Some Meat

That's a good sized buck for a young one.  How much do they traditionally weigh on average?

Gus

WOW!!  250-270lb is the size of a mature White Tail Buck in Iowa (though a few got close to 300) and would be a giant in most parts of Virginia, at least outside the mountains.  Here in Virginia, I took a 10 point that only field dressed at 145 lbs and a 6 point with much larger antler branches and tines that field dressed around 170 lbs.  In our Hunt Club in Virginia, we averaged 50 or 60 deer a year and the biggest mature bucks didn't weigh much more than my largest deer.  

Gus

Red deer are a large deer, I believe from memory they're only smaller to sambar, elk and moose - in that order. Caribou are pretty well the same size as reds i think.

Fallow are another common species we hunt, they're more similar in size to whitetail I think. 

Invasive/Pest are touchy terms here. They're legally regarded as game animals in my state meaning that the government can manage them and charge for hunting them (which they do). Some "hunters" which are mostly the modern social media fame chasers have been calling them pests in recent years. That's only to justify the fact that they want to shoot as many stags/bucks as possible, lop the heads off and leave the rest to rot. I would be comfortable in saying more than half of Aussie hunters do not eat game anymore. Anyway these fools have their wish, govt just announced $19 million to kill deer over the next 4 years. Money that has come from the bushfire recovery fund. They will shoot and leave rot deer in National Park that I'd lose my guns for hunting in. Anyway, I digress.

Up until a few years back we had very restrictive seasons here. Effectively it was 2 months per year for reds and fallow could not be hunted on public land. That was eased for all species bar one. Hog deer (axis porcinus) can only be hunted in April and only 1 tag for each sex is available to this day.

I for one miss restricted seasons, deer numbers have really dropped since they opened it up. And I wish we had weapon specific seasons, while I choose to hunt with flintlocks I am competing against guys with long range rifle setups, thermals and all that jazz.

Someday I'll get to the states and pit myself against those whitetail in a muzzleloader season.
Do many of you guys do stalking/still hunting these days or is it mainly treestand? 

I grew up in Iowa and our small town is right on the Mississippi River.  Dad was an avid hunter and fisherman and since we were rather poor in my earliest years, we ate almost everything we caught or shot, except raccoon.  (My Grandma asked me to bring home one if it wasn't too large and she baked it.  She did an amazing job cooking it, but since I hadn't grown up quite as poor as she had, I never developed a taste for it.)  We hunted squirrels, quail, pheasants, rabbits, ducks and geese and in my teen years I hunted raccoon at night.  There weren't that many deer in Iowa in the 1960's and it was a statewide lottery for the few tags each year.  However, you had no choice what county your tag came from.  We could not afford to hunt outside the county but only a few miles, so I wasn't able to hunt deer till I was an adult.

When I transferred to Marine Corps Base Quantico, VA in 1973, I met the man who became my black powder mentor and best friend in life.  I had not brought my TC .50 cal. Hawken rifle with me from home, as I still lived in the barracks.  We were allowed to store our personal guns in the Armory, but we could not check them out and back in on the weekends.  So my first deer hunt in VA was with an original Colt Amoskeag Rifle Musket loaned to me by my friend and he carried his custom-built Pre-AWI .54 cal. rifle.  Though there is a lot of land to hunt on in Quantico and they limit the numbers of hunters that could check into each area, there were too many noisy and sometimes dangerous civilian hunters back then that ruined our hunts.  Though I never got to shoot at deer with it, that Colt Rifle Musket was deadly accurate.  

My parents moved to Richmond, VA in 1975 and my Dad took over as Plant Supervisor of the HON Industries plant just outside Richmond.  While I was gone on independent duty for four years, Dad and a friend of his from work decided to form the "Hard Luck Hunt Club."  Most hunt clubs in the Piedmont (or flat to rolling hills part of central Virginia) were run by landowners, but the annual membership dues were very high.  Dad's friend lived in Amelia county and found some land they could get hunting rights to by paying the land taxes.  Properties they contracted for were on both sides of the Amelia and Nottaway County line.  Plus there was a large section of land owned by a forest company on which we got free permits to hunt.  

On opening day of modern gun season and most weekends, we could only run organized hunts with modern shotguns.  However, for Club Members who came on the week days and after the last organized hunt on weekends, we could stalk or still hunt with modern rifles or muzzleloaders.  

Now I could normally only hunt on weekends, so I wasn't able to hunt with a muzzleloader and that even when they came up with a muzzleloading season only for a week to 10 days.  The Marine Corps just kept me too busy.  I could not get Dad or my older brother interested in muzzleloaders, but Dad's friend asked if I could get a reasonable priced one for him in the mid 1980's.  Well, that year at the Fall Nationals of the North South Skirmish Association, where I did gunsmithing at the Spring and Fall Nationals Matches; Navy Arms was blowing out some non-descript percussion rifles for only $60.00 each to those of us who could buy at Dealer Prices.  I checked about a dozen over and found the two with the best trigger pulls and bought them.  My Dad's friend jumped at the price and every year for the next couple of decades, he was always thrilled to tell me of the one or two bucks he got with that rifle during ML season.  However, no one else in the club was interested in the other rifle, so I donated it to the raffle we held each year to raise money for the club.  In the following years as Dad's friend got at least one buck a year with his, some members eventually told me they should have bought the other rifle from me.

Gus

Well, I have to sheepishly (at least for this forum) admit that neither of the two deer I've taken was with a muzzleloader.

Since I could normally only come to the hunt club on weekends, they always had two drives (we called them organized hunts) in the morning and at least one or two more in the afternoon.  So we could not go out still/stalk hunting until the drives were done for the day.  I brought the TC Hawken with me a number of times in case we had a chance to still/stalk hunt after the organized hunts were over, but never got a deer when I was able to use the TC Hawken.  We aren't allowed to hunt on Sundays in Virginia so by weekends, I mean Saturdays or the occasional Friday or Monday of a long holiday weekend.  

When I got the 10 point buck and when we had skinned and quartered him, I asked for one of the hacksaws to saw the antlers off to eventually make knife handles and other muzzleloading things.  Good God you would I have thought I committed heinous blasphemy and high treason, both at the same time!  They almost refused to believe I would not get that head mounted.  Now I don't have anything against folks who want to mount the heads as trophies, but I personally believe that is almost dishonoring the spirit of the deer.  I believe the best way to honor the game is to eat the meat and use anything and everything else you can.   Heck a couple of guys said they had a garage full of "horn" (local name for antlers) they would trade me for the head to mount, but I politely declined.  I told them I had made knives with antler handles before, but never from a deer I had taken and I had been looking forward to this for many years.  

Gus