2025 Southeast Deer Study Group

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Deer Management Assistance Program was initiated in 1999 with the purpose of providing technical assistance to hunting clubs in managing local deer herds and their habitat on private lands of Arkansas. In over 25 years of existence DMAP has seen participation rise but with accumulating workloads of the agency’s DMAP biologists, increasing turnover rates of both hunting clubs and staff, and the lack of clear focus; participation in DMAP began to wane. In 2021 the AGFC deemed private lands management a high priority, opening the way for the revitalization of DMAP. The agency streamlined administrative processes through standardization and automation of annual reporting and initiated a partnership with the National Deer Association to create five new cost share positions. Greenway Equipment was brought on as a corporate sponsor to increase technical assistance for the habitat management component of the program. The agency utilized an existing partnership with Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry in a new innovative way through DMAP deer donations. This helped clubs not only reach doe harvest goals but additionally helped address food insecurity issues in Arkansas. DMAP in Arkansas is now experiencing its highest participation and enrolled acreage in the past decade. Importantly, biologists are now spending more quality time with each club, receiving more CWD sample submissions, deer donations, and providing a higher quality annual report than ever before.

For 47 years, the nation’s first Deer Management Assistance Program (DMAP) has been providing cooperative guidance by professional wildlife biologists to hunters in Mississippi in efforts to better manage lands for healthier deer herds. In this study, DMAP deer harvest data was analyzed from the past four decades to describe the different changes in the deer herds over time when participating in the program compared to the first year a property is enrolled. Within the first five years, on average, doe harvest increased 44% and doe lactation went up 8%. Buck harvest also increased on average by 26%. Within the first 10 years, buck antler score potential at maturity increased on average by 14 inches and buck age increased by 40%. There was also variation in these changes over time depending on the decade the properties first enrolled in DMAP, the soil region of the state they were located, and depending on what percentage of the doe harvest recommendations from the biologist were met. Overall, this data shows significant beneficial changes over time in deer herds for properties enrolled in DMAP compared to their first year. This information will support efforts to educate the public on the benefits of DMAP, while helping in marketing for DMAP enrollment.

1, 2Joseph R. McDermott, 1Tommy Apostolopoulos, 1John T. Hast, 1Christine Casey, 1Kathleen Williams
1Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. 1 Sportsman’s Lane, Frankfort, KY 40601.
2Corresponding Author: Joseph R. McDermott. Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife resources. 1 Sportsman’s Lane, Frankfort, KY 40601.

The Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR) has had a CWD Response Plan in place since 2002. Approved by the Commission, the Plan’s main objective is to guide KDFWR’s initial actions upon a positive CWD detection either inside of the state or near the border. KDFWR first implemented its Response Plan in 2021 following multiple detections <10 miles from the border in Tennessee. Following three years of enhanced CWD surveillance, KDFWR detected its first positive case in a wild deer harvested in Ballard County, KY in late 2023. Less than one year later KDFWR received notification of another positive animal, this time in a captive deer nearly 200 miles east of the original detection. A discussion of the state agency’s response to these detections is found herein.

Gaining insights into what drives landowners' decisions to allow hunting on their land is vital for wildlife management, particularly given rapidly expanding suburban and urban environments. Through a cooperative project with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC), researchers at NC State University successfully created a spatial-predictive model to estimate land available for hunting utilizing data from surveys of nonindustrial and industrial private landowners. Increasing property size, male ownership, length of time the property has been owned, property being used to earn income, and landowners with a rural upbringing were all positively related to a property being hunted. Higher housing and road density and older landowners were negatively related to a property being hunted. County estimates of the amount of available hunting land were calculated by running all privately owned parcels in North Carolina through the model. A second cooperative project between NCWRC and NC State is updating and expanding on the model, exploring how political identity predicts landowners' decisions about whether hunting will occur on their properties while accounting for several important socio-demographic and geographic variables and utilizing data from a survey of residents along an urban-to-rural gradient in Durham County, North Carolina. Findings of the most recent study revealed political identity as a significant predictor of hunting permission, with conservative landowners being 6 times more likely to permit hunting than their liberal counterparts. Gender also emerged as a notable factor, as properties owned by men were three times more likely to be hunted than those owned by women. Road density, gender, and political identity were identified as negative predictors of landowner hunting decisions in decreasing order of importance. Conversely, property size was the most important positive predictor for landowners allowing hunting, and the most important predictor of hunter access overall. These results illustrate the necessity of incorporating political, demographic, and geographic elements in discussions about how to effectively communicate with landowners regarding hunting access for wildlife management purposes, and the model can also improve wildlife population estimates by improving huntable land estimates.

Since first detecting chronic wasting disease (CWD) in the free-ranging white-tailed deer population in 2012, the Missouri Department of Conservation has implemented targeted removal to slow disease spread. Targeted removal is one of few interventions with evidence of efficacy yet is often met with resistance and lack of stakeholder support. As such, identifying the motivations and barriers of landowners to participating in targeted removal is key to addressing participation deficiencies and fostering landowner engagement in CWD management. We conducted 12 focus group meetings in Missouri during 2022 with landowners who owned property near where CWD has been detected. Motivations for participating in targeted removal included a sense of civic responsibility to people and/or the deer population, additional hunting opportunity, food, convenience of the removal program, and positive feelings about contributing to CWD management. Barriers or deterrents to participation included misunderstanding about CWD and the objectives of targeted removal, perception of low deer density, reluctance to relinquish what landowners felt was management control of their land during targeted removal, distain for targeted removal methods (e.g., night shooting, baiting), and objections about when targeted removal occurred (i.e., winter, after deer season). Landowner participation in targeted removal could likely be increased by communicating more effectively about CWD and the objectives of targeted removal to combat misinformation, providing additional opportunity during the regular deer season enabling hunters to play a more active role in disease management at that time of year, considering changes to targeted removal methodology, and working to align targeted removal goals with landowner deer management goals when possible.