Even the Village Idiot should be able to figure out that when you make half of the 1 ½ year old bucks off limits your buck harvest is going to decline.
But, carrying those extra bucks over into the next fall was necessary in order to improve the adult buck/doe ratio and improve the breeding rates and times. It is working as planned to
Apparently you and Alt are the primary contenders for that title since both you and Alt claimed the buck harvest would return to normal after the first year of ARs. Even when the buck harvest dropped anther 23K in 2003 you still insisted the buck harvest would return to normal because of increased breeding rates and recruitment. now ,after breeding rates and recruitment have decreased instead of increasing and the buck harvest is down by 46% you are still claiming ARs are working as planned. Therefore, I think it obvious that you are the winner ,since Alt was at least smart enough to leave town and shut up.
The only problem was that we had carried too many deer for too long and start the herd reduction in time to prevent a deer herd crash following the back to back hard winters we had. The years following those harsh winters we had very few surviving fawns. Half of those fawns that didn’t survive more then a few days after birth would have been the bucks that should have been available to hunters the past couple of years. But, hunters will not be able to harvest adult bucks that died as fawns.
That is just pure nonsense. Recruitment dropped significantly because there were 35-40% fewer adult doe available to produce fawns. Breeding rates decreased because the average age of the doe was lower due to HR and the effects of predation were more noticeable since there were so few doe producing fawns.