Guys thanks for the congrats on my speedgoat. They really are a lot of fun to hunt, but man do they stink! Has to be the smelliest critter I've ever hunted.

Colorado Bob - shoot me an email on the South Africa thing.

Country Nate - send me an email and I'll be glad to help you with anything I can. Maybe you can give me some info on Idaho.

oldelkhunter - I talked with the Game&Fish bio for the area a couple of times before we hunted and he blaimed the decline in numbers on the drought. He said that because of the poor quality of forage on the winter range - due to the drought - that fawn recruitment had suffered. He also cited high hunting pressure from resident hunters as being a problem. This is a general area for residents and can be hunted with an over the counter tag by them. Even though the bio didn't cite predators as being a problem I would believe that they probably are. The area I was hunting has a very high number of mountain lions.

The four point restriction was put into place to allow some of the younger age class bucks to survive and rebuild the age structure of the herd. The four point restriction also keeps a lot of the residents that are only interested in tagging a buck for meat out of the area. I knew going in that it was going to be tough hunting this year. The only thing that bothers me is that G&F knew going in to the season that deer numbers were way down yet they still issued the same number of nonresident tags as in previous years. Hunting pressure in the area was very high. There a lot of guys that will not go home with an empty tag, that cost them several hundred dollars, when they can shoot a spindly racked young buck that just happened to grow four points on one side.

"If you can't change your circumstances then you need to change your perspective."