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Youth Season

Bowhunters be careful out there this weekend. Youth season is this weekend .

What, with the new blaze orange law, there will not be any hunting accidents this fall. LOL If it ain’t orange or pink, gun hunters can cut loose. LOL

Absolutely absurd. What is really scary to me, and should be to everyone who steps into the woods is the fact that, according to the DEC, 67,270 people took the ONLINE Sportsmen Education class last year. That is almost 10% of the total number of all hunters who can legally hunt. No in-person training at all. Nothing hands on at all, including: tree-stand safety, safe firearms handling, blood trailing exercises, crossing a fence, shoot or don't shoot, etc... If I had to hunt public land, I would be very, very afraid.

Time will tell.

Good luck to all of the youth hunters this weekend! Like it or not, this is how we attract and hopefully a new batch of sportsmen and sportswomen. Get a kid to enjoy this weekend and maybe even bag a deer and they may be "hooked" for life. Some may even "graduate" to archery. Otherwise, they have short attention spans and it's back to their phones and social media where they are slowly transformed to anti-gun, anti-hunting, anti-2nd amendment snowflakes. PS - Between COVID and the decreasing number of hunter education instructors, many states have gone to fully online hunter ed, including neighbors PA, CT, VT.

Truth is all things DEC has done to try an get more hunters has in the woods has failed terribly. yup online is the answer. Not hardly, best course I ever took was bow course , granted many years ago. Classroom time, blood trail, and shooting . Pretty sure that can't be accomplished online. But lets not disappoint the kids.

DEC needs to keep deer around if they want to keep kids interested.

I wish I had the answer, but I don’t. Don’t like strictly online courses for such a hands on activity, but that’s whistling in the wind. I really doubt that hunting on Columbus Day weekend as opposed to opening day with everyone else is going to make a difference in future hunter numbers, but what do I know. I do know how the mountainmen of the 19th century must have felt as their lifestyle was disappearing.

It hasn't made a difference in #s. Just like opening day on a saturday hasn't done anything to increase #s either. NY wont change, well it may it might get worse. Lets hope not.

I try to be optimistic, but it’s getting more difficult every year.

43 people shot by youth hunters Columbus weekend. Wait - didn't happen

When I was a kid, becoming old enough to participate in hunting with my Dad and brothers was like a right of passage. Before I was old enough, I went on hunting trips with my Dad in the ADK's, seeing a nice buck in the middle of the street in Old Forge in the wee hours of the morning as we drove in, sleeping in the back of the Willys Jeep, breaking ice on the lake to get water for breakfast. We went to the Long Lake dump after dark and watched the black bears that came to feed. The anticipation of achieving that magical age was like a dream coming true. I put in my time and earned my place with my bow, and gun. Having that privilege bestowed on me just because I was a kid was unheard of. Of course that was in the late 50's when a kid were one of many and just part of the family where you had to earn your place, and not somebody that needed to be coaxed into participating in the outdoors.

Hopefully the kids are actually interested in the hunt and it sparks long term interest. Too many cases i think its dad getting an early jump with his 06 and little Johnny playong games on his phone. Youth seasons, early baitless bear seasons, 30 day rifle seasons. NY is the Montana of the east when it comes to poor management

I agree.

Me too. I hunt a lot in neighboring states OH, PA, CT. New York is the worst of them all. 5 rack bucks on 30 acres in PA, 58 rack bucks on 130 acres in Ohio. And 1 rack buck on 320 acres in NY. WTF?

Something is seriously broken and it’s not the attractiveness of my property - with 15 acres of food plots and apples everywhere and 200 acres of sanctuary.

In the NZ it’s actually 51 day gun season if you include the early muzzleloader season. With that being said, for those of us that hunt for mature bucks in the central ADKs and the Core of Tug Hill, where bowhunters are all but non-existent, sometimes you need 51 days. I do not support shortening the seasons in the WMU’s I hunt. Again the state needs to micro manage all WMU’s. What works for 6N and 5H does not work for 6K, etc..

Agree Squash. Most mature bucks in the Central Dax die of old age. Nature, the environment and the climate does the deer management there, not hunting. In the southern zone, the long season with most hunters carrying a pocket full of tags , vehicles, coyotes and poachers do the job. Tug Hill is unique as none of the other areas mentioned get 200-400” of snow.

Squash, I agree with you 100%. My land is in 6k, and it's a different hunting experience than zone 5 and the ADK's. But the same long firearm season that exists up where it's justified is decimating our bucks south. But, I still don't think NY should have 2 buck tags. They need to let hunters choose. If they want to shoot a small buck during bow and end their NY season - that's their choice. I have no problem with that. Hell, even limiting the first tag to bow-only would be a good compromise although I would still oppose that. But to allow inline Muzzleloaders on the first tag is just ridiculous. Everyone is killing bucks with those things and then a week later killing another buck on the regular tag.

One buck tag

Archery season oct 1 to Jan 31

Non transferable DMPs

9 day state wide regular season for rifle and crossbow starting the Saturday after thanksgiving.

