Whatever happened to deer season?
Deer season has changed in the last few decades
By Steve BowmanIf you haven't noticed, deer season has changed a great deal in the last couple of decades.
When I was younger, everything in the entire world revolved around deer season. In those days, the season was only a week long. It was such a special week, in fact, that school let out and even businesses were closed, with signs in their windows that read "Closed for deer season."
Everything revolved around that week at camp, and the hopes and dreams that revolved around getting a deer — any deer.
Today, there may be a few kids getting some school days off during deer season in some of our rural areas. And I'm sure there are still folks whose world revolves around deer season — but deer season just isn't the same season it was decades ago.
While most of those changes are good, they come with some residual impacts that maybe aren't so good.
For instance, in the good old days, it was pretty much free-range hunting. Any spot that didn't have a "No Hunting" sign on it was fair game. In some regards it was a free-for-all.
In the last two decades, that has shifted to a more-organized deer season, where now deer leases are the order of the day.
Almost immediately, organized deer leases drastically reduced the number of hunter-mistaken-for-game accidents. Today that type thing is rare.
And all of that is a good thing.
But the residual not-so-good is that it also cut the amount of land hunters could utilize, pricing many folks right out of the hunt on land they had previously been hunting on all their lives.
Another positive impact, though, was what all that did for deer management.
Back in the good old days, killing a doe was forbidden. For the most part, it was all about bone-hard antler — and if your deer didn't have at least enough bone-hard antler to hang a wedding ring on, then there were those who didn't think it counted.
(For the record, I wasn't one of those — I was an "any deer" type hunter. But I've changed a lot since then.)
And so has the hunting fraternity. With the increase in archery and muzzleload seasons, the taking of does to benefit the overall herd is widely accepted. To complete the shift, any bone-hard antler won't do now, unless of course it's used in the vernacular of "culling bucks."
Those are a couple of words that would likely make granddaddy turn over in his grave ... cull bucks. That would be as foreign as the Internet to granddaddy.
What wouldn't be foreign to him, though, is doing what's best for the deer herd, taking pressure off those year-and-half old bucks, scratching out a food plot and in general taking care of the resource. The results of those management practices immediately started yielding bigger bucks, better deer herds and even healthier habitat.
That's all extremely good. In years to come, that is the very thing that will justify hunting in a country growing rapidly greener.
But it has its drawbacks as well.
Every deer season, I get into a conversation with a hunter at my camp who wants to know what he should or shouldn't shoot.
(I love the idea that hunters do that today.)
But invariably, once the deer hits the ground, the question emerges, "Would you have killed that deer?"
That question arises because I'm known as a picky deer hunter, and I have minimum standards for bucks that I chose to shoot.
Since I typically hunt with a bow, that minimum is around 125 inches, which would put it in the Pope and Young record book — and for the vast majority of deer hunters in this country (regardless of what you see on television) — it would be the buck of a lifetime.
But I let it be known that is my standard.
I've been fortunate over the years to be successful at taking a lot of deer and I have no qualms with laying a lot of does down in green pastures.
So outside of my management goals, my decisions begin with my own standard, followed by just how much that particular deer might mean for me at the time.
And that final standard is the main deal — all other benchmarks go out the window if I think a deer will make my day.
Today, though, a lot of hunters who felt every rush of excitement imaginable when the deer was in front of them are disappointed once the deer is at camp and everyone else is scoring it.
That is a foreign thing to me: A hunter should never be disappointed in a deer. But they are, because the hunting sex appeal on television shows and magazine stories sets up unrealistic expectations.
I love watching the best in the business taking those 150-inch deer, but I also know to expect that on a yearly basis is unrealistic.
I fear a lot of our younger hunters expect that, which isn't totally bad, until they become disenchanted with hunting as a whole. Then the residuals of these great impacts become a not-so-good thing.
It's the conversation that has become common in the last decade.
