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219# dressed, 46"+ heart girth. 4 1/2 YO I'm about 285 in the picture. 205# dressed. Rifle has a 26" barrel. I'm way over 300# in the picture.

It could be a lift in population. I know the clover been growing the last month or better here. Deer visiting with prints in the soil. Some of the low spots with standing water, have grass greening already. I can't say I've seen many years like this one

That’s actually the PA chest girth chart method, first introduced on this sight by G-man. As it turned out, that chart was a bit conservative, when it came to estimating the field dressed weight of a WNY deer. Several members here, myself included, checked it against scales (the one I used was a “legal for trade” butcher’s scale, while the others used those cheap Asian dial ones from Harbor freight, Bass Pro or whatever). All of them showed that the real weights were significantly heavier than that predicted by the PA chest girth chart. I’m guessing that the reason for that, is because the further north in the whitetail deer’s range, the heavier their average body weight. The largest chest girth I ever measured on one was this stout 6 pointer, back in 2017, at 43-1/2”. With a WNY correction applied to the PA chrart, the field dressed weight would have broke 200 lbs. I was never real big on weight because more than half of that field dressed weight consists of water, which has no nutritional value. Also, the weight of a field dressed deer is highly dependent on how fast it is weighed after it is killed. They start to dehydrate and lose water weight very fast . My biggest concert is always meat volume, not weight. The chest girth method allows for a more accurate estimate of that. I know about how many quarts of meat I need to feed my family, and how much my freezer holds, and how many bags to buy.