Members of the Texas Wildlife Association have long appreciated the semi-technical articles published in their rag. Here is a revealing story in the November issue by Matt Williams about the surge in huge deer starting to come out of EasTex. In the last 3 years, East Texas has produced state record bucks in three categories: archery, youth division (first AND second!), and the largest non-typical taken in the modern era....and all were free-range, low fence deer.....and during the drought of the century! The story discusses multiple reasons why this has occurred including changes in land use practices, evolution of hunter expectations and behavior, and antler restrictions.

It is well written and worth 10 minutes of your time, especially if you are a native East Texan of a certain age and can remember when just seeing a deer was newsworthy. No doubt, these are the good old days of EasTex deer hunting. Who woulda thunk it?

http://www.texas-wildlife.org/images/uploads/Texas_Wildlife_Nov_2014_Story.pdf

Great article, thanks for posting. I've hunted the same 500 acres (2 250 acre tracts) in ET (Marion and Cass Counties) for the past 25 years. For the past 5 yrs we have seen mature bucks each year. Prior to that only does and yearling bucks. I attribute this to AR, best thing that happened to ET deer hunting. Glad to see things are changing but we still have a ways to go.