WmHunter, generally I feel like you and I see things alike, but I'll just have to politely agree to disagree on this. For YEARS we've been throwing the number around about fewer license sales (for me, it's not a trustworthy metric), but I don't believe it tells the full or correct story. Like Twain said about statistics, you can basically make them say what you need them to say ("damn lies"). Boots on the ground would tell me there is more hunting pressure today than ever before, and I hunt multiple public and private tracts across the middle 1/3 of the state (so I have a fairly substantial sample size). Not deer related, but I'm passionately convinced that HUNTERS have been the biggest threat to turkeys in the last 25 years (not ants, or predators, or Spring burning.....those things have ALWAYS been here, but there are manifold more turkey hunters today than there was when I was coming up in the 80's / 90's) Both the old lands I have hunted for 30+ years, along with all the new places I've started hunting more recently, the two constants are more people and less deer.