Harold your tracking business should be booming with all these additional kills in the 7-9 county area, right there in your backyard just east of Montgomery.
For tracking to boom hunters need to be shooting at a bunch of “good bucks” instead of 99% of the harvest being 1-2 year old dinks……Its possible to kill the same number of bucks or even more but shift the harvest to younger age classes and eliminate or greatly reduce any older buck populations……Tracking calls have pretty much tanked for all trackers compared to 5 years ago for this reason......There's not nearly as many older bucks now……..Folks can run any kind of clown show you want to trying to distract from it but that’s still the truth of what has occurred. The “quality” of the management occurring in our state is bottom of the barrel.
If that is the case, then you'd better go ahead and turn Otis and pups into pets then, because it aint gonna get any better with the way it is being run. I've been complaining about it on here for the past 14 yrs. The shoot'em all, I've got to kill a "rack" buck to be a man crowd, and the "if I can kill ten basket rack 6 and 8 points a year and 10-15 does, I'm proving to everyone that I am a great hunter attitude" has been exceptionally detrimental to any person or group trying to grow bucks into the mature age classes and it's not just one county or one area, it is statewide. And the people that are supposed to be managing the resource for all, and most importantly for the benefit of the wildlife, are encouraging it. Bama's buck age structure is a mere shadow of what it was back in the late 80s and early 90s.
