You very well may be correct about the habitat is the southern areas not being a problem with the quality of the bucks yet but I don’t think anyone can be sure one way or the other just yet. I think is most certainly something that needs to be watched though based on some of the evidence.

In any event I did take look up and compute all of the record book archery harvest for Allegheny, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland County just to see how they came out over the years. If I had the time I would like to do the same for all of the gun seasons, maybe sometime later I will get the time.

Here are those results of the archery bucks for those four counties:

Time period……………………..number entered……………………….average antler score
< - 1981.……………………………12.……… ……………………..............134.4
1981-1990.…………………………55.………… …………………..............130.2
1991-2000.………………………..120.………… …………………..............133.4
2001 - >…………………………….32.……… ……………………..............145.0

As you can see the number of record book bucks was very high through the nineties and has really declined in the more recent years. Since buck harvests have remained high in the units that include those four counties it would seem logical that either hunters are no longer entering the smaller archery bucks that would make the book, they simply didn’t get them scored and entered yet or there is also the slight possibility that there are fewer book bucks available.

Since the quality of the bucks being entered is so much higher in the past decade I have to suspect the biggest difference within those counties is that hunters aren’t entering the low end record book bucks.

One other thing that I need to caution people on is that they shouldn’t compare these archery antler scores to those previously posted that included mostly the top end rifle bucks. There were no rifle bucks, which have a higher antler score requirement, included in this sampling. If there had been these scores would have been higher.

R.S. Bodenhorn