Oh, and I will give my buddy Billy Rhodes credit for longest shot I've ever witnessed at 650 yards on a doe.  Impressive.

I can't believe we're still having this discussion in 2009. This was my response to the same question a while back on the board.  I'll just copy and paste here.

"People need to quit worrying about shooting spikes...period.

If you have alot of spikes in your 1 1/2 year old age class (and especially if you have them older than that), then there are things you need to address before you ever consider shooting one.

What is your carrying capacity?  What is your population?  What is your average recruitment rate?  How about your buck:doe ratio?  Tell me about the age structure of your deer herd?  How good is your native food supply?  What are you doing to supplement that native food supply?

Until you can do this, you can't know enough about your deer herd to make decisions on spikes.   And if you take care of all of these things and get them in order, you won't need to worry about spikes.

It's not that they'll go away.  Even on controlled, well fed populations, when drought hits, the 1 1/2 year old age class will sometimes produce high numbers of spikes.

Get your other issues in order and then if you want to start "culling", do so at 3 1/2 years old or older. 

I've told this several times, but I'll do it again here.  We've never had a large number of spikes in our 1.5 age class.  Matter of fact, never over 10%...until 2006.  We had a severe drought and for the first time we didn't have year round food plots and had a large number of deer on the ranch competing for a limited food supply in the form of protein pellets.  As a result, the 1.5 age class that year sported over 70% spikes.  But there was NO difference in my genetics.  Just in the balance of population to food supply. 

The following year, we had a great rain year and saw 1 spike in over 40 1.5 year old bucks.  Again, did my genetics just get better?  No. 

Now, an argument could be made for taking that one spike in a banner year.  He was the worst of the worst.  But why would I worry about him?  There are other factors that may have played in:  was he born late? Did he get sick, injured?  If my age structure is in order, I can give him time to prove himself."

I hope this helps.  There is NO reason in anything other than an incredibly intensively managed herd to shoot spikes...NONE!  The only reason that I would do it would be if my population model required me to shoot a certain number of bucks to reach my goals and I didn't feel like there was anything else in the middle-upper age classes that I was comfortable taking.  Even then, I would hate doing it.  People more times than not are just looking for an excuse to shoot a deer...shoot a doe or an older cull buck.

Most of the time a doe is running and calling like that it's about her fawn.  But without being there and hearing it, I wouldn't know for sure.

Kevin,

This was my response to the same question a while back on the board.  I'll just copy and paste here.

"People need to quit worrying about shooting spikes...period.

If you have alot of spikes in your 1 1/2 year old age class (and especially if you have them older than that), then there are things you need to address before you ever consider shooting one.

What is your carrying capacity?  What is your population?  What is your average recruitment rate?  How about your buck:doe ratio?  Tell me about the age structure of your deer herd?  How good is your native food supply?  What are you doing to supplement that native food supply?

Until you can do this, you can't know enough about your deer herd to make decisions on spikes.   And if you take care of all of these things and get them in order, you won't need to worry about spikes.

It's not that they'll go away.  Even on controlled, well fed populations, when drought hits, the 1 1/2 year old age class will sometimes produce high numbers of spikes.

Get your other issues in order and then if you want to start "culling", do so at 3 1/2 years old or older. 

I've told this several times, but I'll do it again here.  We've never had a large number of spikes in our 1.5 age class.  Matter of fact, never over 10%...until 2006.  We had a severe drought and for the first time we didn't have year round food plots and had a large number of deer on the ranch competing for a limited food supply in the form of protein pellets.  As a result, the 1.5 age class that year sported over 70% spikes.  But there was NO difference in my genetics.  Just in the balance of population to food supply. 

The following year, we had a great rain year and saw 1 spike in over 40 1.5 year old bucks.  Again, did my genetics just get better?  No. 

Now, an argument could be made for taking that one spike in a banner year.  He was the worst of the worst.  But why would I worry about him?  There are other factors that may have played in:  was he born late? Did he get sick, injured?  If my age structure is in order, I can give him time to prove himself."

No question that drought and coyotes in large numbers equal low recruitment rates.

I would advise that you trap to begin with.

Other things you can do to improve fawn survival during droughts is to provide more supplemental feeding locations and water sources, spreading them throughout the property.

We have a protein feeding station for every 100 acres on the ranch and 12 water sources (ponds, tanks and concrete pilas) on 1,000 acres.

By doing this you minimize the distance that the doe has to travel and leave that fawn unprotected.   Even in drought years, our fawn survival is very high.  More exposure means more risk for that fawn.

Obviously, when you get good rain, it enables the doe to stay closer, but it also provides more cover for the fawns to protect them from predators.  If there is anything you can do to create this cover, it would help as well.