I have friends who hunt on public land in southern Illinois and the past couple of years were on par with their past history.

I stopped hunting with them and went instead to my friend's farm the past two years. Last year, the crops weren't in and I didn't see squat. This year, we saw deer - a lot of deer. My buddy said that he's seen more deer on his farm this year than ever before.

So from my perspective, there is no problem. But Illinois is a big state and isolated observations really do nothing to indicate the overall population.