they keep cutting back on the harvest numbers every year.
last winter was VERY easy on the population. they are EVERYWHERE.
my zone was lottery again this year....13 in our party...not one of us got a lottery tag
bucks only this year. that's going to make it hard to fill out.
its like they are out to kill the sports this yea.
they tried to do a complete ban of walleye fishing on MIllelacs this year, and now this.
deer everywhere, and bucks only

It is my theory that the anti hunting groups have infiltrated the state game agencies through their biologist positions.

Bingo. MNDNR is full of environMENTALists who absolutely hate sportsmen treading on mother's forest floors and lakes.

Agreed. I built a scoped .300 AR pistol to take deer this year just to spite them.

The GA DNR gives those of us in two counties in central GA a one day bear season in December. You have to bring the bear to be checked in and the DNR can make you bring them to the spot you hunted so they can check it for bait. They claim that there are only something like 45 bears in those two counties. I've gotten pictures of 9 different bears on one 40 acre tract in one weekend. Apparently, those 40 acres are awesome since 20% of the bears in 40 or 50 miles travel through it in a weekend.

Same shit in WI...

EXCEPT for us it was LONG overdue.  They used to hand out doe tags like candy on Halloween here.  Now we are paying the price.  Only sold 150 doe tags in my county(aside from the central farmland zone along the southern tip).  Kenosha county they didn't sell a single doe tag.

Green Lake and Marquette will have leftover tags at the end of the year.  They are overrun with deer.

In their defense mn 348, where I hunt, was way down in deer numbers.2 or 3 years  of no bonus tags, 1 deer only has fixed this.This year we are able to take 2 again.I would say the system worked  perfectly.I am not talking about your area, but  here it worked.

Thank god we dont have this problem in Nw OH.  I think we hit more deer than we shoot.  During deer season you see herds of deer in the fields at dusk filling up on corn and beans.

Same here in Iowa i highly doubt any of the upper crust of the iowa dnr has ever purchased a hunting or fishing license or could even pick a deer out of a line up if it was between a  heifer and a lama

6 deer in the field behind the house tonight....all does

Individual at the Fleet Farm in the Hudson metro area was telling me that some farmers would come in and buy like 50+ doe tags because they had so many deer out in their fields. No idea if they were actually filling all those tags. One change I don't like is how you have to select whether your tag is for public of private property. I hunt both, so having to buy tags for each, knowing I may not fill those tags seems wasteful.  



 

I got one after 4 years of not getting drawn.

Sorry to hear that.  I don't have any experience with these sorts of restrictions as my state requires I shoot does.

Zone 199....  You got nothen.. Trust me...

I think it's great.  Public land gets destroyed in the southern areas.  They need to limit the number of does taken on public land without allowing the does on private land getting over run.

Most people I have talked to are just buying public land tags, and if they shoot one on private, they just tag it with the public land tag.  Not how I would personally do it...I say if you can't afford the two tags to hunt on both, then just hunt the one.  I don't see that as a huge deal.  I'm in the same predicament myself.  I want to see public land numbers increase.


As for the OP: We hunters complain no matter what the DNR does.  WI for a long time was giving out a ton of tags, we all bitched because the numbers were so low we never saw deer.  Now that they're holding back on tags, the same people are bitching because they don't have the tags they want.  

We can't have it both ways.  Think about what the DNR has to do: Manage deer numbers on a massive scale while trying to please people on all sides of them(hunters to anti-hunters, poor people to politicians).  All we hunters care about is what we see in our own local area.  Those two things don't always mesh up.  Just because one parcel is over run doesn't mean that there isn't a massive shortage everywhere else in the county.

Yeah you're right, DNR usually makes the best decisions possible. http://www.wisn.com/news/armed-agents-raid-animal-shelter-for-baby-deer/21272108  



 

You can shoot up to 8 does in the next county over from mine.

That number is pretty meaningless. Let's look into how many antlerless were taken per hunter (this gets tricky), here we go........



There were 123,664 deer killed in 2015, 59% were antlerless that takes the number to 72,962. Youth took 9% of the deer but with the one license does it all for them it's hard to tell exactly what effect that has on the numbers. Let's take a SWAG and say half of the deer killed by them were antlerless - which should be conservative as 59% of the total harvest was antlerless - so - let's take the 72,962 number down by 4.5%, this gives us 69,679. There is another issue to muddy the waters, lifetime licenses. They accounted for 19% of the harvest let's go with the half number again so that's 9.5% of the harvest which is 6931 deer; this now puts us at 62,748 antlerless deer for the number of licenses we can actually track. There were 21,088 antlerless tags sold (don't know how many hunters that represents obviously) and 65,604 bundles sold. Let's assume the bonus tags averages out to 2 per hunter; that gives us 76,148 hunters for 62,748 deer. this averages out to .82 antlerless deer per hunter.



OK, I had to make some estimations to get this number but do you really think it's grossly wrong?



 

Please quote where I said they make the best decisions or even good decisions?  Reading comprehension isn't your thing is it?  Maybe this will help

It's real easy to look in from the outside and say their all idiots.  Especially for the feeble minded.

If people in WI have followed the DNR's efforts over the last few years it's obvious that they are taking the information gained from hunters via many different forms(surveys/forums/online suggestions/etc) and are attempting to fix the issues brought up by hunters.  The main one of which was very poor populations on public lands and high concentrations on private lands.  To which, the tag system is attempting to solve.  I don't know if it will or not...but at least they're trying to listen to what we hunters complain about and fix it.

Solid contribution to the conversation.  Bravo!

You might be up north but down south the deer hunting is fine.  More timber, more deer.

I have never been around NE Iowa but NW Iowa and SW Minnesota is like a barren wasteland for deer (great farmground though)

My biggest gripe is I wish you could use unfilled tags from first season shotgun in second season.

My farm in MN is in zone 275.  Lottery zone.  I can drive 5 miles to my buddy's farm and be in zone 276, and there, my muzzleloader tag is an either sex tag.  
Most of zone 275 is farmland and can't support over the counter either sex tags.

Personally, until MN goes to lottery for all tags, like South Dakota does, the deer hunting will continue to be screwed up.