Hunters Needlessly Fret About Hunting's Impact on Buck Fawns

   Of all the many whitetails roaming and browsing Wisconsin’s forests, farmlands and lowlands, which deer do hunters most cherish and protect?

   Some would say it’s the mature adult doe, the species’ noble matriarch. Some gentle-souled hunters still consider it an act of sainthood to never shoot and eat “Mama Doe.” But if they sin, they’ll claim they fired only after verifying the doe was traveling alone, with no fawns depending on her for guidance and nourishment.

   Some hunters even claim they kill only the “dry doe,” or “old nanny” who’s too old to bear and nurture fawns. Their evidence? When field dressing her, they found no evidence of milk production.

   Still other hunters swear oaths to never shoot yearling bucks, those 18-month-old youngsters carrying their first pair of spindly antlers, whether they’re spikes or basket racks. By passing up these “teenagers,” hunters hope these immature bucks will grow into barrel-chested brutes by age 3½ or 4½, and weigh 200 pounds or more when field-dressed.

   But if this were the early 2000s, I’d argue that more hunters get uppity and protective about “next year’s buck.” Back then we often urged each other to “Let them go, Let them grow,” and ridiculed or ostracized those who didn't adopt that code.

   That isn’t the only reason hunters rally to protect buck fawns, aka “nubbers,” “nubbins” or “button bucks.” In fact, during the 1980s and 1990s, when Wisconsin hunters routinely killed 90% of each year-class of 18-month-old bucks, they often demanded the Department of Natural Resources reduce its antlerless quotas to protect more buck fawns. When wildlife-agency biologists resisted, saying does and fawns must be shot to control the herd, hunters weren’t having it.

     Contrary to popular belief, hunters do not shoot disproportionate numbers of buck fawns during antlerless-only seasons. Buck fawns typically account for 22% to 28% of the antlerless kill.     — Patrick Durkin photo

   Why? When hunters shoot 90% of the antlered bucks each autumn, every buck fawn is sacred. Without all those “bucks in the pipeline,” you won’t have enough spikes and 6-pointers next year.

   Guys like archery retailer Greg Kazmierski of Waukesha used to gather signatures and peddle petitions opposing antlerless quotas, antlerless-only seasons and especially four-day gun-hunts in October. They’d often claim without evidence that buck fawns made up half of the antlerless kill.

   Such claims are preposterous, of course. Fawns are basically born at a 1-1 male-female ratio. So, if you see three antlerless deer trotting past, it’s typically an adult doe, a doe fawn and a buck fawn. And if a group totals four antlerless deer, it’s typically an adult doe, her yearling doe from the previous year, and this year’s doe fawn and buck fawn.

   Either way, only one in three, or one in four, of those antlerless deer is a buck fawn. So, for buck fawns to total 50% of the statewide antlerless kill, hunters would have to identify and target them at least twice as often as they do female deer.

   But don’t take my word for it. At the turn of this century, concerns and conspiracy theories about buck fawns were so rampant that the DNR compressed over 36 years of research into a four-page brochure to assure hunters that we can’t kill too many of the little princes. The “Wisconsin Buck Fawn Harvest Fact Sheet” showed harvest data from 1964 through 2000. During those decades, buck fawns made up 21.6% of the antlerless kill, while adult does accounted for 59.4%, and doe fawns, 17.4%.

   Not surprisingly, hunters doubted the DNR. After all, back then the DNR often offered four-day “Zone T” gun-hunts for antlerless deer. The Zone T foes believed that gun-hunters in October were somehow targeting nubby bucks at higher rates than normal. Some even claimed 70% of the Zone T antlerless kill was buck fawns.

   Hmm. I suppose if you hung around a registration station for 15 minutes, that might seem the case. But if you monitored all those registration stations the entire fall, the harvest percentages would soon mirror the statewide antlerless-only hunts, which were 53% adult does, 24% doe fawns, and 23% buck fawns.

   But that didn’t convince the chronic conspirators, either, so the DNR politely noted that if hunters killed too many nubby bucks during any of those October Zone T seasons, you would have seen evidence of overkill during November’s nine-day gun season.

   But that never happened. From 1996 through 2001, the DNR collected age data from 18,545 antlerless deer killed in Zone T areas during November’s regular gun season. This time the kill was 57% adult does, 22% buck fawns, 20% doe fawns, and 1% yearling bucks with spike antlers less than 3 inches long.

   Meanwhile, some folks also claim gun-hunters are more likely to kill nubbies because they shoot farther distances than archers. They claimed bowhunters can examine the fawn’s head at close range for pedicels, those little “buttons” atop their heads.

   That claim seems logical, but the data don’t support the assumption. In fact, bowhunters killed a higher percentage of buck fawns than did gun-hunters. Between 1964 and 1983 — when this information appeared on Wisconsin’s deer-registration stubs — buck fawns made up 19.9% of gun season’s antlerless kill and 26.8% of the archery antlerless kill.

   “Yeah, but that’s all DNR data,” skeptics say. Ah yes, yet another DNR deer-conspiracy theory. But if true, the conspiracy crosses state lines. During the 1990s, the buck-fawn kill averaged 22.5% of Wisconsin’s antlerless harvest, 26.7% of Illinois’, 19.7% of Minnesota’s, and 24.8% of Indiana’s.

   Still other hunters claimed record-level antlerless kills in the 1990s hit the buck-fawn segment especially hard. Actually, whether the antlerless kill was about 26,750 in 1971 or nearly 403,000 in 2000, the buck-fawn percentage of the antlerless kill stayed in the low 20% range.

   That reminds us of the obvious: Deer hunters can only shoot what exists in the herd. Whether the statewide herd numbers 1 million or 2 million, buck fawns will make up 24% to 28% of the antlerless herd. And given that most hunters shoot an adult doe instead of a fawn, it’s difficult to overexploit buck fawns.

   Besides, if we were shooting off next year’s bucks every year, how did we shoot 171,753 adult bucks during the 2000 gun season, the No. 2 all-time buck kill? That total fell only 138 short of the 1995 record of 171,891. Somehow those antlered bucks survived to puberty and beyond despite all those antlerless-only hunts.

   So worry not for the nubbin. Whether he makes up 22% or 28% of the antlerless kill, he will remain in good supply at season’s end.