers, sportsmen, ought to consider ourselves mighty lucky that we have individuals like William McKinley working in our wildlife agencies. I mean, let’s just think about that story he told us about his first deer. I dare anyone to listen to that and then try to tell me that that man is not passionate about deer and deer hunting cultures. I know it’s a bit of a digression from speaking just to the history of deer, but at the same time, I think about where we could be if it weren’t for people like William with that amount of clear passion for natural resources working in that space every single day. I think it’s important that we remember that. Even in present times, I personally have never met a wildlife biologist, conservation officer, or anyone working within a wildlife agency for that matter that wasn’t there because they loved it. Anyway, moving on.

00:39:36
Speaker 3: We’ve come a long way. So as we start moving, and I ran the numbers, so we got some pretty good estimates starting in the early 80s on population numbers for Today, we use a method called population reconstruction. We’re able to use that because of the DMAP program and gain an age-related data across the state. And then we apply that to our survey. Many of the listeners out there in Mississippi may have gotten a survey. And we typically do it in May or June. And we survey 5% of the licensed hunters. We’ve been doing that since the early 80s. And we ask them how many deer they harvested. That’s very important data for us. It used to be a mail survey. Now it’s a phone survey. But we gain that data to see what the total kill, total harvest statewide was. And so we back up to the 80s. We were below up until 1991. The population was less than a million deer. Now, a million deer is still a lot. It’s a lot of deer. We were in the 700,000s, then the 800,000s, then the 900,000s. In 1992, we estimate the population was at about a million deer. So, the other thing we look at is, based on this survey, what percent of the deer herd are we harvesting? Okay. What I found through looking at this data, kind of the, let’s call it the sweet spot, to keep a deer herd level in Mississippi was about 21 to 22 percent of the deer herd was being harvested by licensed hunters. Now, that’s a key thing there because we’re not surveying the folks under 16 and over 65. We’re just surveying licensed hunters. Gotcha. But around that 21, 22 percent mark. And we will see that herd, if we got up there at 23, 24% of the population was harvested, it would trickle down just a little. It would drop by 1 or 2%. If we hit 18, 19%, it would increase by a few percent. Back then, we were harvesting 22, 24, 21, 23. This was all through the 80s and 90s. We were harvesting in the around 20 to 22% of the population. And the herd was very slowly growing, slowly. So that by the time we hit 2,000, we’re up there about 1.3 million deer. And it’s starting to, it’s still slowly increasing. Well, y’all may have heard that we’re making a push lately to try to get hunters to try to take a few more deer. Our agency, you know, I’m one of the ones kind of spearheading that. Because when you start looking at the mid-2000s forward, we started harvesting less than 20% of the total herd every year. So we’re down there at an 18, 19%, 17%, and then even hit a few years in 2017, 2018, where we harvest 13 and 14% of the total population. We’re seeing deer herds start to increase. They’ve always been increasing, okay? They’ve been slowly trickling up, but that rate of increase appears to be growing.

00:43:04
Speaker 2: Growing. What a pendulum swing.

00:43:07
Speaker 3: I know. What a pendulum swing. I can’t see a deer track. I have to drive all the way to the Mississippi Delta just to try to go hunt a deer, and now I can’t keep them out of my garden.

00:43:17
Speaker 1: Leupold estimated 1,200 deer in the entire state.

00:43:21
Speaker 3: Less than 100 years ago.

00:43:24
Speaker 2: That’s almost like one lifetime ago.

00:43:27
Speaker 3: That’s crazy. And now here we are at harvesting about the past few years have been about 16% of the population, meaning that population still going up. We’re at about one and a half million deer. And we need hunters to take just a few more deer. If they’re not reaching their bag limit and the average hunter out there, y’all want to take a guess? What’s the average hunter harvesting based on that survey I mentioned?

00:43:58
Speaker 1: One?

00:43:58
Speaker 2: Right in the middle.

00:44:00
Speaker 3: One and a half, 1.6. But if you go back to the early 2000s, that number was 2.2. So we’re not asking for drastic changes, but from individual hunters, we’re asking them to, you know, if you’re not reaching your bag limit, then take another deer. One Mordoa person, if you’re not already harvesting them, we’re not telling you to shoot over the bag limit. But the bag limit is five in most of the states. So we are asking you to, if you’re just that average hunter that is shooting one or two deer, then make that two or three. this upcoming season.

00:44:36
Speaker 2: You know what going for the bag limits this year.

00:44:40
Speaker 3: So uh but you know i i joke around a lot of times this restoration effort has been too good in places uh but isn’t that a good problem to have uh so guys i i’ve made a little presentation about a decade ago i’ve given a lot that’s called the value of deer in mississippi how important a resource is this the 80s when i’m i’m a little guy I grew up in a rural community of Winston County, and lots of people had a pig. They kept a pig, and our families together went in to have a steer on somebody’s pasture or a heifer that they butchered, and now deer have virtually replaced that as a meat source. 279,000 deer equals over 10 million pounds of venison. Wow. So you start thinking, there’s only 3 million people in the state. how important a food source are we talking about i mean venison is the meat on my table we eat it we eat it a.

00:45:40
Speaker 1: Lot yeah we eat venison and then if we buy beef we buy it from that pasture cattle place here in the state i mean it’s all everything comes out of mississippi.

