The Southern Home Bestuary: Living with our critter friends and enimies.

Whitetail deer         Thin numbers during season         Consume

Thinning deer provides good eats and helps the environment.

  Eating away at almost anything in the surburiban landscape, whitetailed deer are increasingly raising the ire of homeowners not only as shrub, plantings and garden destroyers but as a real hazzard to drivers. Each year there are over 100,000 accidents reported in the U.S. from deer-vehicle strikes and approximately 10,000 injuries and 100 deaths. Other negatives include the facts that deer ticks are vectors that may carry Lyme disease and rut-crazed bucks can, and have, attacked people.

  While most people don’t take such a radical view as to want  all deer  dead,  there is a need to control populations in confined or densely populated areas where large numbers of adverse deer-people encounters may be expected. For me a hunter, the obvious answer is to shoot a few every hunting season and consume them. I am fortunate that I live such a distance from anyone that I may use bows, crossbows or firearms to take my deer.

 For most people using firearms is out of the question, but there is the potential for using bows or crossbows from elivated stands to safely and quietly harvest deer. Because the hunter is always shooting down, this removes almost any possibility of an errant arrow going to some unintended location. A problem arises that even lung-shot deer will very often travel 30 yards, which may be onto another landowner’s property.

 It is often a good plan for those who own adjoining lots to form a hunter’s consortium, agree as to where the stands should be placed and that hunters can follow-up their deer onto others’ properties. It is nice if any deer taken is processed and the wrapped meat divided up among  the members who want it – even among those who do not, or cannot, hunt.

For more information on Backyard Deer Hunting consult the author’s blog with that title under hoveysmith.wordpress.com which will also tell about others author’s books such as Crossbow Hunting and Practical Bowfishing.  Backyard Deer Hunting  takes the reader through all of the steps from taking the hunter safety program to 50 recipes for cooking deer and other wild game. For a look at my outdoor books go to www.hoveysmith.com.