PA Gun Season
 

Good luck all who will be in Penn's woods tomorrow!! Make sure to post your success stories!

Good luck to all Pa hunters tomorrow, especially the little ones, they are the future of our lifestyle. Good luck, shoot straight. And our anthem in this area:
Early to bed
Early to rise
Kill em all
Then tell lies.

Good luck guys! Wish I was in PA for the opener :(

not to put a damper on this good post but where i hunt, north of marienville in elk county. there were 4 trucks filled with illegally shot buck, so around 30 some deer. what a shame:( the deer population is already suffereing enough with the game commision selling all the doe tags, and now my generation has no good deer hunting up there, im 14. they didnt even have an antler restriction untill 6 years ago! and they allow shooting doe in the same season as buck. what a disgrace

If there's no deer,how did they find 30 illegal bucks?

I wonder how many of those deer were actually road kills instead of being poached.

Gee I live in NY where there are no ARs(in my area) and we get 2 buck tags and 3 doe tags and our gun season is a full month long including ML season, this year Ive killed a nice 8 point, a doe, and a crippled spike, and im planning on killing at least 1 more doe. I do pretty much the same thing every year and every year I see more does and better bucks than the year before.

I'm wondering deer.....Are you bragging or complaining....In Va you get 6 deer 3 turkey and a bear on the same license.I'm lucky enough to get to hunt both Pa & Va...

Hunted monday and part of tuesday. Saw 15 doe and no shooters bucks at all. hard rain all day on tuesday and only saw 5 doe. I wont be back out till next week, hopefully the snow comes.
-jake

5 game wardens were there, pretty sure they arent roadkill.

beats me, they where all under the antler restriction tho, which is 3 on one side. so they wiped out a good amount of the young bucks. I hunted there 3 days solid and saw 1 doe. So did many other hunters. If you ever hunted there you would know.

I live less than a mile from the Elk county line and do about 50% of my deer hunting in that county.I have a pretty good idea what it's like.There is no way that the PGC picked up 30 sub legal AR bucks.Someone's feeding you a line.

I saw two bucks taking out of the area I hunted Monday. One legal six, and one illegal six.
30 illegal in a few PGC trucks is highly probable in my neck of the state.

well im not sure time will tell, this guy owns the Forest lodge, previously the pigeon loft. He took a real nice buck up there last year and passed on 4 legal bucks this year, he is the one who told me. I hunted pigs ear if you know where that is. I saw a doe, thats it out of 3 days of hunting. kinda disapointing.

Like you, I have only seen one deer after 3 days of hunting in 5C. I walked for 3 hrs. this morning in the best cover and deer habitat in the state and didn't see any fresh rubs or scrapes, no beds, and no fresh droppings. Every year I look forward to a couple of meals of venison liver and fried onions,but killing a doe would be contributing to the end of deer hunting in 5C.

Although I haven't connected with a buck yet, our family has done very well this year. We have taken 6 buck the smallest was 17" Spread, the largest 21.5" Spread, all 8 thru 10 point buck. I am heading out tomorrow again, hopefully it's my turn!

Good luck to all!

In 4 days of hunting I saw 21 deer total, passed on a dink legal buck the first day. Wed. after the rain I caught a big 8 in his bed but couldn't get to a position to get a clean shot before he took off . Ran into 4 doe the rest of that day. Today I ran into 5 doe. I can't complain, I may not harvest a buck but I'am having a great time trying.

Im bragging! gotta one up ya though, we get 4 turkeys and a bear plus we can transfer 2 doe tags so we can actually take upto 7 deer, wahoo!




(Too bad we just elected another doochbag for a governor though)

In some countys in Northen Va you can kill does until March and get as many doe tags as you need

Yet you continue to hunt the same small area year after year where you've been complaining about no deer for the past 7 years.It's a mystery why anyone would hunt an area where they're convinced there's no deer.A few weeks ago you make almost the exact same post.Then why continue to hunt there?

I only was able to hunt one day in 4A. I saw 12 deer, 3 were bucks. At 8:10am a hot doe was being chased by two 6 points, I took the larger 6 and then the other 6 ran down to my buddy and he shot it. The other buck I saw was a spike.

