Sam Ubl wrote:thwack16 wrote:Good stuff!Sam Ubl wrote:He also hunted Mississippi again this year, but it doesn’t sound like he has plans of going back...
Would love to hear about this hunt(s) if they're documented anywhere.
Mississippi is said to have an estimated 1.75 million deer herd, with an 1/8 of them annually harvested by hunters. Roughly 4% of Mississippi is open to public hunting, at least according to a statistic I read somewhere, and that's very little compared to Wisconsin's 14%. So of Mississippi's 30-million acres, less than 1.3 million is available for public hunting spread out across the state. That's very limited, considering Wisconsin's calculation comes from 34-million acres of total land with nearly 5.2-million huntable to the public.
So between the expansive margin of public land availability and total land acres across the state, along with heavy hunting pressure, the challenge of escaping the masses to have some space is real. Nonetheless, like most Beasts, Joe isn't afraid to put in the work to find those hard-to-find and hard-to-access pockets of public, but concedes that the sightings are minimal at best and witnessed minimal practice of buck age class management.
The ratio between deer harvested versus total herd is relatively close between Mississippi and Wisconsin, where roughly 13% of the deer were killed in Mississippi in 2017, versus Wisconsin, where 15% of the deer herd are thought to have been killed by hunters in 2017. Mississippi actually has a fairly small deer herd per their total land mass, versus Wisconsin who is somewhat comparable in total land mass, but has more than a half-million more deer roaming the land. And yet, the harvest to herd ratio is very comparable between the two states. In other words, hunters put a much heavier dent on the Mississippi deer herd than they do on the Wisconsin herd. At least that's how my math works out...
Thanks Sam. I'm well versed on Mississippi. Have lived all my 28 years here.
Seeing that there is no harvest reporting, tagging, etc in MS, the numbers the state puts out is really worthless. We have a 3 month gun season with a 3 buck limit, we're definitely going to kill more deer than a state that has a week or two of gun seasons.
I was just really wondering what area of the state he hunted, weapon, whether he hunted an area with weapon restrictions, dates of his hunt, and how he fared.