ORIGINAL: alloutdoors
Dang it! I forgot something else... your 100 acre wood... BTW why isn't Tigger keeping the deer pop. down for you? Lousy excuse for a predator that cat is...
Huh???
Anyway, simple answer, if you told me there were that many deer I would expect to see the signs of the overbrowsing and other deer related damage.
OK well I expect to see that in all the woods the DEC tells me are overflowing with deer also..........but I don't.
If I saw that, I would be confident the deer were there and if I wasn't seeing them I would try to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong.
What if you didn't see it??
The fact is I don't always need to see the actual deer to know that they are there, not when they leave their calling card plain as day. And from my experience, you can find those calling cards in the places that the DEC says have a lot of deer.
Well the DEC must think we have all kinds of deer around here because you can get as many tags as you are willing to pay for every year and while deer sign can always be found (they are extinct) there is definately no signs of overbrowsing.
So you would hunt a plot of land for weeks straight without seeing a single deer and still believe it is full of whitetails??
There are a lot of variables that could prevent you from seeing deer, even though they may be in the area.
That would be a lot more exceptable if the process was a more sudden drop off........WOW all he sudden there are not many deer around. Then something has changed..........but a gradual erosion of numbers when the surrounding enviornment remains unchanged is just not the same situation. There is plenty of food to sustain the deer......in fact I would say more then years ago.
There is no doubt in my mind that the deer just aren't there in the numbers they used to be. We know just about every truck on every road for a couple miles from being there so many years and no one is seeing them..........even if some were seeing them and others not I would say it could be anything. With no one seeing them like we used to there is only one explanation that comes to mind.........and it isn't that every deer figured out how to avoid the hunters.