Keystone State deer hunters may have some legitimate gripes when it comes to finding deer in general, but when it comes down to locating trophy bucks it takes a real sourpuss to deny that there are plenty of bucks available today.

The likelihood of encountering bigger bucks has improved in every wildlife management unit, but where are the very best trophy bucks in Pennsylvania?

Believe it or not, some of the best trophy buck hunting occurs in the Special Regulations wildlife management units, the areas around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

"I would say there's certainly some very impressive animals coming out of those areas," said Dr. Christopher Rosenberry, the Pennsylvania Game Commission's Deer Management Section supervisor.

"I think what you have in many of those areas is that combination of lack of access to hunt, areas where deer can get away from hunters and get older, and decent nutrition for those deer in those areas. Put the combination of food and age on a buck and you can expect to see bigger racks."

By the standard used to determine habitat health -- forested land --these wildlife management units look poor. Forest is not a major element here, nor in many of the top trophy buck areas around the country.

"Unit 5C actually has a fair amount of agriculture. There's an awful lot of development, but there's still agriculture, and when people develop things, there's food available there as well. Deer health in those units is not an issue. We see good reproduction in those units, so somehow they're getting plenty of food despite the developed nature of those units."

However, not many hunters view these areas as desirable destinations -- yet! There is extremely little public land, and what there is gets very heavy hunting pressure, at least on the edges.

"It depends on what kind of effort hunters are willing to make," Rosenberry said. "That unit is 99 percent private land. If hunters go down there and contact landowners, make an effort to gain access, they should have good luck. Hunters from outside the unit are going to have to do a little bit of work ahead of time to gain access to prime private land."

Even though nutrition in the region is good, deer managers are trying to lower deer densities in the Special Regulations units. This is more of a social factor than anything to do with deer health.

"In Unit 2B around Pittsburgh and Unit 5B, which is the immediate vicinity around the city of Philadelphia, the objective is to reduce the deer population, but allocations did not increase in those units because we're not selling the tags that are out there," Rosenberry explained. "We've come close, but we've never sold out in any of those units, so it really doesn't make any sense to say we're bumping up the allocations, when in fact there's no evidence right now that the allocation that we have right now will get used. That's the big difference between Unit 5C and those two. In those other two, the demand for antlerless licenses is not there, but it is there for Unit 5C."