Ask “which counties grow the giants” and you get two answers, depending on the measure. Raw trophy listings put Illinois’s well-known counties on top. Our index removes duplicates across sources and weighs the remaining listings alongside habitat, herd quality, population, and momentum. Under that measure, the highest tier lies in the inland and east-central counties. A county celebrated for its trophy history can rank in the sixties. That difference explains why a trustworthy trophy ranking is difficult to build, why we publish one for Illinois, and why we refuse to make one up for any other state.
KEY FINDINGS
- Our full index puts Illinois’s top tier in the interior and east-central counties: Edgar at 80.5, Vermilion at 79.2, Logan at 73.9, Piatt at 71.2, Iroquois at 70.2 and Menard at 70.1. The celebrated big-river counties are outside that tier.
- Trophy listings measure something different from quality a hunter can pursue. Will County has among Illinois’s strongest histories of recorded trophies, with its trophy-component index close to the maximum. Its overall position is still about #68. This increasingly urban county in Chicago’s collar records past success, while its habitat component places 71st, its herd-quality component 72nd and its population component 97th among 102 counties.
- Pike, despite its destination status, places #26 in the complete index. Its strength is real, but combining the trophy signal with habitat and herd measures leaves it below the state’s leaders.
- Illinois only has our completed index combining multiple sources with duplicate trophy records removed across them. Iowa, Ohio, and Missouri have only a proxy drawn from a single record book. Such a source mainly reflects the culture of reporting, as the companion paper explains. We therefore publish no trophy rankings for those states.
IThree answers to one question
The measurement determines the leader
One common shortcut adds up all record-book listings over time and sorts counties by the total. It seems like a sensible proxy, but it carries heavy bias. A county with a long-established reputation gets a head start in those totals. Hunting access, local traditions of scoring animals and submitting them, and aggressive statewide measurement efforts also add to the count. This reputation index lags behind and reinforces itself. Our approach begins with the same public record-book material and uses it as one of several inputs. We match trophy records across the major books and remove duplicates, so a deer listed in three places counts once. That trophy signal is then considered alongside habitat, herd quality, population, and recent momentum. The result is a proprietary index scored from 0 to 100. Its construction and weights remain private, but its ranking is easy to interpret. That ranking differs from the order produced by listing totals alone.
Accumulated trophy listings identify places where large bucks were documented. The index attempts to identify places whose land continues to produce them. These measures can point to different counties, although both can also point to the same one.
IIThe county the listings oversell
Will County: raw listings place it near the top; our complete index places it #68
Will County makes the point most clearly. It lies along the southwestern edge of the Chicago metro and has decades of documented big deer behind it. Its raw trophy-record signal puts it close to the top in Illinois, with an outstanding history of listings. Judged by listings alone, Will could compete with any county in the state. The complete index places it around #68 of 102. The historical records remain accurate; the land they describe has pavement and is broken into separate pieces. Pike, a celebrated hunting destination along the western rivers, shows a milder version of that pattern. It remains a strong county, but accounting for herd and habitat places it at #26, rather than the automatic #1 suggested by its reputation. Reputation measures the past. A hunter picks land based on its condition today.
Swipe table to see every column
| County | Reputation on raw listings | FDR Index rank | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Edgar | Modest | 1 | A · Elite |
| Vermilion | Modest | 2 | A · Elite |
| Pike | Elite / iconic | 26 | B · Strong |
| Fulton | Strong | 31 | B · Strong |
| Will | Elite / iconic | ~68 | C · Above average |
IIIWhy only Illinois
Why we hold the line
Making the same top-ten lists for Iowa, Ohio, and Missouri would be easy. We do not build those lists because of the disagreement between ranking methods exposed in Figure 1. For states outside Illinois, our current trophy proxy comes from a single book. That source overwhelmingly measures how actively a state’s hunters report deer and have them scored, rather than the deer themselves. The companion paper on record-count traps examines this reporting bias. Illinois alone has a trophy signal that removes duplicate animals across the major books and combines the results with independent habitat, herd, population, and momentum layers to produce a ranking we can defend. Ranking another state’s counties by accumulated listings before an equivalent index using multiple sources exists would knowingly repeat the Will County mistake. Honest reporting means publishing the one ranking that holds up under review and making clear that the others have not yet been built.
That same reasoning limits the index to a tier and a score within defined bounds; its underlying tallies are never presented. We keep the counts used in the trophy component unpublished because of compilation and licensing restrictions. The index’s value comes from bringing its inputs together, rather than from any single input. Hunters need the rank to see a county’s place in the order, the tier to identify its group, and the score to see how far its index value falls above or below neighboring counties’ values. Those are the measures the output supplies, without copying another party’s compilation.
Illinois has our county ranking now; additional states will follow as their indexes combining multiple sources become ready.
NOTES AND SOURCES
- Our index is a derived, proprietary measure reported on a 0 to 100 scale with tiers from A to E. The Illinois county order is current through the 2024 season and uses the same index basis as our Illinois Whitetail County Report.
- The trophy component removes duplicate listings across the major whitetail record books, counting each animal once even if several books list it; the underlying compilations, counts, and component weights are omitted here.
- The positions of Will and Pike counties show how reputation from raw listings can differ from an index combining several factors. Each county remains truly strong. Land-use context, including metropolitan fragmentation around Will, comes from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and publicly available land-cover records.
- Limits: counties receive rankings; individual properties do not. Neither access nor hunting pressure is measured. Placement in a high tier does not guarantee a mature buck on a particular parcel.
Fully Drawn Research is an independent data analysis desk, not affiliated with any state wildlife agency, transportation agency, mapping provider or outfitter. The FDR Index and FDR Trophy Index are proprietary derived outputs, expressed as tiers or bounded scores; they are not record-book measurements, and underlying record compilations, counts, and weighting are not reproduced. Fully Drawn Research is an independent data analysis desk, not affiliated with any state wildlife agency. County figures analyze public agency records and are current to the 2024 season.
Keep reading
FDR Scout puts county harvest history like this on the map of the ground you hunt. Open Scout →