First off, im not telling anyone not to use a permit. If your happy with the herd in your hunt area then by all means shoot. If its the only deer you see all year.... Well thats not so smart.
I hunt places where there is a good herd and hunting ma is like a barren wasteland to me. People that hunted average areas in MA have no idea what a good herd is
Yes, trust the state, we trust them on this website all the time right?
My belief is they dole out permits based on what the insurance companies bitch about. If it was up to them there would be no deer
I have not heard of them doing arial surveys of deer here, maybe the do i dont know but that is the professional way of doing it. I think they guess for the most part or use kill stats which are very unscientific. .
There are good pockets of deer west of 495. Where Arlow hunts is a good example. Some richer towns out by springfield limit it and are hard to hunt. If you get into those towns there is some good hunting.
Ive hunted zone 5,8,and 3. And the trend for me over 20 plus years has bedn very negative. Bavk when i started shotgun was one week, one buck only, and getting a doe tag was like winning the lottery. There was 3 days of muzzleloader and only a month of archery.
In a relatively short time, theyve doubled the available seasons or more, made it way easier to get a doe permit, and added an extra buck tag to the license. Probably all in all a 75 percent increase in hunting time and a 50 percent in increase in tags. Not baby steps.
Now add to that the expansion of the coyotes over 20 years. And the brown is down mentality thatsso prevalent in this state because the herd sucks. So the average hunter shoots anything they see.
What i question is did the deer herd increase that much to warrant that. Not in the areas i hunt. And ive seen first hand the results.
So i choose not to use a doe tag, i also choose not to shoot small bucks for the most part either. I generally stick to bowhunting my ct spots now anyway. I m guarenteed to see a deer every hunt. I dont shoot them all the time but at least its a nice day afield seeing them.
I could be wrong - but I think that the '98' law Mittens signed drastically reduced the number of gun permit holders and similarly impacted the number of hunters. So less total hunters means more tags for the remaining hunters. Most I speak to seem to think deer are overpopulated. I didn't see many in the woods this last year - but I think that's just because I'm not very good at hunting yet...
Got a tag in zone 11.... No surprise there though...
Last edited: