How many does are to many?

With all respect, 80 acres is not enough to be worried about managing numbers. Shoot what you will eat.

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These are deer who almost never leave our 80.

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I’m curious how you know this.

With all due respect, Unless you and all your neighboring 2500+ acres are all on the same page, you’re pissing in the wind trying to manage 80 acres.

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These are deer who almost never leave our 80.

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Now how on earth do you know this?

With only 80 acres you are at the mercy of surrounding properties. If you are only getting pictures of eleven different deer on 80 acres the answer may very well be zero. And I promise you those deer do leave your property.

Just enjoy your 80 acres. Like the other posts, unless the neighbors are under some kind of management, what you do want really matter. If it were my 80 acres, I’d try to take as many does as bucks per season.

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I've never seen that before but they were heck on corn/rice bran.

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Probably a mom, 1 set of twins, the following years fawn from the mom and then the others are mom’s fawns and the 1st set of twins’ fawns…
When most people see these maternal groups they are a mom, last years fawn/s and a fawn/s from this year.

To get back to your original question is it depends. Here (2,800 acres) the goal is 1 deer per 8 acres. I have plenty of natural food, ag, summer and fall food sources. Most are 1:10 and more. We also try to keep the buck to doe ratio around 1:1.
Last years cam survey put us at roughly 1:1.4 buck to doe ratio and 1:6 ratio on deer to acre ratio. With those ratios we killed 124 deer (33 bucks & 91 does). Depending on the cam survey in a couple weeks, we very well could have to kill just as many.
That is an example of this property. I don’t have hay fields where deer can’t survive year round. It all depends on surrounding habitat and what it can hold and not “negatively” affect the deer that live there.

If you are really killing 90 does a year on 2800 acres you will be saving a ton of money on deer feed and batteries for trail cams in a few years.

History is a good teacher. For 40 years the state of Alabama preached that killing a doe was a mortal sin. Many places became over run with them. So then the state said kill does. You could sign up for DMP and a biologist would tell you how many does to shoot. It was often one doe per 20 to 40 acres.

The first few years were fun and easy. Then by year three many hunting clubs were seeing less deer. They killed the recommended does any way. In year four it became really hard, they had to shoot almost every doe or doe group they saw. But they killed the recommended number. The next year they again killed everyone they saw. But they came up a few short. The biologists told them to keep shooting. And they did. They saw fewer and fewer deer. And all along the way 10-20% of the does they killed were actually buttonheads. By year ten, you wouldn’t even see a deer most hunts at many of these DMP clubs.

Fast forward thirty to forty years and many of those places still don’t have as many deer as they would like because of the increased predation from skyrocketing numbers of coyotes and hogs which they used to not have.

If you do keep killing 100 does per year off of 2800 acres let us know in 5 years how many deer you are seeing compared to before you started killing them.

Now a few biologists theorize that with increased predation and increasing mortality from disease (EHD and CWD) some areas have populations so low they won’t ever recover to prior levels in our lifetime.

Add to that the number of people who have bought their own 10-80 acres and moved to the country, each one feeling they should be able to kill multiple does off their property (sometimes legally, sometimes out the window under the bug light) and it is a tough life for does a lot of places.