ORIGINAL: quiksilver
ORIGINAL: GregH
By looking at the record books and seeing that they do exist would hopefully cause one to change his tactics and start hunting differently or in a different place. You can have two places, basically adjacent to each other and one will out perform the other. The record books are a good starting place to plan your strategy of where to start looking. They also give one hope by letting them know that big bucks do exist in certain places of their state . . . the record books can help verify whether you are wasting your time in a certain county or you are simply hunting wrong and not seeing them.
My point is........ don't only go by what you see. You may be doing something wrong.
I agree, Greg. That's kinda the point. People need to understand the trophy productivity and frequency in their home counties
before they go out there expecting to see a 180.
And you'll find out that when you finally do make the move to a Trophy-heavy area, you'll see different results almost immediately. It's not necessarily that you were doing something "wrong" at home, it's just that you were hunting a certain caliber of deer in an area that simply didn't hold enough of them to realistically give you a mathematical chance.
Obviously, this is why many huntersdumpthousands of dollars every year, intotraveling all over the U.S., instead of staying home and hunting in their own back yards.
I don't entirely agree with this statement either. I had been hunting a "trophy-heavy" area for 8 years before I finally learned enough about mature bucks to finally lay eyes on one and tag it. I totally believe in the statement that hunting a mature buck is like hunting a different species. You have to have you're sh_t together or you won't see or get many.
In other words, you could still be hunting where they live and just not know it.