Top Counties For Trophy Bucks 2015

Wonder how your county stacks up against the state’s best for producing big bucks? In Georgia, there’s a system that answers that question.

Worth County is No. 1 for the third year in a row, and few counties in the state even come close to Worth’s ability to yield big bucks the past 10 years.

A big-buck production score for every Georgia county and the trends presented in this article are made possible by an extensive database of officially measured bucks. GON has been compiling these scores for more than 20 years. Only certified scores are used for this yearly tracking of the big-buck production of each Georgia county.

Our formula uses official net scores from bucks taken in the past 10 years, and we also factor in the size of each county. Each county receives a score for its production of high-scoring bucks. Scores may drop from year to year because we only look at a 10-year window. The method works very well. It’s uncanny how side-by-side counties have almost exact scores and often trend up and down together from year to year.

Fulton County, which includes the city of Atlanta and its northern and southern suburbs, has continued a decades-long surge in big-buck production and now holds the No. 2 spot in the state.

Macon County, which has been in the Top-4 every single year since GON began tracking big-buck production, moved up from No. 4 to No. 3 in the 2014 rankings. Dougherty and Morgan counties swapped places at No. 5 and 6, and the seventh and final county to crack the rarefied air of scoring above 100 was Putnam County. Putnam made a nice jump to a score of 108, almost a 19 percent gain in one year, and moved from No. 15 in 2013 to No. 7 this year.

With only seven counties scoring above 100, it broke a streak of three straight years when a total of nine counties scored above 100. Dropping out of the red category for top counties were Turner, Hancock and Taylor counties.

The biggest move up was made by Monroe County, which shot from a score of 47 up to 69 in just one season.

Cook County saw the biggest decline, a score that dropped 55 percent. Cook had two 160-class bucks, a 140 and a 130 killed in 2003 that no longer count toward its score. Another county with a big drop was Hancock, which had two Boone & Crockett bucks killed in 2003 that no longer go toward its Big-Buck Production score.

If you kill a good buck this season, contact GON as soon as possible. Call (800) 438-4663, or e-mail [email protected]. We’ll want to add your buck to this awesome database.