Watching the threads I have noticed a very noticable cultural differance. The eastern folks seem to have family roots around deer hunting. A really serious investment in deer hunting.
Growing up in a small logging town, the boys were focused on elk hunting from about age 9 in many cases. We all took hunters safety together. Every day during hunting season we discussed hunting plans for the coming weekend. What we did with our fathers on the weekend before. For most of the boys, hunting came before dating until 18 or 19.
Nobody hunted deer. We just shot them as we found them. I don't remember even any bragging rights over a big buck. I remember the neighborhood dogs dragging around deer heads that would make people cry today.
I remember complete disruption of a class one morning when a loaded logging truck came past the school with a nice 6 point attached to the top. Many porches had multiple 6 pt racks stacked up on a shed roof.
Even when I moved to Butte, most discussions started with "did you get your elk?". As my generation came more in the lead, we started to see about an even split between boys and girls in hunter safety. I remember a hunting weekend where an instructor brought all 20 kids to where I was hunting for the weekend. It was a little crowded.
I've seen the day before the opener with grocery stores filled with families buying out the store to stock their camp for the season. North of my house there are campgrounds that are filled from Sept to Dec with families from town only 20 miles away. Many of those campgrounds have whole neighborhoods that move there together. Card games, family gatherings, etc. all for the sake of elk hunting.
I can only speak for my state but here in PA the White Tailed Deer is the predominant big game species in the state with roughly 1.6 million of them. The next biggest population is Turkey at 159,000 followed by 16,000 black bears and finally elk at 1,200 animals. With the types of hunter numbers we have the deer is the only one that has the robustness to sustain that level of hunting pressure and we still shoot around 400,000 of them every year.
Based on your post that’s how it used to be here in PA, back in the 80’s we had over 1.3 Million hunters in this state, many of which lived in the south east and would drive 5+ hours up to the north central part of the state to hunt deer as there were none locally to be found. You would have multi generational camps with all manner of family and friends gathering together over a shared love of hunting and the outdoors.
From 1963 til 2019 our rifle season started the Monday after Thanksgiving, this gave people the opportunity to spend a day traveling to hunting camp since for many it was a long day of traveling. They would then have the entire weekend to spend hanging out together in camp as kind of a mini vacation prior to the start of the season. For years in much of the state that Monday many businesses and schools were closed as they knew most of their employees and students wouldn’t be showing up.
For much of that time the season ran for two weeks, you could only hunt bucks but anything with more than 3” of antler was legal. Pretty much every one got spikes, forkies and basket racked 6 points, 8 points were rare and you would be the talk of the town if you got one that big. Doe season was three days starting the Monday after the end of rifle buck season, doe tags were scarce in the beginning with many people lucky to get even one tag. That two and a half week period was our deer season, archery was an afterthought that few people hunted and muzzleloader was flintlock only after Christmas and getting a flintlock tag meant forfeiting your rifle tag.
Hunting was predominantly still hunting on old stands followed by hours and miles of driving deer. Back in the day it was not uncommon to have multiple groups of people drive the same mountain side back and forth throughout the day. This meant most of the deer spent the entire day on their feet running back and forth from one group of hunters to the other. Since does weren’t legal for two weeks it was not uncommon to see 50+ deer running around with everyone gunning for anything with more than 3” of antler.
Over the years the hunting changed, hunter numbers went down to around 850,000 now while deer numbers went up. My family started hunting in the 70’s under the old rules listed above but by the time I started in 2004 they had changed. The rifle season became two weeks of buck and doe hunting, doe tags were more plentiful and everybody could get at least one and many times a second as well. They also added antler restrictions requiring 3 points or more one one antler, this has lead to more and larger bucks and increased the emphasis on bigger deer.
During this time the deer population was also seeing a shift. In the northern part of the state all the timber from the last big logging boom grew into standing timber that held far less deer than the old clear cuts which lead to a major decrease in the population there. Additionally deer had started appearing in the south east where much of the states population lives. With the much more fractured properties in the southeast archery was the only way to hunt them.
This has lead to a large increase in archery and subsequently a reduction in hunting camps as people chose to hunt closer to home rather than travel several hours to hunt in the big woods. It has also turned it into a much more solo endeavor, more hunters than ever are hunting by themselves or with only their immediate family since they are hunting out of their house on a small piece of property. There has also been an increase in the interest of public land hunting where guys go out with the sole intent of getting a mature buck on public land which is again a generally solo endeavor. Overall it seems like hunters are becoming better woodsman at the expense of those old multigenerational camps.
While many hunters have ditched camps in order to hunt locally our hunting camp has been traveling several hours hunting the same area in the south central part of the state for over 40 years now. We are currently down to two generations as the oldest members who started the group have past away while us in the younger generation have not yet had kids.
Our camp make up has also shifted, the original group was three families with the father, sons and grandsons. One family has stoped hunting entirely, the other has the father and one son who only hunts once a year. The rest is my family consisting of my Dad, Brother and myself, we have additionally expanded the group by bringing in some of our friends to hunt with us. We also expanded on what seasons we hunt, before they would hunt a weekend of archery, a weekend of small game then rifle season. Now some of us hunt almost every weekend in archery, we have a full weekend for the early muzzleloader season, then we hunt every weekend of rifle with everyone coming up for the opener and a mix for the last two weekends.
Overall it seems like hunting culture is changing and in some cases it’s better but in others it is definitely worse.
