ORIGINAL: Buckshot
You know the guy didnt ask for a discertation on the pros and cons of shooting button bucks.... Gheez, you sound alot like a guy I know that goes by the name of neverwas...I mean beenthere on huntingpa.com.
Anyone who has shot a bunch of does has shot a few buck. The law of averages says so, the PGC says so and it is part of the deer management equation
Really? I shoot between 3 and 4 doe a year and its been 7 years since I shot a button buck and the only reason I shot him, is that is was raining and he was bedded down in the mountain laural and at 100 yards he sure as heck looked like he didnt have buttons.
Of all the guys that I know that hunt, and shot doe last year, only one of them shot a button buck, and were talking total harvest of well over 30 doe.
Bottom line is that we do everything possible to avoid shooting them. But then again thats us. We like having buck around.
So to answer the ?, I try like the devil to avoid it, to the point of if I dont know I dont shoot, just to many does out there to have to whack one if he maybe a button buck.
Another person who is upset by Bt's wit and intelligence? Go figure!
First of all you should be proud of the record of your little group of 30 hunters. They have done what no state with statewide AR/HR has ever done. Harvest one BB out of 30. Deer and DEER Hunter would write a story of your little group!
But we do have states who use AR/HR like ARkansas since 1998 and are in thier sixth year of trying to squelch BB harvest. Lets see how they do ? Shall we?
espn
http://espn.go.com/outdoors/hunting/...cast04_AR.html
Arkansas makes hunters use a buck tag for BB. Yet lets see here......how
many do they take.... 66,204 adult buck - 9756 Button buck - 32175 doe in 2003
We don't have BT here to do the math for us, so what does that work out to Bucky?
The PGC says 20-24% will be BB, we go to Arkansas and even without a real push on doe harvests in 2003 took more than that!!!!!
So if we compare that to PA, then Pa will have a bigger problem because we are wailing a lot more doe than the Arkies are. WE took 142,270B and 322,620 AL deer. Lordy! We are taking 2 doe for every one buck and ark is flipped the other way around.
So what was 20% of Pa's 322,620 harvest ? 64,454 bucks taken as AL
So as you can see we will see the effects of this small facet of deer managment even clearer than states that are not so zealous in thier doe harvests.
Did Beenthere tell you that too? Is that why you are upset with numbers?
Remember, if you can't represent it with numbers, it ain't science.
So in summary, a lot of individual hunters claim amazing powers to never harvest BB. But the reports from deer biologists show a different story. In very small groups on controlled lands a small group of hunters might get lucky and have a low %, but statewide the laws of averages catches up to ya and you end up with harvesting a bunch of BB. If you don't then the opposite happens and you are not harvesting doe in large enough numbers to reduce the herd size. Which is our goal in PA.!
In case you don't like looking to other states because you are backwards and afraid to, then here is a link for QDMA. A trusted Alty source for wishfull thinking.
The percentage of button bucks in the antlerless harvest remained similar (22 percent in 2002 vs. 23 percent in 2001).
http://www.qdma.com/articles/details.asp?id=41
So although you may sit in your stand and cross your fingers that good things will happen by magic, the truth is that BB are gonna get whacked with about as much regularity as before AR/HR percentage wise. And as we all know, when we increase the number of percentage points of doe harvested we are INCREASING our take of BB too.
But you already knew that, BT told you that 3 years ago.
