Someone said something earlier about the gov should have hunted one of the average northern farms. I looked, and all the counties in the north central and north west part of the state don't even have doe tags available. Not sure how you can cut down on zero???
Being that every tags sold is an either sex tag thats certainly not the case.Wasnt all the long ago that many of the deer tags sold in this area of the state were buck only.We did have extra doe tags available which I assume your refering to up untill a couple years ago.
I personally dont care where or with whom the Gov. went hunting, I dont have anything against the Drurys and dont really know much about them.I do care what happens with the deer herd where I live and me, and my friends and my kids have to hunt.And Ive been hunting deer in this area for 30 years and have seen a lotta changes in that time.
The DNR asked us to lower the deer herd by shooting does, the year this started they went so far as to threaten to cut out buck tags if we didnt comply.It was a threat printed right in the regulation booklet for that year.Hunters did what they wanted, more does were killed and slowly the population was brought down over a couple years time.And for awhile I was a big fan of the herd reduction.More people were shooting does, less people were shooting smaller bucks and about 3 years ago things seemed to be at a ideal point for the deer, the farmers, and hunters in this area.There were bigger bucks running around, even the most deer hating farmers in the area were commenting on how much less crop damage they had, there werent dead deer littering the highways and you could still stand a reasonable chance of seeing deer when you were out.
Two years ago you couldnt find a big doe, everything was dinks and people started shooting the smaller bucks again.Shotgun season they massacared the bucks and the few decent does we had running around and by late muzzleloader season there were scattered groups of small does left.
Last year was when things got noticeably bad, I hunt a lot, almost every day and night through bow season and the late season.I didnt fill my bow tag and wound up not buying a muzzleloader tag.
This year was the worst Ive seen in 30 years of hunting.Many people didnt bother to buy tags and many that did didnt fill them.You could sit for days and not see a deer.The deer you did see were all small and even the bucks you seen were noticably smaller, the average deer in years past would have been a small 6 or 8 pointer, this year I seen more spikes and 4 pointers than ever before.
Ive been in touch several times with the DNR concerning this.They have given me some vauge answers mostly concerning habitat loss and harvest numbers.Only problem is Ive seen this same amount of habitat substain many times this many deer and they were healthy.They pointed out the harvest numbers werent that much lower, while this may be true the quality of the deer killed was much lower, and again the shotgun hunters that make up a large percentage of the yearly harvest in this area massacered a lot of yearlings to fill thier tags.A substantially reduced herd and a steady harvest of them isnt neccassarily a good thing.
Before anyone gets me wrong Im not hating on the DNR, I simply see flaws in the information they gather and the information they pass on.And Im not blaming the shotgun hunters for anything, its hard to be picky if you want to kill a deer and only get a couple days to do it.And the emails I recieved indicated Im not the only one whos contacted them about this, and theyre hands are tied if our politicians wont act on thier recomendations.The emails they recieve will be used in legislative sessions and they recomend if you want changes to contact your elected officials.
Im not to worried about what Ive seen the last few years if something is changed soon, deer numbers can rebound fast as theyre very adaptable.I am more concerned that if something doesnt change soon next year, and the following year, etc..... are gonna really suck and theyll have to go to the opposite extreme to get deer numbers back somewhere close to what they should be, buck only tags, lottery, etc...And yes, every either sex tag given out is a license to shoot does, when the majority of the does you have to pick from are yearlings somethings not quite right in the equation.IMPO
