Hunting
Squick warning for the anti-hunting contingent: this is about killing a deer.
We have 80 acres in an area with a serious overpopulation of white-tail deer. Good management requires controlling population to protect the resource--their food supply. Thus, we gave two people permission to hunt on our land, with all kinds of restrictions which they cheerfully accepted. One is a neighbor; the other lives across the county and his ranch has no deer habitat. We definitely do, as the abundance of tracks shows.
Well, our neighbor-hunter bagged a big doe that we've all seen for several years. Nice clean shot, early morning, down by the secondary drainage. He brought us some breakfast sausage therefrom. He is going to try for another one, as we could stand to lose 2-4 does this year. More will move in, but we need to keep the numbers to what the land will stand.
He told us that there are a lot of wild hogs (non-native and a serious pest) up on the Lampasas, about 12 miles north. We agreed that we'll both be watching for hog sign and that aggressive hunting will take place if they move in. The last thing I want is a feral sow farrowing in the creek woods...we'd lose half the resource in a year. (Wild hog behaviors increase erosion, damage vegetation, and make wandering in the woods unsafe for the person who isn't alert and prepared to shoot. I've been chased by a domestic sow with piglets--don't want that in my woods.)
We have 80 acres in an area with a serious overpopulation of white-tail deer. Good management requires controlling population to protect the resource--their food supply. Thus, we gave two people permission to hunt on our land, with all kinds of restrictions which they cheerfully accepted. One is a neighbor; the other lives across the county and his ranch has no deer habitat. We definitely do, as the abundance of tracks shows.
Well, our neighbor-hunter bagged a big doe that we've all seen for several years. Nice clean shot, early morning, down by the secondary drainage. He brought us some breakfast sausage therefrom. He is going to try for another one, as we could stand to lose 2-4 does this year. More will move in, but we need to keep the numbers to what the land will stand.
He told us that there are a lot of wild hogs (non-native and a serious pest) up on the Lampasas, about 12 miles north. We agreed that we'll both be watching for hog sign and that aggressive hunting will take place if they move in. The last thing I want is a feral sow farrowing in the creek woods...we'd lose half the resource in a year. (Wild hog behaviors increase erosion, damage vegetation, and make wandering in the woods unsafe for the person who isn't alert and prepared to shoot. I've been chased by a domestic sow with piglets--don't want that in my woods.)