I hunt SE Ohio in the gun season. It seems to me that there are fewer gun hunters every year. I hear fewer shots every year. I think a lot of gun hunters are going to the crossbow. Longer season, better weather & beable to hunt the rut.
Same here in the NW part of the state. Most guys are filling their tags during the archery season, and hunters are few and far between during gun season. There are a few "hot spots" in most areas where you will run into other hunters or groups, but if you avoid those areas chances are you might not even see any orange other than your own the whole week. Deer hunting has changed quite a bit in Ohio in the last 15-20 years. Far fewer groups out doing drives in the more open farm country as more and more have taken to sitting in a ground blind or treestand hoping something comes along like the stick chuckers. I only bow hunted a couple years back in the early 2000's as I never had the patience or the desire to practice year round as one should for bow hunting. At this point though I'm most likely going to be buying a crossbow in the next month or two for the very reasons you state - much longer season with better weather and get to hunt the rut. Being a gun nut though it's a very bitter reality to swallow.
I used to hunt down in Crawford county in a section just north of a very popular river bottom along the Old-n-tangy River. Hunted that same area for 25-30 years. When I was a kid we used to count how many shots we would hear come out of that bottom every day during gun season. Opening day it would usually be somewhere between 50 and 75 shots before noon. The last couple years I hunted down there if you heard one or two shots for the whole day on any day it was considered a busy day in the bottom. As you can imagine, that significant change in pressure also resulted in a significant change in our success rate in the next section as we didn't have all those hunters stirring them up out of the bottom and pushing them to us.
