Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Tough to track trophy-buck trends
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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Last autumn, hunters killed more deer in Virginia than ever before.
So it stands to reason more of those deer should have been trophies worthy of a spot on the wall, right?
It's hard to say.
It would seem the best way to track trophies is through the annual Virginia Big Game Contest.
Now in its 69th year, the contest provides hunters with a convenient venue at which to compare their trophies to others, while swapping some good tales in the process.
There are other contests, and lots of them. But this is the granddaddy.
This year's Western Regional is Saturday and Sunday at its normal spot, the Rockingham County Fair Grounds near Harrisonburg.
The state championship is held in conjunction with the event and will feature some of the top deer from the Eastern Regional held two weekends ago in Franklin.
With the hundreds of mounts of big whitetails, some larger than any most of us will ever kill, the Big Game Contest is always great for putting hunters in the mood as the deer season arrives.
But while it's interesting and a lot fun, looking at the numbers and scores is hardly a scientific method for tracking Virginia's production of large-antlered bucks. (And trophy bears and turkeys, which are included in the contest but a much smaller aspect.)
As for tracking scores, the number of truly high-scoring deer is so small that you just can't provide trend analysis without a substantial margin for error.
Now, one thing you could do is analyze the numbers of deer meeting certain scores from year to year, and develop some trend information from that.
That approach could provide a fair long-term picture, but it has issues, too.
The primary one is that entering the contest is voluntary.
And while it might be tempting to say the percentage of hunters who kill big deer and choose to enter the contest is fairly constant, we just don't know.
Something that probably affects participation in the contest is gas prices, as well as the general state of the economy.
Paying an extra dollar a gallon for fuel is not going to deter a hunter who kills a truly massive buck. But it very well could make a difference for someone who has a deer they realize is a middle-of-the-packer.
Looking at the numbers from the recent Eastern Regional, it appears on the surface that economic worries might have made a difference.
Considering that the antlered buck kill was up about 3 percent in the 2007 season from the 2006 season, you would think that the number of trophy deer entries would be up about 3 percent.
But the number of entries was almost exactly the same -- 193 this year versus 194 last year.
Again, it's not that simple.
Actually, I suspect that the number of contest-worthy bucks killed in Virginia last season was up more than 3 percent over the 2006 season. The reason is simple: the growing focus on hunting mature bucks.
This trophy madness is leading to, among other things, many hunters enhancing habitat to produce healthier herds. There's even a Farming for Wildlife magazine.
Whether or not things such as wildlife food plots, supplemental feeding and even culling sub-par bucks to get them out of the gene pool can grow bigger bucks is up for debate.
There's no debate about the best way to grow mature deer, and that is to let them live longer.
A growing percentage of hunters in Virginia have bought into this approach. They no longer consider shooting yearling bucks, a luxury afforded in part by booming statewide herds. Instead they wait, knowing there's a decent chance a bigger whitetail will happen along eventually.
Still, I don't think that means we can say gas prices scared away even more hunters two weekends ago in Franklin.
The improved hunting for wall-worthy whitetails means that some hunters who 15 years ago would have been eager to enter their lifetime-best eight-pointer may very well have killed a number of bucks as big or bigger since.
