It is so much harder to try to count every event of anything, than to get good estimates through random sampling. Imagine the time and effort needed to count every tree on 1000 acres and record it's size and type. It would be real easy to miss areas and to double count others. A 5% cruise would be far more likely to be accurate. Trying to count every deer killed is also a very difficult task. You need every hunter to participate, or your results are gonna be off. And the thing is, you will never know how many are reporting.

The hunter survey may have been flawed; anything done by people can be messed up. But in all the years I've been here I've never read anyone who listed a specific problem in their procedure. Lots of people have said they didn't believe it, but I have never seen any reason to think they weren't doing it correctly. And the results always seemed reasonable to me. The harvest was higher in good years, down in bad years. The GC numbers don't seem reasonable.

It seems far more likely to me that the hunter survey underestimated the harvest. They only sampled licensed hunters and made no effort to count the harvest by unlicensed. This wasn't an error - they said in all the reports that they weren't included. As someone already said, the actual numbers don't matter, the trend is what is important.

It's all a moot point now. GC is what we have and we should make the best of it. I have reported all my deer and turkeys and urge everyone to do the same.