Mine



The one that was with him

I hunt there because I live there and there is no reason why I should expect to find better hunting anywhere else in 5C. Would you prefer that I go to an area with much poorer habitat and cover and hope to find more deer? Haven't you been telling us that the deer will be where they have good food and cover? That is where I am hunting, but when the PGC issues 125 doe tags/FSM it doesn't matter how good the food and cover might be , you still won't have many deer unless they are off limits to hunting.

My friend hunts 5C and tags out every year by the second week of the early archery season. He also hunts with me in 3D :party0005:with an additional doe tag. We hunt the Delaware State Forest (logged) surrounded by hunting clubs and developments. We are successful hunting thickets, swamps, and mast producing trees growing among them. You can not waste time in 20 year old/20ft high birch bark, and expect to see a deer/nor in open SGL woods.
Archery buck hotspots intermixed with suburban development doe, or true off the beaten path swamp loving doe/bucks.

Opening day for me was 8 doe, grouse, active bear tracks, and a bunch of other sign.
There you have have it from my neck of the deer devoid state (30k doe permits).
Archery was sub legal/legal buck daily.

Saw total of 4 first day in 5c, and about a dozen the second day. One was a 4-point and the rest baldies. I ended up with 2 button bucks. Haven't seen any of the six non-shooters I saw in archery. But seems to be the typical year, little action the first day and see alot more and shoot more the second day. With the bucks being scarce.

Nice looking Buck WVBrent! Congrats!!

I saw 11 doe and an 8point all by 8:30 opening day in the eastern part of 4e. even grouse hunting in 2g i saw many deer in the deep wood of Sproul state forest. The 8 was not a monster but 16in spread and big body.

first day out saw 2 does.....the next morning I saw 3 illegal bucks and 5 does. I never had a good shot on any of the does. I live in 5D and hunt both 5D and 5C....

Don't complain next year that bucks are scarce.

PA-The Very Best Hunter Complainers
 

Nothing like PA. If you want to and just love to complain, just hunt PA. Unfortunately, the highest number of unsuccessful hunters come from Pa, because PA has the most hunters.
If every hunter was successful in PA, all deer would really be wiped out. They use to have a million hunters, restricted to two weeks of antlered hunting. Now, they're down to some 750,000 and the hunting seasons expanded a little. But never enough deer.

Nothing like 350,000 so called hunters, hunting the same acre of land, year after year, and complaining about not seeing any deer.
Of course, if half weren't unsuccessful in PA, they'd really have a reason to complain. No Deer!

does PA really have the highest amount of hunters nation wide?

No complaining here. I personally saw 6 non shooters in archery, plus the ones that I didn't see, and mature bucks, so I don't think there will be any shortage of bucks next year. My point was I usually see a bunch of anlered buck in archery, and they become scarce in rifle season.

When all other things fail blame Jersey (kidding)

i agree.i would like to say what i think of anyone that shoots those little bucks.

Did the harvest of BB prior to 2000 prevent the herd from increasing to 1.6M deer and producing a record buck harvest of 203K buck in 2000 and 2001? However, reducing the BB harvest from 77k in 2002 to 51K in 2008 produced a buck harvest of 108K. So how does saving BB increase the buck harvest on a sustainable basis.

Because button bucks grow into bucks?

One more rifle hunt left. Maybe I'll get lucky and bag a last day buck! (Crosses fingers as he puts on all the hats he ever shot a buck while wearing, LOL!) Good luck to all tomorrow!

Lets not forget that in Va you can also buy a "bonus" tag that allows you 6 additional does(antlerless)!

That is not even close to being a rational answer. In a stable or decreasing herd if you save a BB you have to harvest an adult doe which means fewer fawns will be recruited the following year ,which in turn results in a lower sustainable harvest. There is no free lunch when it comes to deer management. Everything comes with a price.

Nice to see you are still around bluebird.Isn't too many of the guys from few yrs ago around. We had a pretty good season. Got ten pt in archery,Saw some big herds of doe first 5 days 3c couldn't shoot does.Tagged out last sat.