I believe a little of everything playing a HUGE factor on the 2009 deer season .
I also hunted Northern and Southern zones in 09 .
I hunted just abought evry day some morning , some evening and some both .
I only hunt Southern tier opening ( 3 days ). But myself and 6 other hunters had unusualy bad luck .
We took 2 bucks and 1 doe between 7 guys .
We did miss 2 bucks , but taken into consideration the very few doe,s we seen it was not a very good season .
Now in the Northern section and only speeking for myself .
I managed to take a decent buck .
Not a huge one but he was decent .
In all my daily hunts there were a substansual drop in deer numbers in 2009 from the previous hunting seasons .
Not sure if it was the weather, or lack of hunters or a VERY FRIGGED 2008 winter the deer numbers were way down ..

traditional b/p season NO INLINES OR SCOPES
SIDELOCKS OR FLINTERS IRON SIGHTS

A sidelock shooting conicals or sabots looses nothing to an unscoped inline and is easily a 100 yard plus gun.
Like I said - bowseason is not split into trad and modern. Why does gun need to have seperations.

I heartliy second that. DEC does the best they can with a very difficult task. In reality it is a best-educated-guess. It is highly reliant on reporting, so if you complain and don't report you are part of the problem.

We saw a few less does were we hunt in the Southern Zone, but that's what we want. I hunted in the Northern and Southern Zones. Got a doe on the first day of bow up north and a wall hanger 9 in November in the southern zone. I think there's too many people out there that don't report their deer. It would give the DEC an easier job when determining how many tags to sell and what changes need to be made to what zones. Hunters have to do their job too, instead of shrugging a harvest off and not reporting it in.

I wonder what the plans are for the 2010 DMP's then ?

we had a great season just above albany you know its good when you wack two on state land ten minuets outa the truck during muzzloader season then fill the rest of your tags in 4 days with only have hunting 5 days during muzzloader season and i could have gotten alot more i actualy passed on deer and being from MA never thought id do that

I did fine, filled 3 tags for archery, got a doe during shotgun. Bucks disappeared all shotgun season which stunk but can't say my season was bad...