Hey guys
I'm new to the board and i wanted to ask the NJ guys a question: Why is zone 4 bucks only? It used to be one of each, they changed it to bucks only 5 or 6 years ago and its been that way since. I go down for the first week of fall bow every year and hunt the Northern part of the state and every year it amazes me all the deer i see in zone 4. Is there a logical reason for this ? and will they ever change it?
Thanx Red-Dawn

Red-Dawn. I think it's because the herd has been "stabilized". Actually, from my own experience in zone 4, the herd has been thinned out considerably. The zone has become a very popular place to hunt and given all that preasure coupled with the more liberal seasons, the herd has been dramatically reduced.

Wow. If thats what you guys call thinned and stabilized i'd love to see it out of control!
I've hunted zones 2 and 4 for the last 4 years and every year i've managed to shoot my buck in zone 4. Almost every time i hunted in there i could have shot does. I thought it was the other way around. I thought it was over-populated.(still much more deer than SE mass.) I guess it shows you how much deer populations vary from state to state.

I hunt Zone 2 and there and the buck/doe ratio is still out of whack but they are still hunting up there until the end of the month. Some of the classic deer area in NJ lies within Zones 1-5 and I think that Zone 4 has a lot of public land so therefore the state wants to minimize the harvest. Zone 5 is like "it's brown--it's down" and Zone 2 is just behind in that category. The shame is that these Zones can/do produce some monster bucks but the Jan either-sex hunts wipe a lot of buttons and shed bucks out.

Good luck in NW Jersey!

Looking at the world from 15 feet up.