Hill Country Whitetail

The Edwards Plateau carries more white-tailed deer than any comparable area in North America. Texas holds roughly five million whitetail altogether, and the densest concentration of them is here in the Hill Country. State survey units in the counties west of this road have run close to 265 deer per thousand acres, which works out at about one deer for every four acres. The reasons stack up: good browse on broken ground, mild winters, a century of predator removal, and land divided into ranches that manage deliberately for deer. It is also a wild population living almost entirely on private ground. About ninety-five percent of Texas is privately owned, so nearly every deer on this drive spends its life on somebody's ranch. Density has a cost, and it shows. Hill Country bucks are noticeably smaller in the body than whitetail elsewhere in Texas, because at these numbers the animals are competing for the same browse. On heavily used ground you can see the result as a browse line, a level edge under the live oaks where everything within reach of a deer has been eaten away and nothing below it has grown back. For anyone driving, the practical part is timing. Deer move most at dawn and dusk, and collisions peak in November when the rut has bucks crossing roads without looking at them. They also rarely travel alone. A deer clearing the shoulder in front of you usually has two or three more still in the brush behind it, and those are the ones that reach the pavement.