How many like Nathan remember the good years?
I was just a kid during the really good years.
Dad would only shoot a nice buck (comparatively) on the first day.
Or any of the first week, untill Saturday. He could find and shoot a buck
Pretty much any day he wanted. By the time I turned 12, the buck/doe ratio
had gotten screwed up. We still had a bunch of deer. But bucks were harder
to come by. A point restriction 4 out of 5 years at that time would have produced
Some dandy results.
I have hunted Somerset to Franklin counties, Cambria and Blair.
I have never, ever seen a browse line in my Pa hunting.
Other states, especially some big woods in WV yes, not here.
To be fair, my hunting hasn't been in the all woodland mountaintop
areas. So, maybe the Game Lands were different.
Thing is, what happens one place isn't truth.
It is the condition there.
Here in Somerset and Bedford, reducing the doe population maybe wasn't
a terrible idea. But it's went way too far.
Hell, when I was a kid, our county had a lot of deer.
Numbers were managed by doe hunting.
We would get 6-8k licenses per year.
Single tag, kill a buck you don't even doe hunt.
Now we have, maybe, 25% of the deer we used to.
And, guessing by county, we are giving out 15k tags.
Each one a potential deer killed.
This thread like so many is limited by those who aren't intelligent enough
to absorb information, process and understand it.
There are threads where I've been blasted for views on cartridges, bullets,
all kind of stuff. Thing is, we have different experiences, and expectations.
Last year, I had about 4 hours into the season and shot the nicest buck of my life.
He was running with about a dozen does.
A decent group with a nice buck, by any times standards here.
I didn't come on here bragging. Showing the buck, saying how great
our management was. How many does came by and that there were scads
of deer, if you were just as good a hunter as I am.
Because I know that's not the universal truth.
