What do you OLD TIMERS think?
I was talking to my dad the other day out at our farm and he started talking about what it was like hunting 20-30 years ago.
He started deer hunting sometime after he got back from Vietnam, and was on the same family farm that we still hunt (it was a few hundred acres bigger though). He was a recurve man, and later on finally picked up a 12 gauge. In those some 40ish years of deer hunting he has killed more deer than I can dream about, and put down some pretty darn impressive bucks. His knowledge far outweighs any that I have ran across inmy area.
All the way up until about the early 80's he was the only one hunting the farm seriously. And by serious I mean that he would bowhunt about a week in November, then hit the woods with his shotgun. While he says that he did not see near as many deer and would hunt long and hard to SEE a buck, butthe bucks he did see were usually OLD and BIG. Some of the deer he talked about were nearly all good ones, and the history on our farm proves it. It used to be AT LEAST a 140+ inch deer a year for one of the hunters, but over the last 12 years or so I can only think of about 7 bucks that would go over 135, but 2 of these were the only B&C's ever taken off the land.
So what do some of the older veterans think? 15-20 years ago did you see bigger bucks? Didyou even see bucks?
I found it interesting with all the modern ideas of food plots, passing smaller deer, and all other QDM ideas. This was a period where "brown and down" was accepted.