Never thought of this until today…Is a fawn considered an anterless deer?

[osu007]

If it has spots not legal or ethical

But oh so tender and tasty. Got one in Mo. numerous years ago. Was told by my friend/relative/guide, after seeing a couple of spots, get it and run like heck. All I could see when I shot was the head. So I thought it was a doe. Man was it tender. I know I should be ashamed, but I wasn’t going to leave it. Also when we, group of 8, would hunt in Texas, we if we could take a fawn for camp meat. It was not wasted either. We would camp out/stay in an old rock house over 100 yrs old. That was back in late 60’s.

 

[Dorkus]

I'm trying to understand how shooting a fawn on the same day every year proves anything about the health of the herd?
There can be two to three breeding cycles with deer depending on the buck vs doe ratio.
If the ratio is skewed toward lots of does, they can be bred in October through January.
Fawns the following fall would be three different age groups.
If the guy has the perfect 1-1 ratio, He would only know that by doing spotlight surveys and counting deer which would actually be the method to determine if the deer herd was proportioned appropriately.
If he did the spotlight surveys and determined it had the correct ratio there would be no need to kill a fawn that has the potential to be a trophy buck.
Weight is also not a way to determine the health of a herd. Sickness of the fawn, younger or older bred, type of habitat/food sources all plays into the weight of a deer at any time of the year.
I just don't understand.

It took longer than expected but here is the article. I was just too tired to post it last night:

Credit to Drury Outdoors and DeerCast app. Posted by Zack Vucurevich



DeerCast Daily: Why Fawn Harvests are Okay



Here we have one of those topics people often get up in arms about.

This is a conversation I often have with my clients when I am consulting. Being a biologist, I’m a stickler for data. When discussing what data should be collected at the skinning shed, I always recommend either live weight or dressed weight (it doesn’t matter which one, just be consistent), date of harvest, age (tooth-wear/replacement method), and whether or not she was lactating if it was a doe.

Then, in the spirit of data, I follow that up with the proposition of utilizing an antlerless tag in order to harvest a fawn or two each year. This is almost always met with a certain amount of trepidation and distaste until I give them the old elevator pitch for fawn harvest. Then it is met with a little less distaste, but also a fair degree of understanding.

Fawns are The Best Litmus Test for Your Deer Herd

A newborn whitetail fawn weighs between six and eight pounds. For most of the whitetail’s range, a majority of fawns will hit the ground somewhere between the last week of May and the first week of June. Between that time and their first winter, a fawn will weigh anywhere from 50 to 70 to pounds. To put this into perspective; can you imagine a 70 pound six-month-old human baby?

The rate at which that young deer is able to grow is directly dependent on the quality of habitat available. To complicate this seemingly straightforward equation, new evidence is coming to light relating the health of the doe while that fawn is in utero, to the growth potential of that fawn for the rest of its life! This means that just because you have awesome food plots pumping out forage from spring time through December, but your late winter nutrition availability is marginal, those fawns will never grow at the rate you would expect them to, due to the doe's stress and malnourishment during those winter months.

This is why by harvesting a fawn or two during the season and getting the weight recorded is so important. With growth rates like that, it’s easy to see why fawns are the most susceptible members of the herd to poor quality habitat, even if that gap in nutrition availability occurs before the fawn ever hits the ground. The key to keeping tabs on the health of your deer herd is consistency. Because the fawns are growing so rapidly, it is important to be consistent when you plan to harvest your fawn(s). If you wish to target them during early archery season, stick with that approach. If you prefer to wait until late muzzleloader season, stick with that. If you are doing your job as a land manager, those fawn weights might look something like this:

Year	Live Weight of Fawn (lb)
2016	52
2017	59
2018	65
2019	69
2020	68
2021	59
2021	61

In the example above, the weight of fawns was increasing nicely over the years before hitting a plateau between 2019 and 2020. In 2021, you will notice a drop-off in live weight that was alarming enough to go out and harvest a second fawn in order to confirm my suspicion – something is happening to my deer herd! Could this have been a result of an abnormally harsh winter the year prior, resulting in the does being stressed? Or could it be something more serious, like an overabundance of deer on the property? Is the recent timber harvest starting to mature enough that the woody browse previously available to my deer herd is suddenly out of reach?

This is where being consistent with your data collection will pay off. Say the following year, those weights jump back up to 70 pounds. This would mean that the decrease last year was most certainly the result of a harsh winter, but if they were to remain low, you are now in a position to mitigate the issue, whether it be high deer numbers or lack of late season food sources.

Which Fawn to Harvest?

The answer here is really up to the landowner, with the most important factor being consistency. Early in the hunting season, it is far easier to distinguish a fawn from a yearling doe. With regard to body size, buck fawns also begin to pull away from the doe fawns in their cohort throughout the winter, so earlier in the season might be a better option if you aren’t going to be choosy about which sex you harvest.

I wanted to make a quick note about my thoughts on choosing to harvest a buck fawn or a doe fawn, as I know this is something you all have been thinking about. If you are a firm believer in genetics being a major influence on your property, you should consider harvesting the buck fawns, and here’s why.

Unless you are managing a 1,000+ acre tract of land, the mature bucks you harvest on your property were almost certainly not born on your property. This is because yearling bucks will disperse from the area they were born once their mother is getting ready to drop the subsequent year's fawns. This buck dispersal is the deer’s defense against inbreeding, and the distances these young bucks will travel to establish a new home range can vary wildly from three miles, up to some documented cases of over 150 miles! With that in mind, if you truly want your herds genetics to stay on the property for the next crop of bucks, you would be better off harvesting the buck fawn and allowing the doe fawn to remain on the property, as she won’t disperse and, therefore, the genetics of the local buck who eventually breeds her will remain on your property.

On the flip side of this equation is choosing to harvest the doe fawn. I would recommend this to anyone who is already overrun with high deer densities. While that fawn will likely not be bred the first winter of her existence, she will most certainly be ready to breed the following fall. So, if you are trying to decrease deer numbers, opt for the female fawn.

Personally, I do not believe it matters much whether you opt for a buck fawn or a doe fawn. They are more important for the real-time data you collect than they are to the future of the local deer herd. One or two fawns being harvested per season on your property is not going to make or break the health of the herd or throw a wrench in your management practices, but it will tell you whether or not your herd is trending in the right direction!

One other consideration I wanted to bring up was a situation where I would not recommend this practice. The most glaring situation is one where fawn recruitment is a concern. If your camera surveys and observations are leading you to believe your fawn recruitment is less than .75 fawns per doe, I would not recommend putting any more pressure on that particular resource. If you are at or above this number, please consider adding an extra layer of data to your record keeping!

What are your thoughts on fawn harvests?

- Zack Vucurevich, DeerCast Contributor