Of course I know why the buck harvest didn't return to normal the second year of AR. The main reason is because AR doesn't add any additional legal buck to the herd , it decreases the number of legal buck by the amount of buck that are lost to non-hunting mortality. Also, over 20% of the buck saved by AR won't be AR legal as 2.5 buck ,so that also decreases the harvest.


The question you should be asking is why was the 2003 buck harvest 23K lower than the 2002 harvest. We didn't have any buck saved by AR in 2002 ,but we harvested more buck than we did in 2003. Adding the AR in the SRA counties only accounts for a decrease of around 3 K buck,so that was not the cause . The answer is that due to the anterless harvest of 352K in 2002 ,we harvested 15K more BB than we did in 2001 ,so there were 15K less 2.5 buck to be harvested. Also, AR did not save 38K additional buck in 2002. It only saved around 20K.