Now what do you think of the zone 3 antler restrictions

[flipper]

Almost all but not all. Area 347 is lottery and I think there is another one. Who knows about next year after the number of anterless deer that were harvested.

[HandGunner]

were i am the past 20 years of my elders hunting there i have heard there were some nice ones taken but never really anything special the racks are never as good as they can be my dad says there ugly racks and this is from 20 years of hunting the area! its state forest and the past 20 years it has shrunk trmendously due to the state selling off the land. plus the trees there are small the tree im in i always thaught was big until my father gave me a history lesson and said there use to be wayyy bigger trees than that until a logging co. decided to do some logging and took out almost all the big trees and left the little ones. sad in its own way how it all changed over the years. so this 20 years of hunting there and nothing real special was never taken there just some nice big bucks with alrite racks that werent as pretty as they could have been. so this tells me just because we have an APR now dosnt mean we will see bigger bucks in terms of racks.

plus in those 20 years the 300 class zone that we are in use to have lottery and 2 deer limits and sometimes doe only years but now its an intensive 5 deer limit zone

[Bear55]

HangGunner I can't imagine you are in some kind of dead zone with poor genes, overall the MN gene pool for deer is great, with a few small freaks here and there. I think you just might be hunting some of that high pressured public land where all the younger deer get shot right away and any large bucks that slips through the cracks has learned to survive in the highest pressure imaginable and will probably die of old age. They may even go nocturnal after years of public pressure.

[kelly-p]

"I can't imagine you are in some kind of dead zone with poor genes"

It could be poor nutrition. Up here there is very little row crop farming leaving only brush and grass for the deer to eat. When we started rotating soybeans into the rice paddies within 2 years over all the racks were suddenly over 30% larger and it has stayed that way.

[HandGunner]

bear55 i think your right on that we have alot of ppl. but in all we are all meat hunters no one really cares about spending the time to chase the trophies or look for them mostly everyone is meat hunters and also just ppl who want to be out rather than at home. sounds right that the big bucks are very smart, when i heard about the "big" 10 that is around my stand i was skeptical but when i was out and it was still pitch black darkness with little sun light starting to burn over the horizon i heard a snort wheeze i was thinking big buck becaus thats exactly what my cuz's said, he comes out when its too dark to see but u might be lucky and see him later.

possibilities that the good genes never made its way around and that the true big boys are too smart, who knows but what ev im glad we have alot of deer to take and eat.

as for the food sources theres tons and tons of cornfields all around the whole town and farms with lots of cows and horses. im not sure about other food sources but corn is easy to identify and easy to i dentify at a distance without having to tresspass lol thats the reason i only know theres corn and nothing else but maybe one day i should go around and talk to the farmers about there exsperiences hunting there land and what there farming and what kind of quality bucks they have seen since there farmland borders the public land we hunt on.