The Good Old Days

[shmelton]

How many of you that hunted in the 80’s and early 90’s killed bigger deer then? I’ve been doing some pondering, and it seems to me like more big deer were killed before trophy management became a thing.

 

[Nutterbuster]

Everything I've read and experienced indicates that there's never been a time where more trophy bucks were harvested in more areas. I can't speak with certainty for every area, and it's worth noting that most of the #1 bucks were killed decades past. Here in Alabama, our REALLY big deer were mostly killed by dog hunters or just picked up as dead heads. But most places are killing more 120+s a year than ever before.

But, more land has become concentrated in fewer hands. And the better the land the fewer people have access to it. I've had the privilege of seeing some of the properties owned by wealthy guys who can hire consultants and biologists and trophy management done correctly definitely delivers as advertised.

 

[shmelton]

I understand what your saying, and I agree that more 120’s are reported being killed now. But, how many racks are hanging from the 80’s to mid 90’s that were never measured. My pop has 15-20 from that time period that are 130 up. 168 being the biggest. Me and my brother finally measured them, lol. And, every one was killed in Merriwether county on a 150 acre track of land. My uncles have quite a few off the same track also. There wasn’t even a bush hog path on that property much less a food plot. I’m just wondering if the data is not skewed since most folks pre internet didn’t know how to measure nor took the time.

 

[Halfstep]

Back in the 70's into the 90's, it was common for people to let you hunt on their property for free. Now, it has become a big business to rent out your property for hunting for big money especially in the right locations. This can hinder a lot of hunter's ability to find reasonable places to hunt.
Bow hunters use to be a smaller crowd who didn't draw a lot of attention and had less competition for prime hunting property. Now with Xbows being legal in most states, bowhunting has become more popular and finding low pressured areas can be more difficult.

For a lot of hunters like myself, the increase in bow hunters, rather it be compounds or Xbows, isn't really noticeable. But in places that are popular hot spots for having bigger bucks, this can become more problematic for bow hunter who live in those areas. They are having to compete more for good property and having to deal with the effects of higher hunting pressure.

All these things may lead to more difficulty in consistently killing bigger bucks.

 

[will4554]

The good days are right now. More deer, less hunters, etc etc.

 

[NMSbowhunter]

A lot of bucks are still getting killed around here and the folks doing it could care less about scoring or even having them mounted. Case in point. Back in 2016 I was in a club with 25 members (and families), and I got onto a really nice buck up on the north end of the club. This area was predominantly new growth cutover and I found a bachelor group of 3 bucks living down in a very narrow SMZ with some small white oaks. The big boy was among them and there was another decent buck. I had chopped a hidden, winding trail 400 yards down to this SMZ over the summer and put in a stand. I hunted those bucks hard during archery season. Either one would have been my best deer to date.

To make a long story short, one of the members, a local farmer in his 70's shot the buck out his truck window with a rifle while the buck was crossing a county road. A friend of mine told me about it and said he had seen the bucks fresh rack sawn off and pitched into a wood box containing numerous other racks from season's past up at the guy's tractor shed. The guy just sawed the horns off and tossed them in a box.

That's not even talking into account the dog runners who kill anything brown that pops out on the black top road ahead of their dogs.

 

[shmelton]

Back in the 70's into the 90's, it was common for people to let you hunt on their property for free. Now, it has become a big business to rent out your property for hunting for big money especially in the right locations. This can hinder a lot of hunter's ability to find reasonable places to hunt.
Bow hunters use to be a smaller crowd who didn't draw a lot of attention and had less competition for prime hunting property. Now with Xbows being legal in most states, bowhunting has become more popular and finding low pressured areas can be more difficult.

For a lot of hunters like myself, the increase in bow hunters, rather it be compounds or Xbows, isn't really noticeable. But in places that are popular hot spots for having bigger bucks, this can become more problematic for bow hunter who live in those areas. They are having to compete more for good property and having to deal with the effects of higher hunting pressure.

All these things may lead to more difficulty in consistently killing bigger bucks.

I never really thought about the legalizing of Xbows, when it comes to putting more people in the field. I don’t know why it’s obvious.


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[NMSbowhunter]

My general feeling, and I may be wrong, is that overall, there are more bucks living to an age where they can get bigger than say 20 years ago. Part of that is antler restrictions making spikes and fork horns and the like off limits. Back when shooting does was heavily curtailed, but ANY buck was fair game a lot of male deer got shot immediately that first season their mama kicked them out.

