Yup.

Swamp Wolf, stay in your lane.

Have never really had decent browtines here.
And the little they have, are often busted off by gun season.

Been crazy dry here until about 2 weeks ago.

Been having up to.11 popping out together in a stunted corn.field most evenings

How much are these trophies worth?
Tricky business, be careful.

Sometimes you just have odd balls..if everything else is more or less the same, nothing wrong with the odd ball.

Look at the huge freak deer in the pens. You can give wild deer the same food, they won't become freaks. Genetics is key.

IWM,

My experience is nearly all field level, hands-on from a 62 year lifespan in the deer woods of southern Georgia. I have only an associates degree in wildlife management from what was back then a junior college. Worked 27 years for Georgia DNR and have learned from what I saw and experienced from hundreds of properties, habitat types, and hunter interactions. I remain involved as a CWD sample collection contractor for the southern part of Georgia and on the statewide deer management planning committee.

I didn't learn what I know about whitetails from reading peer reviewed studies in the Wildlife Society's Journal.

My neck of the woods here along the Georgia-Florida line don't produce bucks like most parts of Texas, but the way to get bucks close to their potential remains the same. I'm no expert and don't claim to be just because I post pics of aa few bucks and post facts about CWD. It's not something I read and then repeated on an internet forum.

Go mount a deer head.

From what you've posted in the past....your taxidermy is much better than your "selfie-posting, in the deer stand" hunting skills.

This^^^ I've noted many times over the years here in south Ga.

Works like this^^^^ in Georgia, too.

Swamp Wolf,

My background, lifetime livestock farmer, Wildlife management major in college.

If you want to improve a herd, you do it by controlling whatever factors you can. The easiest way to do that in a wild population would be to control the bucks as that is the only factor that you can meaningfully assess. Even if the doe (which we have limited info on) has inferior genetics, breeding her to a superior quality buck will likely result in the offspring being better than her genetically. Over time this results in improving genetics in both the doe and buck populations. Would it be as productive as breeding the best bucks to the best does and culling the inferior ones? NO, but we have no way of doing that, do we. Your suggestion is basically saying its too hard so we will do nothing and complain about the results.

Its easier on the farm because we often know what we are working for on both ends but, guess what? We typically work with what we have, which means the cows we have get bred. Even the mediocre ones. then we bring in superior genetics on the sires side. Its no different as far as the strategy goes but easier because we have control over the whole population.

Im waiting to see these genetics show up again. What do you think the changes are of it happening again. His sire likely passed his genes on several times, his dam likely did also and he likely did too.

15" brow tine

Too late

Genetics……. For brow tines.

Here's a good example of what a few years can change to a deer. In the first pic this deer would be a cull buck around here, large body, getting mature but a very small basket rack for his age. Me and the boys actually joked about it having such a small rack compared to his body size. Then a couple years later all of yes would be tickled to tag it.

Genetics

Guess I've never thought about genetics. Weather or not its in range is as deep as my thought process goes!

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If that meets your goals and expectations that's great. That is how I mostly am. The thing that boggles my mind are the guys that preach about improving the herd but then only want to shoot the biggest bucks they can find. They are actively sabotaging their own stated goals. Genetics is the building block behind everything, nutrition, weather, predation, age, stress ect all impact growth and quality, but without genetics nothing is there for those factors to impact.

I have no ethical problems shooting the biggest buck i find but I do have a problem with guys that complaining about not enough mature bucks then shootinh young bucks.

From a nutrition standpoint, around here I think late winter is more impactful on antler growth than summer. Even in dryer summers we usually have plenty enough high quality forage for deer. But ive definitely seen bucks wear themselves down enough during rut then have a somewhat tougher winter and it effecting their antlers the next year.