How to Grow Big Bucks Texas Style
Rewards of Conscientious Deer Management
 Editor’s
Note: Today, the concept of trophy-deer management or
quality-deer management is learned from how deer are
managed in Texas. To raise trophy deer like Texans do
on the land you hunt, you’ll need a lot of money,
plenty of land and numbers of trophy deer. This week,
we’ll take a look at Texas deer management, where
I hunted with Trijicon, a company that provides aiming
solutions for hunters, law enforcement and the military
with its various rifle scopes. Trijicon is supporter
of the Wounded Warrior Project (http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org),
giving a portion of each sale of Trijicon to this organization.
According to David Kitner, the Duval County Ranch manager
“We are under what’s known as the management-lands
deer-permit system that’s promoted and sponsored
by the Texas Wildlife and Parks Division. Under this
program, if a landowner has set up a management system
that enhances the deer herd on his property, the landowner
can have longer seasons than Texas’s normal season.
Too, hunters will have the ability to harvest more deer
there than what’s typically allowed. In addition,
you can harvest deer according to that permit, which
doesn’t affect the number of tags you receive
for the statewide deer season. In other words, if a
hunter hunts at our ranch and buys a Texas hunting license
with deer tags, he can take a buck on our property and
not use the tags he has on his license. Under the permit,
we have to abide by the harvest recommendations provided
by state wildlife biologists, which are all based on
the census data we provide to Texas Parks and Wildlife.
We work very closely with the state wildlife biologists.
So, much of the census data is acquired from the deer
we report seeing from our helicopter surveys, as well
as the age and the size of th e
deer. Also, from these surveys, we usually can determine
the buck to doe ratio, age structure and the size of
our herd.
“Eight-years ago, before I came to the ranch,
there never had been a buck harvested on the ranch that
scored 160 on the Boone & Crockett scale. The average
score of the top-five bucks we’ve harvested off
the ranch in the last 3 years has been 180 or higher.
The biggest buck we’ve taken gross-scored 209.
Today, our bucks are field dressing from 175 to 200
pounds or more. When the bucks start to rut, the weights
will decrease about 10 to 15 pounds per animal.
“When we first started our management program
8-years ago, t he
average buck weighed 155 pounds. Each year, the average
weight of our bucks and the average score of our bucks’
antlers have increased. Our management bucks (deer scoring
from 130 to 145) are considered trophy bucks in most
parts of the country. We can produce these kinds of
numbers because we spend a lot of money on protein pellets
and corn and habitat management. We feed our deer 100,000
pounds of corn during deer season. We feed somewhere
between 250,000 to 300,000 pounds of protein pellets
to our deer after deer season. We also perform pasture
irrigation and brush chopping to improve habitat. So,
we’re not just managing our harvest to grow these
big bucks. We’re feeding them protein and corn,
improving habitat and green fields and controlling the
number of hunters hunting and the number of cattle grazing
the property. It’s an overall management program.
Of the 125,000 acres we have on the ranch, we only allowed
50 hunters to hunt on 17,000 acres this year. For $3,500,
our hunters get a one-on-one guide situation, meaning
all our hunters have their own guide to make sure they
harvest the right-size buck. This price also includes
lodging and meals for 3 days and 3 nights. Our hunters
usually can shoot a doe, a javelina (a pig-like animal
native to the deserts of the southwestern US), a coyote
or a feral hog. However, we ask our hunters not to take
these other animals until after they harvest their management
bucks.”
For more information about the Duval County Ranch,
call David Kitner at (361) 394-6313, visit www.duvalcountyranch.com,
or email DCR@wildblue.net.
To learn more about Trijicon, go to www.trijicon.com.
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