 

[Will Harris]

i killed my 1st deer 42 years ago. without question there are more and better deer now than any time since i started. this being said, i grew up in GA. in the 60s when i was born, they were shipping deer in from WI. we couldnt legally kill a doe in most counties even in the 80s except maybe thanksgiving wkend. now its 2 bucks and 10 does. the peeps that want bigger deer and work for them are killing deer that we couldnt even imagine back then. been a steady incline as far as our area goes.

been hunting in IN since '95. certainly more deer now than then. i'd say buck sizes are similar. hard to manage when you are hunting 80 acres surrounded by 3 other land owners. IN went to a 1 buck rule a few years ago and i see a TON of small bucks every year. even on public. that certainly helps bucks get a little older.

 

[HuumanCreed]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is also a financial incentive to trophy hunting years ago that is not there for most of the veteran hunters in today's world. It used to be an arm race to get the biggest buck around and having it display at shows for money. Vendors would then sponsor you and you appears in magazines. But with social media and other type of technologies, the requirements for making money as a bow hunter changed. You need a certain camera appeals that guys like Mitch Rompola or Milo Hanson are not used to working a crowd.

And our society have a hard time caring about 2nd place and anything below that. So unless you beat some records, most of the time good bucks are just not getting exposer.

 

[BTaylor]

Here, the difference is the quantity of bucks making it to 3.5 or older now as opposed to back in the 80's or 90's. Overall population is bigger as well. More readily accessible knowledge about habitat and more willingness to manage private habitat as well has also made a difference. Plus we didnt have or know anything about safety, no thermacell, no decent insulation, virtually all cotton clothing or big heavy, itchy rough wool. I didnt have a pair of insulated boots until the 90's and the first pair was waders for duck hunting. Knowledge, equipment and management has definitely made a significant difference in the quality and enjoyment of deer hunting.

 

[Will Harris]

Here, the difference is the quantity of bucks making it to 3.5 or older now as opposed to back in the 80's or 90's. Overall population is bigger as well. More readily accessible knowledge about habitat and more willingness to manage private habitat as well has also made a difference. Plus we didnt have or know anything about safety, no thermacell, no decent insulation, virtually all cotton clothing or big heavy, itchy rough wool. I didnt have a pair of insulated boots until the 90's and the first pair was waders for duck hunting. Knowledge, equipment and management has definitely made a significant difference in the quality and enjoyment of deer hunting.

so you were climbing with a Baker tree stand? what a death trap those were! innovative for sure but omg dangerous. no thought of safety harnesses. i only dropped my foot portion of my climber once before i tied it on! bad time to be way up a GA pine

 

[BTaylor]

so you were climbing with a Baker tree stand? what a death trap those were! innovative for sure but omg dangerous. no thought of safety harnesses. i only dropped my foot portion of my climber once before i tied it on! bad time to be way up a GA pine

I was climbing on Baker's before there was a top portion. Still have it too. Dropped the stand a few times but only once well up the tree. That time I was at 20' when I dropped it. It went all the way to the ground. First or second weekend of season so had on a light t-shirt. Was a fun slide down the tree for sure. First safety gear was a strap around your waist that was more dangerous than falling. The good ol' days alright.

 

[shmelton]

I was climbing on Baker's before there was a top portion. Still have it too. Dropped the stand a few times but only once well up the tree. That time I was at 20' when I dropped it. It went all the way to the ground. First or second weekend of season so had on a light t-shirt. Was a fun slide down the tree for sure. First safety gear was a strap around your waist that was more dangerous than falling. The good ol' days alright.

Man I fell with a homemade Baker so many times it’s not funny. Nothing like hanging upside down on a small piece of plywood with you feet still stuck in the straps!


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[Will Harris]

i was well above 20' when i had to slide down to get foot portion. at least it was a slick GA pine and i had on coveralls.

waist strap? dont remember those. i didnt even think about safety until i had kids in the mid 90s. one of the things that got me started on a tree diaper (saddle) was my 3 boys. now i hesitate to climb a tall ladder stand

back when you could buy a stand and it didnt come with safety harness or warning stickers! those were the good ole days. except we shot more pigs than deer cause there were so few deer back then.

i still have my 3 piece Apache 10' aluminum ladder stand from the early 80s. that thing was expensive! that was innovation also (back then).

