moose,

where is you "home" area (just a pet peeve of mine, but it would be nice if eceryone on the board had to give a location that showed up - at least a general location - but that is a topic for another discussion)

I don't know the answers. all I know is in my home area (central 7M and surrounding areas) the herd is fine (but i bet I could find "a hundred" people that would say there are no deer - they tend to be those that hunt for 2 days or when there was no snow or were just unlucky - i say "tend" because there are certainly going to be hunters like some that post here that did hunt hard and saw few deer - those are the breaks)

I think I saw hundreds of deer from late september till the end of december at night on my many drives to and from my camp (~25 miles). I made that trip many times (too many) for hockey games, basketball or football games. The deer were everywhere. And this is in a unit where there was no DMP (ie low population - however, the way I understood it, they were concerened with the low buck numbers more than anything). nother case in point - I hunta at my friends in Owasco this year [3 days]; i didn't see a deer; so my obvious reaction should be "there are no deer", right??; well, they had actually taken 2-3 buck and 3-4 doe in the previous 2 weeks; so i guess their numbers were pretty good there

I think most of us agree on some things: 1) that 30-40 deer a day is not that good (in NY). 2) that in some places in NY the deer population is down. 3) some places the pop is just fine 4) there are many hunters out there that complain but really don't understand a lot of what they are complaining about (and I am not talking about anyone here) 5) and MOST OF ALL we will always be able to agree to disagree