Especially in northern New England, as best exemplified by Vermont’s constitutional right to hunt on lands “not enclosed.” You don’t need a fat wallet to hunt in the Green Mountains or Northeast Kingdom, and it won’t necessarily make you a better or even a more successful hunter.Īnd to suggest that snow and cold are adverse weather conditions completely fails to understand the hunting culture in northern-tier states like Vermont, which not coincidentally produced the country’s most famous tracking family, The Benoits. In contrast, many of the “worst” states have a much more democratic hunting tradition. Left unsaid is that in many of the “best” states, such as Kansas and Iowa, if you don’t own private land, lease it, or pay an outfitter, you don’t even step foot on it, much less hunt it. Which underscores another of Wide Open Spaces pet peeves: high hunter densities. Wisconsin? Seriously? Its western uplands region along the Mississippi River is arguably the top record-book buck producing area in the country, and deer hunting is so popular throughout the Badger State that it borders on religion. 9, and Wisconsin, 10, closing out its Top 10 Worst Deer Hunting States. But the Texas-based website also showed a remarkable bias, if not thin skin, against cold weather in general, as evidenced by Michigan, at No. Remember? The Buffalo Bills had to move a home game in November to Detroit because of all the snow.įair enough, maybe, at least in New York’s Great Lakes plains region.
Its Southern Tier has extremely high deer densities and harvest rates the six million-acre Adirondack Park offers the rare chance to hunt mature bucks in a real wilderness setting and New York’s bow hunting-only zones produce some absolute monsters.īut according to Wide Open Spaces, its weather, well, sucks, as evidenced by all the lake-effect snow that buried western New York last fall. That will no doubt come as a surprise to the many people who consider New York a whitetail hunting haven, with something for every hunter’s tastes. 1 worst deer hunting state in the country. 8, followed by Massachusetts, 7 New Hampshire, 6 Pennsylvania, 5 Maine, 4 Vermont, 3 New Jersey 2 and, drum roll please, New York as the No. If it is any consolation to Vermonters, the Northeast as a whole fared poorly in the ranking, providing eight of the top 10 worst deer hunting states. The ranking was based on high hunter densities low overall harvest numbers a high percentage of yearling bucks in the harvest, with a correspondingly low number of bucks age 3 and older and what the editors at Wide Open Spaces deemed “consistently adverse weather.” Much of the data used in the evaluation came from the Quality Deer Management Association’s 2013 Whitetail Report. In fact, we came in as the third worst state for deer hunting in the country. The outdoors website Wide Open Spaces recently posted its Top 10 Worst Deer Hunting States, and you guessed it: Vermont made the cut. Until now, and on the wrong kind of list. But Vermont as a top deer hunting state? Not so much. Lake Champlain is routinely included in lists of the country’s top bass fishing waters.