Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Australia Earth to Oz: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Over?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa7Ehl9UcHY&t=375s

So let me get this straight: Y'all got deer coming out of your orifices, and you can't figure out what to do?

This is not to throw shade on any of y'all, but it would occur to me that there is a solution here. I don't think many Americans realize that you're having the problem, otherwise we'd be happy to help.

Me? I'm kind up to my eyebrows with the long-legged rats myself. I own a 200-acre farm in the middle of cattle country in NE Kentucky. I've got to stay where I am and concentrate on the home front. I'm in a zone that allows unlimited antlerless harvest during a 5-month season. My only limit is my freezer space. As it is, I've got them coming up and peeking in the windows. However, I'm sure there are plenty of folks who'd love to come over and help out.

If you put together a package of cheap flights, decent accommodations, and a reasonable way to get trophies home, I'm sure the world would flock to your door.

That would make sense. They offer buffalo hunting in the Northern Territory to overseas hunters. The strength of our dollar (or lack thereof) helps keep the cost down.

Best of luck in all your endeavors. Remember that whitetailed deer, elk, bear, and buffalo were extirpated from Kentucky in less than a generation by Daniel Boone and his buddies. I'm sure you can solve this mess if you put your minds to it.

Yep, a lot of similarities between whitetails on 200 acres in Kentucky and an invasive species in the Australian outback.

There probably is. When I bought the farm, there were very few deer. The old lady that lived there had given everyone and their uncle access. Once I moved in and posted the place, the deer immediately started to come back. About a decade later, we had a really determined poacher move in up the road and for about 2-3 years we had miserable seasons. Once he got evicted, life got good again. Over the years, I've had to learn how to manage what I've got. The big lesson has been to limit access; one guy can wreak havoc. Take that basic truth and turn it on its head, and you have the nut of what I'm saying.

The moral as I see it is that if you stick to it, cervid numbers can be reduced rather quickly, and they stay down with reasonable maintenance. However, it isn't sport hunting alone that does the job. You need a concerted effort to knock the numbers down. The other trick is to make money off it. I trust the innate ingenuity and hospitality of the Australians to invent a good way to make this work.

One other thought: The Aussies are right about hunters not being the sole answer. Kentucky is a good example. We're crawling with deer in Kentucky, and they bumped my region up to Zone 1 20 years ago and kept it there. You can take as many antlerless deer as you want. However, that does not begin to cut it. Most hunters, residents and non-residents come in, shoot 1 buck and go home. About half of them take an extra doe. Once you get above 2 deer, most fellows are long since home with their freezers full.

There might be an element of not everyone wanting them wiped out, so they can continue to be hunted in the future, just like the buffalo in the Northern Territory.

There's a strong element of propaganda here too. There are those whose interests are in dismissing the role of hunting, especially hunting by those who aren't being paid to do it. Here in NSW for example, there are those who'd prefer that hunting was banned, even if that condemned the deer to death by poisoning or starvation. It is worth pointing out that the ABC, which produced that piece, is distinctly left-leaning, and not exactly an unbiased observer..

We have legal hunting of deer on private land and in State Forests (public land which is primarily managed for production of timber) but we have massive National Parks in which large numbers of ferals live and breed, where hunting's banned and very little control takes place. We've had campaigns to try and open access to those NPs to hunting, as they are just across the border in Victoria, but all sorts of so-called greens, anti-gun and anti-hunting types stopped that.

The situation is even more ridiculous with feral horses, which are all but protected in some of the National Parks. In fact in the Alpine NP, which was shown on that piece, the numbers of horses and the damage they cause are far more apparent than those of the deer. I hunt around teh fringes of this NP, and the numbers of horses, the piles of their droppings, the damage to tracks and waterways they do, are very obvious. Woe betide you if you knock one though. Equally foolish, there are feral dogs in those same areas, but in the SFs adjoining the NP you aren't allowed to shoot them either - even though there is active 1080 (poison) baiting going on. This stuff makes no sense at all.

It really isn't that hard to manage the deer. Hunters can and do play an effective part in doing so. Let us into the NPs and we'll be happy to do it there too, limiting their current role as massive reservoirs of these and other ferals.

Ah, now it would seem we're getting to the nut of the problem.

Yep as usual dan has got to the point, everything the ABC publishes is politically driven

I noticed the video was made in a national park. Looks like hunting is banned in national parks over there, just like here. I'm not sure how that figures in Australia, but over here it's very difficult (politically) to get hunting allowed in national parks to control populations even when it's obviously needed.

We had the same problem in Rocky Mountain national park here, too many elk and they were degrading the habitat. Several options were floated including introduction of wolves and hunting. Wolves were not politically acceptable because the park is too small to contain them and they'd spread, affecting agriculture. Hunting was not politically acceptable to the tree huggers and people who don't understand where their food comes from.

So, culling by paid "expert marksmen" was selected because it was the only thing politically acceptable. We could have generated a lot of revenue by selling tags and allowing hunters to do the culling, but we ended up paying to have the elk removed using the same methods hunters would have used. Makes no sense when you look at it rationally but then again, rational thought rarely enters the picture in these things.

Most of the policies we all have to abide by are put together by public servants, most whom tend to lean to the left. The Politicians fear nothing as much as a loss at the ballot box. So decisions are made in order to pander to a non involved minority who have little or no idea about the real problems. Hell, every day is like an episode of that Brit show "Yes Minister".

They had too many deer at nearby Selfridge ANGB. They had to bring in USDA "expert marksman" there. The funny thing was, the head NCO in charge of security was an former Marine who'd been to sniper school, was an NRA Master and was Distinguished and P100. He could shoot circles around the people that they brought in.

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.

No...that is bullshit and whoever told you that is having a wank.