15 guys. 2 dead baldies.
By far our worst year ever.
How did everyone else do?
Did Covid kill the population?
OR
Is it because the seasons are too close together with the last week of archery followed by bear season without giving the deer time to relax with nobody stomping through the woods?
Very frustrating 2 weeks of rifle.
The only deer we saw were a few laying in very thick brush next to the road.
That sounds sad. I've only hunted PA once in '99, but even back then folks were talking about how good it was and how bad it sucked.
Us? We had our best year ever. 5 of us brought 8 to the pole. 3 were nice 8 point bucks. I'm in Zone 1 in KY.
You problem is not COVID. It isn't seasons running together. We have Archery from Sept thru to January, and it doesn't change the November rifle hunt a bit.
The problems in PA as I see it are:
1) Long-standing mismanagement.
2) Over browsing and lack of good habitat.
There is a sweet spot in the life of forests that favor whitetails. For a lot of PA, that sweet spot has gone. There just isn't enough browse to support deer.
Here in KY, we had the Feds come in and pay farmers to permanently cease tobacco cultivation. Those that took the money either let their land go fallow or converted to beef production. All those empty farms and empty land have been a major boon to whitetails. We're now allowed as many antlerless deer as we want. It's a golden time to be a whitetail hunter in northern KY.
That's not to say this is forever. I hunted other patches of KY where they were having your bad luck. It all boiled down to the same things:
1) Past over-hunting
2) Mismanagement by the state
3) Over browsing and lack of good habitat.
