BigT...I am enjoying this debate. I have followed your posts for a while as we live and hunt in the same areas. I live in Saraland and have hunted in Deer Park for over 30 years on and off. When I was a young lad, in the mid 1980`s, my father and I hunted all over in Washington, Clarke, and Monroe counties. The common thread in all of those places was the amount of deer we saw back then. Especially in Deer Park, Vinegar Bend area it was quite common to see 15 to 20 does in a field on any given hunt. Did we gripe back then? Of course we did....Hunters are a rarely satisfied group of people. Back then the argument was too many does and hardly any bucks. I believe the state had good intentions in increasing the doe harvest when they did, but I feel as if a perfect storm is brewing. With loss of agricultural food sources, coyote predation, and very liberal harvest policies, the state, I believe has done some serious harm to the numbers.
Too many times this argument devolves into a pissing contest between hunters. One guy says he sees plenty of deer and says the other guy is doing it wrong. The fact is..unless you can pay five or six thousand dollars to hunt on some quality managed land with deer managers and all, you probably are just a working class stiff like me and have to take what you can get. The thing is, back in the mid 1980`s any old piece of land would do. The woods were teeming with deer and weekend warriors like myself had plenty of opportunities to fill the freezer or take a buck. Those were great times. Partly because I was a young man learning to be a hunter and partly because those years were filled with great hunts and plenty of deer. It just felt different....good people,and good hunting. Stevie Wonder can see that the deer population is different these days. Maybe if we learn to talk about it instead of accusing each other of being inferior hunters we might could get something done about it.