Sunday, November 02, 2008
Urgency gone with longer deer season
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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NEW CASTLE -- Looking for examples of the impact longer deer seasons are having on hunters, I headed up to Craig County on Saturday morning.
At the Humble Harvest Hunt Club just outside New Castle I found five of them, snoozing on cozy couches and recliners.
Harry Steeves drowsily opened his eyes when I opened the door.
"What are you doing here?" he whispered.
"Looking for a story," I replied.
He pointed at the sleeping crew and said, "Right there's your story."
He was joking, but he was right, really.
Deer season was once a mad dash, two weeks of controlled mayhem during which everyone hunted and hunted hard.
There simply wasn't time for lounging.
These days deer season stretches three months.
Yes, big chunks of those months are taken up by archery and black powder seasons, while the general firearms season is still only two weeks long in most counties in Western Virginia.
But unlike in eras past, a large percentage of deer hunters participate in those fringe seasons, in part because advances in technology and supporting regulations have made archery and muzzleloader hunting much more accessible to less-than-hardcore hunters.
By the time the traditional opening day of gun season rolls around, it's hard to find a deer hunter in these parts who hasn't already been out there chasing whitetails.
"There's just not the urgency," said Steeves, a retired Virginia Tech professor who lives in Blacksburg.
This isn't just hunt camp philosophizing.
Matt Knox, Virginia's head deer biologist, has said time and again that longer seasons don't necessarily prompt hunters to spend more days afield.
Most have a certain number of days they can hunt, and that total just doesn't change much. Instead, they pick and choose the days.
"That's what I do," said club member Miller Williams of Giles County. "I'm going to hunt Monday, but then I'm going back to work for a couple days."
A few miles away, George Annis and Danny Wright of Salem were parked on the side of a dusty U.S. Forest Service Road studying a map.
They weren't even sure if they would hunt that afternoon. Instead the two hunters, who work for the Forest Service and are avid public land hunters, said they thought their time might be better spent scouting.
"It has the potential to spread the pressure out," Wright said of the longer seasons, particularly the expansion of the early black powder season from one to two weeks this year.
With most western hunters concentrating their efforts on the early muzzleloader season, it's probably fair to say that Saturday was the most anticipated opener of the fall. Still, no one would say it was anything like the opening day of the firearms season back in the day.
The popularity of the early black powder season is all about the timing.
Starting on the first Saturday in November, the season coincides with the approach of the whitetail breeding season, or rut. Because the rut is about the only time in the fall during which normally wary and nocturnal trophy bucks make mistakes, it's the best time for a hunter to kill a whopper.
The downside is the weather.
While it may seem a stretch to complain about spending a crystal clear 70-degree day outside surrounded by fiery red and glowing orange hardwoods, Robert Dudding couldn't help it.
"It's too hot to hunt," said Dudding, who lives in Craig County.
But not too hot to kill a nice deer.
In the pre-dawn darkness Dudding and his 15-year-old son, Brandon, hiked about a mile back into a section of national forest land just outside town.
They were sitting down by 6:30 a.m.
Five hours later, they could hear something coming. It was a husky six-point buck, which Brandon dropped with a shot to the neck.
"It's my second deer," said Brandon, a sophomore at Craig County High School. "I killed a four-pointer last year but it wasn't this big."
So how did everyone else do?
That's hard to say.
Now that hunters can report their deer kills by phone and Internet, tracking hunting success is no longer as easy as camping out at a checking station and waiting for the trucks to roll in.
Although Greg and Lance Leighton of Salem didn't see much during their morning hunt in the Broad Run area, the father and son team heard plenty.
"There was a lot of shooting," Greg Leighton said. "I don't know if they got anything or not.
"But it sounded like opening day."
Which it was.
