Saskatchewan Mule Deer Population

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krchov

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has anyone noticed that the governments stupid cwd managements hunts have reduced the population greatly. on a normal day we would see at least a 100. and on opening day of whitetail we seen two and covered three management zones
 
krchov said:
has anyone noticed that the governments stupid cwd managements hunts have reduced the population greatly. on a normal day we would see at least a 100. and on opening day of whitetail we seen two and covered three management zones
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I hunted mulie does in the Weyburn area this year. It was right after the big storm. What we ran into literally nothing for a day and a half. Piles of white tail but the mulies were very scarce. We eventually found some on the second evening on posted land :mad:. The next morning we found another herd again on posted land. On the evening hunt they started showing up along the old railroad beds and we managed to fill four tags over the next 24 hours. I think in our area they hunkered down in deep cover for the storm and took a couple of days to regain their movements. Lots of bucks chasing does on the third day ( over a dozen that we could of shot easily ) but only doe tags in our wallets:mad:

two years ago there was a CWD hunt in the Christopher lake area and the next year deer were as scarce as hell. They seem to be rebounding a bit now. The CWD hunts have definitely thinned out some populations.
 
me and my dad talked about this aswell. Took 7 days to get our deer we talked about not even taking days off as it's usually not a big deal to fill a tag on a weekend or after work. We saw nothing but imature spikes and does. Where we would normally see herds of deer we were seeing one or two deer. All this on our once every 4 year trophy tags. We were hoping it was just our area but taking to other hunters this is a wide spread issue.
 
The mule deer population this year seemed pretty strong near the end of August. Once the season opened up it became increasingly difficult to find anything of decent size as the days went on.
 
KDX said:
A buddies wife shot a nice record book Mulie with a muzzle loader this year.
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Where'd the Mulie get a muzzleloader?:confused:


I have an antlerless tag (2 deer) in Z29 and so far have only seen bucks. And no whitetails since Monday.
 
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The first year they had the cwd program you could take up to 6 mulies per person. I found 8 deer that were dumped minus their heads so the hero's could get their buck tags. What a way to help the hunters image.
 
There are high concentrations of mule deer in and around small towns andthey are a pain so people complain. Limits go up and more deer get shot in the country. No one shoots deer in town so they are still a problem and people keep complaining and the limits stay the same or go up and more open country deer get shot again. It is a vicious cycle. I have permission to shoot in peoples yards bordering the local towns and it has been helping.
 
I am not sure where you guys are looking. I was drawn in 9 this year and it took me exactly 1/2hour to take 2 does with my muzzle loader have them gutted and in the truck. Looked at probably 50 bucks a day for a week then waited for rifle season and hopefully some cooler weather. Went down again with rifle on last Saturday passed up another 50 bucks with a couple in the 180s for sure and tagged out on a nice 200 gross nontypical at around 1:30. I hunt alot of zone 19, 4 and 20 with a little 23 and 13 thrown in and in all the zones but 13 I can take a person out and look over a 100 mules a day with out much trouble at all.
I always hear from people too that there are no deer left and the dnr screwed things up so bad. I just think alot of people don't know where to look and we have seen a definate change with the deer in the last few years as they will not move unless you almost step on them. It seemed like in the old days if you drove to close to peice of cover you were going to walk the deer were gone but nowadays you have to kick a deer in the butt to get them to move. I think the pheasents have been giving the deer pointers on how to survive.
 
If you can show me a hundred mules a day in zone 23,I will buy you 48 cold ones,I just spent two weeks hunting there,and have been hunting there for forty years prior to that.I wll agree five years ago you would see many in a day but those days are done.
 
There's still plenty of does and young bucks where I'm at. I just found it exceedingly difficult during rifle season to find a 190+ typical and 210+ non-typical. I thought it might be due to hunters in primitive season taking a few of the bigger boys out, but it doesn't seem to be the case. I'm not going to say that I hear of every good deer shot around my area, but I hear of the majority. There just really didn't seem to be a whole lot of big boys shot this year.
 
it might be a combo of two things, serm giving out lots of tags/cwd hunt and a low cycle in the population. the zone i hunted in this year we saw deer maybe 50 a day average but there were not that many big mature bucks. the two my dad and i got were the biggest we saw on the hunt, i did pass on a solid 180 class our last morning. most of the deer the other hunters took were 2.5/3.5 year old 4 point bucks nothing big.

i did notice that when we did spook deer they didnt run stop and look back like so many before. they non look back genetic must be getting bred in to them.

there are big deer us hunters might have to change the way we hunt them a little bit. the game is changing we must change our hunting styles to match our quarry.
 
Azazle said:
The mule deer population this year seemed pretty strong near the end of August. Once the season opened up it became increasingly difficult to find anything of decent size as the days went on.
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Yup, they go to ground at the first crack of a rifle. Same for whitetail in my area. The day before the season opened, I spotted at least 50 coming home from Saskatoon. By the end of opening day, they had gone to ground. Hell, it's even safe to travel gravel roads now.
 
The CWD program is a terrible fiasco!! Mule deer in zone 29 are not what they used to be. Heads should roll at the sask environment for implementing such a retarded program and shame on the guys who participate in it.

I also hunt zone 45 and same thing in one week of hunting I counted 4 deer shot and left minus the heads. Our deer have no value I guess. Sickens me.

I was in canadian tire trying to buy some ammo for a buddy and overheard a dude bragging about all the deer he shot in zone 29. Made me furious. Unfortunately the law says he can.

I am normally not political but cwd and gun control are all ####ed up!!!
 
Lets hope this program comes to an end soon. Too bad about #29. I used to hunt there a lot years ago and it was a deer mecca. I was thinking of going back in the future but by the sounds of it the S'toon boys have cleaned it out.

One thing about Mulies is if they have 4-5 peaceful years with decent winters the numbers will climb fast.

This fiasco reminds me of what happened to the antelope years back when they implemented a wide open season rather than a draw. The numbers crashed. Some would say it was the coyotes but from my point when you see complete herds wiped out by piles of trucks chasing them around and around I'd say the bullets did most of the damage.
 
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