The results of the survey came as no surprise to Hugh Price, executive director of the Wildlife Heritage Association. In all the years, I've only done stories on a couple from northern Minnesota.'' That isn't to say that nice deer don't roam the North Country. They do, as Cortese and Focault and others can testify. Taxidermists up north aren't short of deer to mount. But as you shift into the transition zone, where there's a mix of farm country and forest, you have crops all summer long and agricultural wastes on the fields during the winter.
Price thinks that long ago, more big deer came from northern Minnesota than the farm country.
The other factor that allows an average deer to become a trophy is how long it lives. There's also been a shift in where people hunt. It used to be most Minnesotans went north to hunt, so naturally more larger bucks would be shot up here. Now that's reversed. Lenarz thinks some of that change in hunting pressure occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when severe winters eventually forced a closing of deer season in 1971.