Shaman, you're contradicting yourself. In your first post, you complain about having too many deer and you don't know what to do with them. Several posts later, you say that the prior owner didn't have a problem because she let others hunt the property. You have it posted so only you can hunt there. There's nothing wrong with that since it's your land, but that is also the cause of your "problem". Let a few other trusted people hunt there and the population will go down to a sustainable level.
I'll attempt to explain. Back in 2001, I got the property-- just this time of year. There were deer on the property, but the pickings were rather slim. I also had a bunch of poachers. Most of these were leftovers from the previous owners' lax policy of letting everyone hunt. In the first year, I did everything I could to limit access to the property. Coincidentally, several neighboring properties changed hands about that time, and the new owners also started limiting access. Within a couple of years, we all had deer coming out of our years. About a decade ago, we started having trouble with poachers again. This time, it was neighbors up the road that shot everything they could just to be ornery. Within a year or so, all the deer were gone, and we had a couple of relatively dry years. Nowadays, we're back to a surplus. We've added an extra guy to our deer camp.
One thing I will tell you is that our success comes from two things:
1) We limit access to the property. Most of the deer taken on our property are taken by us.
2) We have fewer hunters on the property than most in the surrounding neighborhood. I figure the average around our parts is about one hunter per 20 acres during the Rifle Opener. We normally have 4 hunters on 200 acres.
