Biology And Management Of White-tailed Deer In Alabama

ces and make management recommendations in response to these
trends.
Hunters serious about managing their deer herd should at least
be collecting harvest data. The minimum information to be collected is
the deer’s sex, body weight, antler dimensions, and lactation information.
In addition, a lower jawbone should be removed from each deer so
its age can be estimated using tooth eruption and wear patterns.
A few basic tools are needed to collect data. These include: a
set of accurate, quality scales, a mechanism to hoist a deer, a pair of
long handled pruning shears, a 1/4-inch wide metal measuring tape, a
jawbone extractor, data sheets (see APPENDIX 6, page 154), an indelible
marker and/or jawbone tags, and a collapsible fish basket or
some other container to store jawbones. All of these tools and data
sheets should be kept readily accessible to everyone hunting on the
property being managed, such as at a skinning shed, camp house, etc.
This makes it more likely the data will be collected before the deer is
carried off the property.
JAWBONE EXTRACTION
It is necessary to know the age of each deer harvested to accurately
assess the condition of deer on any property. Determining a
white-tailed deer’s age using tooth replacement and wear is the most
common technique employed by wildlife biologists and managers today.
This technique was first described by C. A. Severinghaus in 1949.
The accuracy of this technique has been called into question in recent
years. Gee et al. (2002) found even experienced wildlife biologists had
difficulty accurately aging deer beyond 2-1/2 years old using
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