 

[BTaylor]

i was well above 20' when i had to slide down to get foot portion. at least it was a slick GA pine and i had on coveralls.

waist strap? dont remember those. i didnt even think about safety until i had kids in the mid 90s. one of the things that got me started on a tree diaper (saddle) was my 3 boys. now i hesitate to climb a tall ladder stand

back when you could buy a stand and it didnt come with safety harness or warning stickers! those were the good ole days. except we shot more pigs than deer cause there were so few deer back then.

i still have my 3 piece Apache 10' aluminum ladder stand from the early 80s. that thing was expensive! that was innovation also (back then).

Those first straps were 2 sections of seat belt webbing connected with a D ring with slider bar buckles. One went around the tree and the other around your waist. If you fell you were going to get your guts squeezed right out through your ears. I hated those things and refused to wear it after trying them a couple times. If my only options were the Baker or a ladder stand, I'm taking the Baker 1000% of the time. I have way less than zero use for a ladder stand. They freaking suck, period.

 

[shmelton]

Those first straps were 2 sections of seat belt webbing connected with a D ring with slider bar buckles. One went around the tree and the other around your waist. If you fell you were going to get your guts squeezed right out through your ears. I hated those things and refused to wear it after trying them a couple times. If my only options were the Baker or a ladder stand, I'm taking the Baker 1000% of the time. I have way less than zero use for a ladder stand. They freaking suck, period.

My 1st safety strap was a piece of yellow nylon 1/2” rope my dad spliced together. I’d probably been cut in 1/2 if I fell out of the tree with that thing on.

Maybe I’m just romanticizing over my childhood, but it seems like every deer that was killed back then was a toad. I know I killed a bunch of 3 pointers, but the grown folk always seem to kill at least 1 monster a yr. They all looked like this, in my head anyway.

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[elk yinzer]

Around here (PA) there has never been a better time to be a deer hunter. We have a contingent that yearns for the old days, but it was more of a socialite crowd centered around the deer camp traditions, namely, drinking. That aspect, of which the hunting was mostly a casual affair, has decayed. A lot. For actual hunting, it's tremendously improved since AR (antler restrictions) and generally more habitat-based improvement.

A lot of this predates me but from talking to old timers it seems hunting that was underutilized, like most hunting out west, a lot of bowhunting pre Xbow explosion, has definitely suffered from the exponential increase in hunting as tourism and how much it has become a major form of self-expression in the past 20-30 years.

It was never like that before. You were either rural and were too busy farming most of the time, or you worked in the towns and some of those guys got away to camp a week or so a year. No one had the time or money to make it an identity thing and certainly nobody could imagine it becoming a career option or "industry". I don't quite fully know why, but that vein of the evolution of hunting I find rather repulsive. I think maybe because I find hunting a calming escape from a too-modern world, and those people want to have it both ways. That's what the socialite version of hunting has become.

Habitat is never constant either. We had unnatural booms of small game and large game in the 1900's as habitat was regenerating from the homesteading and logging boom. Later 1800's PA did not have many trees left at all, so it spent a good portion of the century as a mosaic of perfect habitat. Then a lot of that habitat aged out into mature forest.

Times are always changing. Comparing eras or generations is a waste of time.

 

[Will Harris]

Those first straps were 2 sections of seat belt webbing connected with a D ring with slider bar buckles. One went around the tree and the other around your waist. If you fell you were going to get your guts squeezed right out through your ears. I hated those things and refused to wear it after trying them a couple times. If my only options were the Baker or a ladder stand, I'm taking the Baker 1000% of the time. I have way less than zero use for a ladder stand. They freaking suck, period.

I'm with you mostly on climber vs ladder, but there is a tonna places in GA that was way too thick to climb and a 10' ladder was the ticket. Tools in the toolbox. that hasnt changed over the years.

the one thing that i have changed lately was going back away from a platform to using the light weight hangon. partly cause its way easier to shoot trad, but also cause its way more comfy. and you couldnt buy a 5# lockon back in the day

 

[Jtaylor]

A lot of bucks are still getting killed around here and the folks doing it could care less about scoring or even having them mounted.

Agreed. I personally know a few guys like this. Loose lips sink ships.