Doc

Put yourself in the seat of a DEC decision-maker. You have decided that a dire situation is developing in certain WMUs. The herd is crazy out-of-control. It needs some emergency action to get it all back under control. You know the only way to do that is to take a significant number of does out of the herd. Now if you really believe all that, what season would you use to do that kind of drastic doe reduction? My thought is that if you were truthfully convinced that dire actions need to be used, I would be applying doe only days during some of the days of the most effective season that is likely to have the most significant effect. I have a regular gun season available for use that has more participants involved.Those more participants have demonstrated that they are much more efficient at getting the job done and likely are the only ones who really can. Seems pretty obvious where I would be putting the "doe only" days. Of course I would only do that if I happened to honestly believe the seriousness of the situation that I was portraying and that my only agenda was to bring down the herd size. Can anyone explain why would I be wrong with that decision?

Just let us know who the members are that are forcing you to poke that link to this thread and maybe we can convince them to stop doing that. I hate to see anybody forced to access a topic that they really don't want to see.

That poison ivy can be some pretty devious stuff. For years, I had no reaction to it. As a kid I used to walk barefoot through it and had great fun showing off that fact to anyone that was interested, that I was completely immune. Then about a decade ago, I was hacking on the stuff clearing it out of a tree, and I came up with a couple of little blistered that itched like crazy. Not nice, but no big deal. Last year I got nailed pretty darn good to the point where I went to the dermatologist. Now I pay attention when I see it .... lol. So immunity apparently is not necessarily for always.

In most cases (not all), the word "hate" might be a bit strong. But anyone who has not spotted the bias and language of animosity here and there, either hasn't been following the thread or simply doesn't want to see it, or is part of it.

I practice sitting and standing and kneeling. However, I seem to get better consistency and back tension when standing. So when in my ground blinds, if I believe I can get into a standing position without a whole lot of movement and commotion, I will try to stand. As has already been mentioned, it is impossible for me to shoot to my right when sitting, so that will force me to stand or kneel. But if I have a good shot at 20 yards, and I can get into the traditional standing shooting stance, I'm a real happy hunter. It is my most confident shooting stance.

Actually, anybody who has been following this thread and doesn't see the gun hunter vs. bowhunter animosity showing through, can't be really paying attention. It has nothing to do with complexes, but a simple honest reaction to some of the comments on this thread. Apparently I am not the only one picking up on that. The idea of everyone going out hunting and having a good time is an honorable thought, but bowhunters are not the only ones who should be thinking that way.

A lot of vines are destructive, but I have seen wild grape actually bend mature trees over and kill them. They can get huge.

One thing that this thread has really brought to light is just how much animosity there really is from gun hunters toward bow hunters. I always suspected that it was a much bigger problem than is generally acknowledged, but the comments on this thread plus a lot of other sources, is showing an increasing divide in the hunting community based on the use of a bow.

Yeah, wild mushrooms scare me to death. I don't know one from the other, and having read about an entire family that thought they knew edible mushrooms from poisonous ones (but didn't), I am not ready to let some picture in a book make the decision for me either. Too many look-alikes out there. I love mushrooms on my steaks, but I want those mushrooms to come from some bonafide supplier that will guarantee that he's not feeding me poison.....lol.

OK, if we are all done bashing hunters and engaging in all the self-flagellation, let me be the first to tell you that attitudes have not gotten worse. In fact not that many decades ago, you would never have heard any hunters even having these kinds of conversations. For some reason, we seem to think that the attitudes of hunters have suddenly shifted from the great selfless benefactors of wildlife who hunted only to make the world of nature a lovely balanced place of harmony, to some kind of menace of the planet bent on the wanton eradication of all of wildlife. Well, that's a nice rose-colored vision of the hunters of the past, but no, there has not been some strain of evil that has infected all of the modern hunters. Regardless of the perverse pleasures we seem to get out of running down the hunting mentality of today, we need to occasionally stop beating ourselves to recognize that the widespread concern for ethics and fair chase, and the concepts of individual herd enhancement and management are relatively recent mind-sets that the hunters of the past never really bothered to engage in. So, let's stop explaining to the antis or any non-hunter how we understand and appreciate their efforts to impugn hunting and its participants and now want to help that effort along. Lets take a little credit where credit is due and appreciate our contributions to conservation and even the fact that we are discussing what is good for ecology and wildlife management. The very fact that we are discussing an over-abundance of deer kind of shows that we are not the scourge of wildlife that we seem to now enjoy portraying ourselves as.

And of course there are always those that get absolutely giddy about somebody else being screwed. Oh and by the way, I am looking at those special cross-hatched areas and the way I see it bowhunters and muzzleloaders are the only ones affected. I don't see any changes to the gun season where some real impact to the problem could be seen. So I haven't a clue what you are talking about as far as it being "effective across all seasons in the southern zone".