00:45:49
Speaker 3: Yeah that’s great uh but i i put in my presentation that Deer replaced the backyard cattle and pig pen because now people can walk out back. And I got 20 acres in Choctaw County and I took a couple of deer off of it last year. You’re able to do that here, there and yawn and stock that meat for the freezer. And granted, it’s incredibly healthy meat. Venison is very lean. It’s very. As far as red meats go, it’s one of the most healthy out there. So we eat a lot of it. So how important is this resource to us today? I look at my job as a state deer coordinator as I’m in charge of that, you know. And we make the best informed decisions we have with the data. We make recommendations quite often. We’re making recommendations to policymakers. And then that is taken and implemented out there. But I mentioned earlier, people are passionate about deer hunting. That’s a really good thing. People tend to be resistant to change sometimes. But, hey, look at where we’ve come. Look at now. For years, we’ve been harvesting more does than we are bucks now. And so you mentioned shooting a doe in 1980 in Kemper County. And our biologists were worried they were not going to make it out of the meeting. I mean, literally, that’s where we’ve come in 40 years. And now over half the deer were harvested in their does across the state. But we still say in some places, a lot of places, we need a few more. Because we want to maintain long term what we’ve got right now. We’re beginning to get more and more urban animals. deer problem calls but we’re also getting calls from all over i mean cities all over the state right after i started i was at a national level meeting and some guys from the east coast maryland i think it was they’ve been fighting urban deer problems for decades and they threw up a picture a slide and it showed like a block of woods and it said good deer habitat And then they threw that same picture up 10 years later, and it was a subdivision with 10-acre lots. And it said, great deer habitat.

00:48:04
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:48:05
Speaker 1: And a guy made a joke one time. He said, if we can just talk turkeys into putting up with as much habitat-wise as deer do, they’d be in great shape.

00:48:13
Speaker 3: That’s right.

00:48:14
Speaker 2: Because deer are just like, you’re going to do what? Yeah, we’re good with it. We’ll figure it out.

00:48:19
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:48:20
Speaker 2: They just kind of keep going.

00:48:22
Speaker 3: Well, they live from the equator to the boreal forest of Canada, man. They can survive it almost anything. They figure it out. From key deer to deer in upstate Maine that are weighing 300 pounds on the hoof. Yeah. Yeah.

00:48:36
Speaker 1: But again, I mean, look, if we even talk about the tone of the conversation when we started to the tone of the conversation now where he’s talking about Flowers getting eaten at the front of the building.

00:48:47
Speaker 2: I mean, just look at the pendulum swing.

00:48:48
Speaker 3: I know.

00:48:49
Speaker 2: It’s wild.

00:48:51
Speaker 3: It’s good to sit and tell this story because so many of the people out there that are hunting right now, avid hunters, they have no idea where this population was even, you know, when their parents were born or especially when their grandparents were born and seeing how this deer herd has changed. And I got to say, I work with agencies. And I’m going to brag on them. The Game and Fish Commission and the bottle just before me and law enforcement officers before me they’re the reason we have this today and i mean i tell y’all again i work with some great people and i would put up against anyone any agency out there they’re passionate and they’re hunters and practically every one of our ball just are avid hunters it takes your fanny cooks your bill turcotte’s your early game wardens that were having to supply their own gun and vehicle to trudge through what they trudge through to get to the data where we’re at now to be able to you know manage this herd based off of scientific data and and numbers for y’all to go off of and demap programs and just yeah it is it’s crazy to look at where it’s at now compared to where it’s been Every generation of that restoration has faced its own challenges. We face more challenges today. We face challenges with disease. We face challenges with. deer complaints who’d have thought that in the 1970s we have taken this herd from very few deer to then a buck only harvest of shooting everything it had an antler to then picking up and starting to harvest a lot of does and now to letting bucks get some older age on them and seeing what they can potentially peak out and just we’re in that tweaking mode we got to tweak it a little we need to take it down a little uh on the total number but Man, what a great resource.

00:50:49
Speaker 2: Incredible.

00:50:50
Speaker 1: I mean, it makes me, a story like that, it makes me proud of the hunting community. It makes me proud of this state. And it’s just such a cool story.

00:50:57
Speaker 3: Well, I gave a lot of the credit to the agency, but those early hunters where those lands were, deer were restocked on. If Ada went ahead and took those deer then, we still wouldn’t have what we have. So I cannot not recognize, I have to recognize the hunters in this state who have conformed when science was put before them and they saw it and they recognized it and they implemented it and said, hey, you know, there may have been a little resistance to change at the beginning, but they changed and they implemented best science techniques and when to harvest, we’ve changed our season structure, but the hunters in this state have proven they know how to manage deer and they can manage deer. So landowners and deer managers across this state are to be commended in what all they’ve done.

00:51:46
Speaker 2: What a cool story. I’m glad. Thank you for telling it.

00:51:49
Speaker 3: Oh, you’re welcome. I enjoyed telling it.

00:51:51
Speaker 1: If a story like that doesn’t fire you up, I don’t really know what to tell you. And I’m going to throw out a little bit of advice that nobody asked for as we wrap up this episode. This fall, when you’re hanging a tree stand, putting out a trail camera, climbing into a tree, or Lord willing, dragging a deer out of the woods, maybe take a few minutes to think about where we have come from as a hunting and wildlife conservation community. Personally, the more I learn about this kind of stuff, the more old conservation stories I hear, I can tell you the effect that it’s had on me. I find myself just all the more grateful that we’ve got this resource at our disposal.

00:52:28
Speaker 2: Man, what a life we’re blessed to live.

00:52:37
Speaker 1: I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Grease and This Country Life. It means a whole heck of a lot to all.

00:52:44
Speaker 3: Of us over here.

00:52:45
Speaker 1: If you liked this episode, share it with a friend this week, or family member, or deer hunting buddy, or someone who’s not that great at deer hunting, but they try hard.

00:52:53
Speaker 2: Doesn’t matter.

00:52:54
Speaker 1: And stick around, because even though we just closed the chapter on this deer hunting history series, there’s a whole lot more on the way.