5 day muzzle loader season starting the first sat in Jan

Pat - 1 buck on 320 acres? That's seems impossible

James your plan seems pretty solid to me. Unfortunately don't think you'd get support from a lot of hunters or the DEC.

I'm seeing a trend here, and it's called LOGIC!! So, there's absolutely no way that anything here that makes sense will ever be implemented by the DEC. When hunters stop buying licenses as an act of civil disobedience, maybe then they'll listen. Until they see that $45 million a year disappear, they could care less what any of us think.

Nice listening to all the Rifle shots this morning on cross gun day. This place is a joke

And then they'll stick in a broadhead tipped arrow!

" But I still don't think think NY should have two buck tags ." New York is a big state and the ADKs and WNY are very different places. Please don't paint the bleak picture with too broad a brush. In WNY I say " long live the two buck rule " as we have the population to justify it. Here's a 5 buck picture from a 30 acre woods...

Insane pic. Nothing like that in 3N.

My feeling is eliminating the 2 buck tags will not stop many from filling someone else’s tag. We do need a shorter SZ gun season and not let the Xbow during the best 2 weeks of hunting. Also, the MZ season with a pocket full of tags to be used on anything must stop . If the western part of the state can handle this, fine, but Central and eastern NY cannot.

West of I81 is what the rest of the state should be working towards. One buck tag and shorter gun seasons would help accomplish that. It will also bring the hunting west of I81 up a couple notches to point of being as good as some midwesten states.

To the point of filling others tags and other law breaking. No regulation changes will stop pouching however that doenst mean that we should keep promoting bad regulations, bag limits and season lenghts. What we should do is enforce the laws and promote a more conservation minded hunting culture in NY. New Yorks hunters, their behaviors and attitudes are the biggest obstacle we must over come.

I think some here did not read my post ? You cannot paint all WMU’s in the NZ or SZ with the same brush. Every WMU should be micro- managed by the DEC. Heck, 6N the DEC states they have no management objective. How’s that for proper deer management ?

The DEC can’t even accomplish micro management of the units that got smashed by EHD, hell the even sold more antlerless tags. Can we realistically expect them to set seasons unit by unit? And if if that happened who would enforce it?

What we see here in NY is all too common. Catering to lowest common denominator to the detriment of everyone else. Lowering the bar and bringing us all down.

There is no reason to have firearms seasons during the rut and for the insane lengths of time that we have them in NY. Go to state wide season 9 to 14 days after the rut and it will make world of difference in age structure and quality of deer herd.

Trail, Other states micro manage, have you ever applied for draw units in western states ? It can be done. ME does it with its moose season. As for no gun season during the rut, makes me think you have never hunted the big woods units of the Central ADKs and Tug Hill ? Anyway, I doubt anything will change in NY, so I make the best of it, and hunt big woods unpressured bucks, it’s tough but I did kill a great 10 pt’er last Sunday afternoon. Now I have a 14 year old who has no one in his family that hunts, and I’m going to try to put him on a big woods buck. Everyone needs to remember as screwed up as NY’s management is , to try and have fun out there.

Amen Squash, I couldn’t agree more. At 65 and a lifelong NY’er I am too old to just complain about things that will never change. And good for you for mentoring the young lad. That is something we all should be able to agree on.

It is an unattainable goal to think that sound biological management practices would ever come out of Albany. Despite criticism over the expanded hunting regulations that the DEC proposed this year, they still forged ahead and implemented them. The commentary periods are merely a formality under their skewed guise of transparency. After last year's EHD outbreak, they did not have a plan, and now, this year's is devastatingly worse, and still no plan. They continue to sell licenses and made no adjustments to the limitation of DMP's. What does that tell you? Do you think that they really care about your opinion, or concerns, or even the deer herd for that matter? It is so frustrating that questions, letters, calls, etc.., all go unanswered. Yet, they and the NYS Conservation Council say that "this is what the sportsmen wanted". A total con job.

Poor deer numbers in those areas are caused by poor management, and it’s overly long seasons lengths and structures. Keep doing the same thing and keep getting the same poor result, NY hunters are just as guilty of that stupidity as the DEC

My area of western ny doesn’t have the population. Meat hunters/killers use all those tags up. Dont forget you can kill 7 doe legally. They can and do. And as the population goes down, human predation on does goes up. I like a 1 buck limit as well. Would have drastically positive results. But lest we forget dec doesnt have good Kill data nor do they care.

My area of western ny doesn’t have the population. Meat hunters/killers use all those tags up. Dont forget you can kill 7 doe legally. They can and do. And as the population goes down, human predation on does goes up. I like a 1 buck limit as well. Would have drastically positive results. But lest we forget dec doesnt have good Kill data nor do they care.

Just to give you and idea of how other Game Agencies respond to a threat: MO-Mandatory CWD sampling November 13-14, either whole, field dressed deer, or just the head to remove lymph nodes. WY-CWD sampling, so far 4,800 samples have been taken MB- Western Manitoba has suspended ALL cervid hunting (deer, moose, and elk) due to CWD. NYS-DEC regarding EHD...crickets!!!!

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