I'm not sure why I would continue to add to this thread. I guess just to pass on information. You will have to take it for what its worth to your situation.

I am always hesitant to reveal any type of personal information on a forum such as this because unlike face to face communication where there is physical expression, voice inflection, and other means of emphasis during the communication to keep the intent of the message clear, it is easy in an environment like this to twist words, meanings, and be misunderstood in general. What I may say in an effort to add weight to my statements could be interpreted by some to be self serving, bragging, or an attempt at putting myself on a pedestal. Further I think that cyber space is a perfect place for making outlandish claims simply because there is no accountability. A person with experience can sort out the treasure from the trash in most cases but even then sometimes the line between the two gets blurred.

At any rate, here is some background on how I have gone about things in the last few years in the core area (home turf) that I hunt. That of course means I am not including any of my out of State hunting.

I will spend in the neighborhood of 300 hours sitting in a treestand on the properties that I hunt. I do not hunt these places exclusively, in other words there are other hunters hunting these places also. The above hours of course do not include scouting, putting up tree stands, moving treestands, cutting lanes, hunting sheds etc. I do not consider myself an "expert" when it comes to sorting out the life of a whitetail but I can usually tell fact from fiction.

It was mentioned that "If you let a deer walk by 20 times in his life he doesn't magically get smarter one day...." I guess my reply to that is that there is nothing magical about it. It is actually an evolution of sorts. A mature buck by nature is a completely different animal than an immature buck. In adition to acquiring the normal learned behavior along the way, he grows ever more wary, reclusive, and becomes nearly totally nocturnal. If a person thinks that they are going to watch a buck mature for four years and then go out and put an arrow through him will be sorely disappointed 99.9% of the time.

Three days ago a 190" (gross green score) was shot by a party of gun hunters. The bare field where the buck was killed was less than a mile from a woods where some of my stands are hung. The buck can be aged anywhere from 3 1/2 on up. Because of the number of years I have hunted this woods, and the amount of young bucks I let walk (yes I am lucky to have that luxury) I can almost guarantee you that at one time or another in that bucks young life he has walked by me in the tree. Here is the rub...for at least two years I have not seen this guy even though I have spent a considerable amount of time pursuing him and his relatives and have certainly seen evidence that he existed. Though he may indeed have been the biggest buck cruising this piece of real estate there are other good bucks also, I have the sheds to prove that. However, try as I may with the exception of sighting one buck, I have got not even a whiff of any of them in the last two years. While one could interpret this as an incrimination of my hunting skills (you wouldn't get an arguement from me ), I have done nothing radically different than I did in scoring on a number of book bucks in the past.

Here are a few more statistics I find interesting. The county that I live in and do most of my hunting in geographically speaking is about average size for the state. According to the DNR we rank 6th in terms of trophy bucks registered. The numbers for trophies registered between October 2002 and July 2003 were just published the 15th of this month. To have your buck registered it must meet the following Qualifying Score (net) Bow Non-Typical 155; Bow Typical 135: Shotgun Non-Typical 170; Shotgun Typical 150: Muzzleloader Non-Typical 170; Muzzleloader Typical 150; Pistol Non-Typical 170; Pistol Typical 150.

Care to guess how many trophies were registered for my county last year for all catagories combined (That is typical and nontypical for Bow, Shotgun, Muzzleloader, and Pistol)?