QUESTION: I hear people use the terms “cull buck” and “management buck” but I don’t understand the difference. Can you shed some light on this? — B. Warren
ANSWER: I’ll do the best I can, but there are no hard and fast definitions for either term. Much depends on specific management objectives of the landowner, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. A cull or management buck is a deer that the manager wants removed from the population in order to better achieve the management objectives for a given property.
The intended purpose is often to improve antler quality in the population. However, research has demonstrated that outside of an enclosure, it is nigh onto impossible to improve antler genetics through culling individual bucks.
In certain instances there might be some benefit to removing older deer with poor quality antlers. For example, the King Ranch has an abundance of mature bucks and relatively few hunters. They are very selective, targeting only the top five percent of the mature bucks. They define a cull buck as a mature buck with a gross score in the bottom 25 to 50 percent of the gross-score average for their age class.
These bucks consume resources that could otherwise go to the upper percentile. If not harvested, many would simply die of old age, taking those resources with them. Removing them frees up food resources and provides additional recreation.
Unfortunately, there are VERY few places like the King Ranch where deer, and hunters, are so predictable.
We’d all prefer to shoot a buck with trophy-class antlers, but I consider any mature buck a trophy.