If so, perhaps you’ll find comfort in the fact that you’re hardly alone. Across North America, plenty of other hunters and landowners feel your pain. In fact, it’s safe to say there now are more frustrated whitetail managers than ever.

At a time when there’s so much sound information on how to manage deer land, why is there also such dissatisfaction? To some extent, it’s due to the fact that record numbers of folks now are trying to manage their herds. The more people you have involved in any activity, the more will come up short of their goals. If you think about it, there probably are also record numbers of frustrated golfers these days, and it’s certainly not for lack of instruction on how to whack a little white ball toward a hole in the ground.

In reality, many hunters and landowners think they’re frustrated with deer, when at the root of their discontent lie frustrations with people. Whitetail management is at least as much about our understanding each other as it is about understanding wildlife.

Just as people come in all shapes and sizes, so do people problems in deer management. Let’s look at some of the forms they take and discuss some practical ways in which they can be addressed.

YOUR LANDOWNER
You don’t have to leave your own property to find people problems. This is particularly true when you don’t own the ground you’re managing. Often, hunters and landowners have very different views on what one party or the other should or shouldn’t be doing.

If you don't own the land, develop a great relationship with whoever does. Photo by Gordon Whittington.

Whether private land is owned by an individual or a corporate entity (a timber company, for example), what happens there is ultimately the owner’s call. If you’re leasing hunting access you might feel you have more “rights” than if you’re hunting strictly by permission, but what you can do regarding cutting trees, planting food plots or bringing in guests to harvest surplus does still must be settled with the landowner up front.

When in doubt as to whether or not you can implement a certain management idea, ask. Some landowners will care and others won’t, but it’s far better to be safe than sorry.

Failing to keep a landowner informed is a common cause of friction in management programs, but communication is a two-way street. The landowner can’t expect you to be thrilled if he starts cutting firewood 50 yards from your favorite stand when he knows you’re there. If you’ve leased a farm on the basis of it having the only crop fields in the area, the farmer should let you know that he’s thinking of enrolling the fields in a government set-aside program instead of continuing to plant soybeans and corn.

Good people skills will serve you well in all aspects of deer hunting and management, and nowhere more so than when dealing with the person who owns the land you hunt. Some deer managers are able to hold onto a piece of land for generations, while others are always on the lookout for a new spot. It takes time for a herd to reach its potential, so if you can’t work well enough with the landowner to hold onto that tract, your ability to maximize its hunting potential will be limited.

YOUR HUNTING GROUP
While deer managers often become frustrated with landowner decisions in regard to habitat management, even more common are problems with fellow hunters. This can include the landowner and his family, though it many cases it doesn’t.

Occasionally such problems arise from simple “personality conflicts,” but usually they’re due to differing goals and priorities. Some people are willing to make a serious effort to manage deer, while others aren’t.

If you’re planting food plots and passing up young bucks while somebody else on the property isn’t, it won’t take long for the kettle to boil over. Such mismatches of hunters have led to setbacks in many management programs, and sometimes even to their outright ruin.

Anger often erupts when someone kills the “wrong” buck. If it hasn’t happened where you hunt, it probably will one day. When it does, take a deep breath and think about how to turn the situation into what educators like to call a “teaching moment.”

Several factors can result in the “wrong” deer being shot. First, the hunter might have shot too quickly or under poor lighting conditions that precluded clear identification of his target. This is common on drives and particularly in late season, when hunters are desperate to cull surplus does. There’s a lesson to be learned from such mistakes, and if the person takes it to heart, he isn’t likely to err in that way again.

Much harder to address are cases in which the hunter who made the mistake just doesn’t care. If this is a member of a hunting club, a fine might be in order, with the money being used for habitat improvement. But if you’re going to adhere to such a policy, it must be in place long before the season starts.

Hunting clubs can do well at managing deer, provided everyone is on the same page. Photo by Gordon Whittington.

Dealing with someone who shoots the “wrong” deer can be a particularly touchy subject when the shooter is the landowner or one of his family members or guests. If you’re lucky, someone in the family will point out the gaffe and try to prevent it from occurring again. But if not, you might have to embark on a long-term education program to get the person to come around. Sometimes, subtly exposing the hunter to books and videos that show small bucks growing into trophies will make the light come on.

Understand that whatever you do, it doesn’t help to jus
tify the mistake by looking at the little buck and saying, “He probably never would have been big anyway.” If the deer in question was a yearling, nobody — not even a professional biologist — can say how big he might have been in his prime.

To suggest that it’s possible to make unerring judgments about a yearling buck’s potential is to declare open season on them. Give hunters any opening to shoot “inferior” young bucks and there will be no end to the excuses they can find for blasting them. This is a proven recipe for failure in a management program.

NEIGHBORS
Among the most common management problems are conflicts with neighbors. Sometimes these result from the guy across the fence having put bait right off the edge of our property (legally or otherwise), in hopes of coaxing one of “our” deer across the line. The same thing can happen with food plots. Generally, though, there’s just friction over what we perceive to be neighbors’ lack of restraint in shooting “our” deer.

As you probably know if you own or lease hunting land, it’s natural to develop a feeling that you own the deer living there. This is particularly true if your agricultural crops make up a fair percentage of the herd’s diet. But we must remember that nobody really owns a whitetail until he or she fastens a tag to its carcass.

Maintaining this mindset is a big part of keeping your sanity as a manager. Unless someone is breaking a law, there’s nothing you can legally do to force a behavioral change. Instead, figure out what motivates the person and then use that to your advantage.