BuckHunter said:
TaftHunter said:
I took the survey via phone a couple weeks ago. I do not understand why they would want to merge zones, our zones are already big enough. There are many zone that should be split up, making part of the zone as a limited tag draw unit.
Look at A zone, it's huge. And it really needs to be split into different units..
Another thing is, the season here is way too long. They need to shorten the season by a few weeks at least.
A cool thing is if they made the zones, 3 weeks archery, 1 week break, 2 weeks early rifle, 1 week break, 2 week late season either sex limited tags (maybe like 50 tags, depending on the size of the zone), 1 week break, 2 week muzzle loader. Then with a general tag for the zone you can hunt for 6 weeks total. Plenty time to harvest a deer. After a few years the deer populations would look a lot better in my opinion, and the quality of deer would be too.
Many guys have work and families and only hunt on the weekends. I would not want them shorter. I like to hunt a lot, take my time. With a short season you could get a heat wave or get rained out and your season is over. Bigger zones would mean more options to hunt with your one tag. Like the AO tag. But only if they combined the amount of tags.
Combining some zones would not be good. It could make some zones much harder to draw.
I understand that. Nobody would like it at first, but 10 years later the deer herds would be a lot healthier.
In the areas I hunt, people get in groups and just destroy the deer, 8 weekends in a row, killing every legal deer they see. This means the deer do not have a chance to mature. If people only had 2 weeks, then there would be a lot more deer the next year, then the success rate, and the overall quality, would continue to increase as the years progress. It's called management, California's management is terrible, and that is why we have some of the lowest success rates in the country.
6 weeks is plenty of time to harvest a deer, if you don't, then so be it. Those deer you didn't kill will be there next year.
And just cause the season is shortened doesn't mean that you can't scout for weeks previous to season opener.
Just my opinion...