Thinking Year-Round

If you look back through some of the most popular whitetail hunting books written during the 1960s, '70s and even into the '80s, you'll find plenty of good information about how to hunt deer, but chances are you'll find very little information about deer nutrition.

Back in those days, even when the experts wrote about the three key ingredients necessary for growing big bucks--age, genetics and nutrition--a lot of emphasis was placed on the first two, but the third was badly neglected. It was pretty much assumed that the deer we hunted were getting adequate nutrition through natural means, and the idea of boosting a herd's overall nutrition through supplemental feeding was practically unheard of.

Then, in 1975, the landmark book Producing Quality Whitetails was published by two Texas biologists, Al Brothers and Murphy E. Ray Jr. Today the book is considered one of the all-time classics on whitetail management. Among the many topics the book covered is nutrition and supplemental feeding. Nutrition might have been a badly neglected management key back in the old days, but today, if you were an alien from outer space and you landed on planet Earth for the first time, you would probably come to the conclusion that deer nutrition has been a driving force in deer management for at least 100 years.

Good management starts with keeping total deer numbers under control, and Brothers and Ray were the first to drive home this important concept. They discussed "carrying capacity" in depth and defined it as "the point at or below which a deer population can perform at maximum efficiency." Maximum efficiency means getting maximum nutrition from the available range. If the carrying capacity of the land is exceeded, then the herd will become overpopulated and the range will suffer. Even in the best deer range in the world, if the carrying capacity of the land is exceeded, the bucks on that range will decline in both antler size and body size because they will be getting less than adequate nutrition. Does will decrease in body size as well, and the average number of fawns they produce will go down.

We've all seen the result of overpopulation in many parts of the country, and today most of us work hard at trying to keep deer numbers in check by shooting more does. During the three decades that have passed since Producing Quality Whitetails was first published, whitetail management has made great strides in every area. By far, however, nutrition has become one of the most important aspects of any successful program. Today there are countless success stories being played out all across the whitetail's range, but one that really opened my eyes occurred right in my own home state of Georgia.