Should You Shoot Does Early in the Season?

Taking a doe early in bow season can actually improve your rut and the overall health of the herd. Photo by Nathan Yeagle.

Bow season is young, and shooting a doe has not even crossed your mind. You’ll get to that in a couple of months, after the rut and after you’ve tagged your buck.

Sound familiar? Probably, because that is the mindset of most whitetail hunters across the country. Spend early archery, black-powder hunts and the primary rut focusing on your buck, and then bust a doe or two (your legal limit) for the freezer after Thanksgiving until the end of the season. Harvest data from Michigan, for example, shows that almost two-thirds of the state’s deer season is finished before most hunters start tagging does after Nov. 25.

Is this the way to go, or should we shoot more does early?

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RUT INTENSITY

According to Chad Stewart, deer management specialist with the Michigan DNR, in regions with an overabundance of does, harvesting more skinheads early can provide a benefit for the deer herd and hunters.

“Intense doe harvest early in the season can help balance out the buck-to-doe ratio prior to the rut, which can intensify the rutting activity you see (in November and December),” he said.

If hunters thin does in archery or muzzleloader seasons in September and October, fewer remaining does will come into estrus around the same time in November or December. That increases competition among bucks, causing them to move more and harder in search of fewer hot does. Hence, your rut is more intense, visible in daylight and enjoyable.

BETTER FOOD AND HABITAT FOR DEER

Did you realize that a mature doe requires about 6% to 8% of its body weight in forage every day? That’s 6 to 8 pounds of food daily for one 100-pound doe just to live and breathe. For every doe you remove from the herd early in fall, when green foliage and browse are relatively plentiful, imagine how much forage you save for the remaining deer to eat later in the year, when food sources are more limited.

Managing the antlerless population in an area, which includes a healthy doe harvest early, is especially important if you hunt a raw woods-and-pasture habitat (no crop fields), where the primary food source for deer is native vegetation. Too many deer will eat themselves out of house and home. When and where the habitat is degraded, and forbs, foliage and browse are scarce, fawns, does and bucks will never express their full genetic potential, body and antler wise.

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SMART DOE HUNTING

From a pure hunting perspective, the early season is the easiest time to shoot a doe. The animals haven’t been pressured for a year. They haven’t seen many people in the woods or heard gunshots. They’re relatively calm as they walk and feed, offering good shots for archers and gimme shots for muzzleloader hunters. Although it’s generally not a problem to fill the freezer later in the season, especially with a rifle, there’s no doubt does are jumpier and more skittish then. A wary old doe can be harder to kill than a 5-year-old 10-point in December, especially with a bow.

The members of my little club in Virginia readily kill does with bows in October and muzzleloaders the first week of November, but we are smart about it. Nobody shoots a skinhead in our best areas, where we have had good luck tagging mature bucks in the past, or where we are getting images of a shooter 10-point during the season. Why risk spooking a target buck by stomping around his core area to retrieve a bow-shot doe, or with the boom of a muzzleloader? We have several designated doe-kill areas on the property where we go to fill the freezer any time of the season. Do that, and go ahead and shoot a doe or two in the next few weeks.