Ep. 511: What Deer DNA Reveals About Which Bucks Breed w/ Dr. Steve Ditchkoff

Beau Martonik sits down with Dr. Steve Ditchkoff at Auburn University, where he has run the deer lab for about 25 years and has been studying deer for roughly 35.

He did not grow up hunting deer. His father quit about the time he was born, so he grew up fishing outside Detroit, found a fisheries and wildlife degree at Michigan State, studied wintering deer in Maine on snowshoes, and did his PhD in Oklahoma on mating strategy, which was a question deer biologists mostly weren’t asking then.

That question is what this episode is built on. In 2007, he built a 430-acre facility at Auburn, fenced, with about 100 adult deer in it, because hunting shows had spent years telling people which bucks were breeder bucks and nobody had studied which individuals actually breed. His group tries to capture the whole population each year, pulls a tissue sample off every deer, and builds the family tree out of DNA. They can look at one buck and count what he sired at one, two, three and four years old, and see which does he bred with.

The answer is that it isn’t random. It’s partially driven by similarity in body size and age. He also has data showing a doe increases her movement substantially right before she comes into heat. What he flags as belief rather than data, and he flags it himself, is his hunch that a dominant buck is targeting specific does rather than wandering. Then the hunting consequence: if you knew the exact peak of breeding, that’s the worst week to sit, because that’s when the most bucks are locked down.

The other half is pressure. He doesn’t believe gunshots are what deer respond to. He believes they respond to the sign we leave walking in and walking out. Two of his studies sit under that, one in South Carolina where daylight use of a hunted spot dropped the day after a sit and took about a week to recover, and one in Alabama that found the best day of the week to hunt.

In this episode:

Why the Southeast ended up leading deer research

Where AI helps wildlife science and where it goes wrong

How he ended up handing his data to Bill Thompson

What confidence actually does to a hunter in the stand

We train deer to avoid us, and the sign we leave doing it

The South Carolina study, and the week it takes a spot to recover