There I just finished reading their statement. I can only say that the lying sacks of crap have outdone themselves in terms of destroying their credibility. I have just one very simple question that if properly answered would totally change my mind about this new rule. If they are not flat-out lying about the severity of the population situation and their super-concern about the excessive deer population, why did they chose to make their remedial actions apply only in the most inefficient season that they could find? Yeah, how seriously can you take their whining when they passed over actions during gun seasons and put the entire corrective management of deer populations on the backs of bowhunters, the least capable to have the needed impacts that they claim they need. It's a simple question that no one seems to want to answer.

Ha-ha-ha .... why don't we just see exactly how screwed up we can make things. The ideas keep getting screwier and screwier. However, I will say that such a thought could easily be something hatched by the DEC. That is kind of the way they are thinking these days. I know the gun hunters would be all for it. It seems that lately that season time slot is the envy of everybody in hunting these days and there is no shortage of people looking to push bowhunters out of it or glom onto it for themselves .... lol. And that thought always seems to come with the blessing of the DEC these days.

Never timed it, but I do know that no matter how much let-off your bow has, there still is a finite window of time before you begin to lose accuracy. Yes there is an optimum time to draw, and we don't always get it right. It can be an amazing amount of time between when the deer is first seen, and when it reaches the perfect location for a good shot within your distance capabilities. I have seen deer stop for no apparent reason and just stare for several minutes. I have been at full draw during a few of those staring sessions waiting for that critter to move into position. I have also been forced to let down because I could feel that time window closing. No matter what your decision is as to when to draw, there will come a time when that decision is wrong. That's one of the things that adds the challenge to bow hunting.

I dispute your claim that most were saying anything about how they could care less about antlers. The fact is that most were saying that antlers is not the only reason that they hunt deer and that there is a lot more to deer hunting than simply high scoring antlers. I don't think that anyone said that they had a problem with shooting a buck. Even the pure meat hunters cannot be in favor of having a large percentage of the potential deer take being made unavailable to them whether they be buck or doe.

That is exactly the kind of hunter the DEC believes we all are. They continue the war on bowhunters and we have all been conditioned to obediently fall into lockstep and wait for the other shoe to drop. Yes they have reason to assume that everyone will simply take it. That is our history and they know it. But, maybe not all of us.

Ha-ha-ha .... just another page lifted out of the Cuomo Book of Dirty Tricks. Page 846: " Don't give them a chance to respond". That goes along with the other page in that same chapter of the Cuomo Book of Dirty Tricks that says, "Never mind all the fuss and furor, they all have a short attention span and will forget about it very quickly". They've learned well from their political leader. And why not, he appoints their Commissioner.

Yeah, I think it has always been obvious what was meant regarding the difference between appreciation of a good rack vs. using it as the only measure of success and satisfaction. And of course the current uproar is obviously about the point that deer hunting is a 2-gender hunt, and odds of a kill have just been depleted arbitrarily by the DEC in their little campaign against bowhunters. Don't be confusing that with an idea that all bowhunters are suddenly, or ever were, trophy hunters.

You know as well as I do that the deer population cannot be managed by bowhunters. It also may occur to you that the situation will not change because this war on bowhunters can never achieve what they are claiming it will. And so this fiasco will become an engrained regulation that bowhunters in these areas will be saddled with for the foreseeable future. Add to that all the little brain-farts that keep popping up in the minds of DEC management, and the bowhunters in the affected areas had better get used to chronic and ever-increasing DEC harassment.

Notice how perfectly posed those illustrations are. However, I do know how to arrange the head-on view. Of course it will result in the whitetail's instant version of flipping the finger as the white flag waves bye-bye. The perfect side view doesn't happen all that often either, and seldom is there really all that much time to analyze and study if the pose is exactly right to calculate the measurements. But it all looks good in a diagram.

No. It is time to resurrect my boyhood hunting activity of squirrel hunting and let the DEC eat my bowhunting license. I've had it with their little war on bowhunters. All this screwing around with bow seasons has finally taken it's toll. I'm tired of fighting every attack on the season. I'm tired of constantly writing this and phoning that, begging for a little time to enjoy something that I have enjoyed for over a half century without the current constant DEC harassment. We have a neutered state bowhunting organization that has been completely gutted, and we have the people in power in the DEC to exercise their will to harass bowhunters. It's time for the old guy to dig out the .22 and raise hell with the squirrels this fall.

This comment is so on the mark that it deserves repeating: "This isn't on bowhunters or muzzleloaders shoulders. It's on the DEC with an agenda and they're not concerned with screwing over groups to get there. Yet they say doe population is the problem and they are enacting regs in the seasons of least effective tools to immediately make an impact. That's an agenda. If they really wanted doe levels down, they'd be going to gun hunters because that's where 100k DMPs were filled last year."

Wait a minute ..... This is the DEC we're talking about. All they have to do is have Cornell write them up some statistical nonsense and they can expand our few comments to apply the to the entire hunting community. It works on their deer management stats (within 2% I'm told.) ......lol.

And what are the odds that we will ever know those percentages? They'll be burying those stats as deep as they can.

Yes, let's quietly give back the two weeks we worked so hard for. Don't really have much choice on that anyway. The DEC is in the driver's seat and has gone rogue.....lol.