Many of us, and many WCO's reported the same, have been asking that people tell us exactly where they saw the bucks laying and they can never do it. It usually goes to, "Well it wasn't actually me, but a good friend that saw them." Okie-dokie there Red Ranger.

This is the first year I didn't find any dead deer while hunting. Same with many of my friends. Our safety record improved also. Maybe forcing people to take a hard look is helping.

There is no $300.00 fine. If everyone that reported they knew someone that got the other than $25 fine were right, there would be thousands of them, not just 24.

I think we have to recall the actual situation we were in before we started this AR journey. We were only carrying over about 25% of our total bucks. Very few of these are mature bucks. Our herd is composed of 90% yearling bucks in many areas and probably 80% statewide. So they really had a poor management program with this high of a harvest and that much of it composed of yearlings. So it would be hard to argue for doing nothing, as you had very little to lose. How could you make it worse than what it was?

So now we have a program that should allow about half of our normal harvest of yearlings to get at least another year older. And once they make it there, they become harder animals to harvest. So we are significantly adding to the number of 2.5 year old bucks.

I have seen some concern that it really can happen that when we pass on the yearling, many will harvest a older deer later on. We should of known this before! I'm hearing we did in fact harvest bigger deer this year. Did that happen, or was it because of the low harvest the year before, the great mast crop and mild winter just made our bucks better racked?

Let's study it and take a hard look at the research. But let's do something!