If you aren’t keeping track of the fawns living on your hunting property, it’s time to start and that means now. Fawns are the lifeblood of your deer herd.
Summer to early fall is the time to start taking a good hard look at your herd’s fawn production. The fawns have made it past the vulnerable new-born stage, have made it past the hay bines, and can pretty much outrun most predators. The fawns you see today will probably be around come hunting season and hopefully for years to come.
Trail cameras are a major plus when counting and don’t ignore doing plenty of woods field counting too. Knowing your fawn recruitment rate and having a well-educated trigger finger will help you keep your deer herd in line with the habitat they depend on.
Our friend and huntingpage.com contributor Craig Dougherty, would say – if a fawn lives to become part of the adult herd in late summer, we consider it to have been “recruited” into the adult herd. Craig passed last fall, but he’s done some amazing writing on this subject with his son Neil. Here is a great series on Fawn recruitment on wired2hunt:
from wired2hunt.com
If a fawn lives to become part of the adult herd in late summer, we consider it to have been “recruited” into the adult herd. Recruitment levels can be indexed by counting the number of adult does and comparing this to the number of “recruits.” If you count 1 doe and 1 fawn your recruitment index is 1 (about average). The same would be true if you count 10 does and 10 fawns. Ten does to 5 fawns the index is .5 (low). Ten does to 15 fawns the index is 1.5 (high).
Read more here:
From Ground To Gun: Herd Management Guidelines and Fawn Recruitment
