Was the deer herd thinned too much?

[Musky Buck]

Drive around the sections, worked for 25 years of winter deer scouting if you know they tend to cross here or there and have literally like a cows path in places decade after decade, after a quarter century of checking, but yes I'm on hoof also and I think with the way everything is plowed/ bizarre winter, anyway I did find some traffic last night, not many tracks but some

[candiru]

I am in old the zone 4. The all season license hurt our herd pretty bad. After about 6 years of somewhat restrictive lottery the herd locally is looking better. I don't know if it is that way across the whole permit area.

[Rippinlip]

Definately lots of less sightings down around here.

Have many other friends and family all talking about the lack of deer sightings.

[Musky Buck]

hey candiru do you mean the multi-zone buck vs. the all-season tag ? I don't think the all-season tag sold really well, if you were a zone 2 or 1 hunter it seemed the all-season tag wasn't really important because you had so many days, I figured the zone 4 folk so you could hunt 6 rifle days and not 2. Just curious because thankfully everyone I know that all-seasoned we didn't party hunt or cross tag or anything, it saved deer from our hunting party because we could lean on the muzzy if we didn't score rifle hunting, we were more patient letting bucks go we likely would've shot having only a rifle tag, then few if any of us could score on a nocturnal muzzy buck so we burnt our tags often.

[Musky Buck]

Back to the thinned, I've been scouting a lot lately and someone said get out of the truck and scout so I did, put on some miles, the results are the same. 3 areas had 0 deer tracks, fresh or otherwise and area # 4 appears a doe and 2 fawns are hanging in there. Least amount of tracks I've ever seen, my dad said in the closed deer season in the 70's there were 10x as many tracks where I scouted as there is now. Told dad it wouldn't take but 10 deer to have 10x as many tracks. I guess I'm not all that concerned but wondering when or if there will be wintering deer where they'd been year after year ? Last winter was the same except area #4 had roughly 70-80. If Lou is saying deer numbers are at the "goal" then the goal for the areas I'm in are ? This winter has been goofy and I've wondered if others in the farm country are seeing wintering herds or is it some here and some there ? I also took a tour through what I consider the best area in the state and didn't see a 50th of what you'd normally see for sign, my gut feeling says if you thought last fall was tough, hang on, you aint seen rock bottom yet. If some or most of this is true we're lucky we are having this winter this winter. Asked my friend about his herd of 150 animals, he tells me cut that by 3/4's but he has heavy wolves around and they're changing things at his swamp.