Down South we refer to them as yearlings also. Must be an Arizona thing that they Googled or something...lol

We call them fawns or toeheads if they are less then one year old, yearlings are one to two years old and does or bucks are over two. I have shot all three but now prefer yearlings(male or female).

all I am going to say is they always look bigger and when they are running

As predicted. My 12 year old shot a medium size doe in the state forest this evening. She had milk and it was so thick he only saw her and shot her through an 8 inch opening. 5 min after the shot when I was walking up to him I ran the other two off not seeing him wave for me to stop. He would have shot them also. But it's 19k of public ground that gets hunted hard.

I prefer adult deer. More meat and the tag costs the same. Killing YOY deer hasn't hurt their population any so I have no problem with it. People I know deer hunting right now are bow hunting and mostly shooting antlers anyway. You can buy doe tags now but I dont know anybody hunting them yet. I wait till Jan when I am not forced to buy a fifty dollar either sex tag before I can buy a doe tag for 20. Twenty is to high IMO but I can still come out ahead at that price if I shoot only adults.

Shoot whatever you want or prefer- everyone will have different answers., think about your current buck to doe ratio and harvest accordingly. You can make a strong case that for deer management a fawn 6-7 months old is a harvest of 1:1, in contrast- shooting a bred doe during gun season could hypothetically reduce your herd by 3 deer the following spring. A lot of button bucks get harvested on antlerless tags and probably the only negative if unexperienced hunters have trouble with identification.

When I worked on the PA Elk program, we would occasionally dart elk that we knew were over a year old that still have faint spots on them. I was talking to a friend that worked on the program with me after the last thread about late born fawns. He was telling me that many in the deer biology field now refer to yearlings as those that have survived their first winter.