Gary Alt said the deer herd was out of balance. Too many doe. I live in a unlimited tag area (Thousands of doe tags left every year) and it is apparent that now there are more buck than doe in the area. As far as how big an oak tree should get, 3 foot across is nothing. We cut trees in Philadelphia, where they could not be logged or burned, that were so wide I could not get the log truck grapel around them to lift them. I hunt West Virginia and every once and a while you find one on a rocky shelf where the loggers could not get it or a fire either. Those trees you see are not dieing of old age. There is something killing them. I heard that horse **** "A tree gets ripe" from the DNR. That is an excuse to cut them. Go back through the history books and look at the early logging pictures.