Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Lost Saturday could impact final tally
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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The text messages flew through the woods last week, the little electronic snippets keeping everybody in our small Botetourt County hunt camp informed on sightings, non-sightings and the occasional good fortune.
The best message came early Saturday afternoon from my buddy Tony Kelly, who had continued to wait in the stand for a big buck even as storm clouds grew more ominous.
"Send the canoe!" came his cry of surrender as the heavy rains started.
Saturday's weather took no prisoners, and served to get the general firearms season off to a much slower start than usual.
"It was a washout," said Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologist Matt Knox, one of the managers of Virginia's whitetail program.
And that's not just anecdotal.
On the opening day of gun season last year, hunters checked in 8,308 deer by phone or the Internet. This past Saturday it was 5,838, a decline of 30 percent.
In fact, Saturday's kill barely surpassed the 5,768 deer registered electronically on Nov. 1, the first day of the early muzzleloader season. Were it not for the buck-only rules in most western counties on that day, the kill would have almost certainly topped the opening day of gun season.
Knox would love nothing more than to finish the year with a kill total below last year's record of roughly 240,000 whitetails. A drop could mean that efforts to stabilize or reduce deer populations in most counties are working.
But when a washout day such as Saturday comes into play, that complicates matters.
Furthermore, Saturday was a so-called "doe day" in many counties, with hunters allowed to take deer of either sex. Taking a reasonable number of does is a critical part of the stabilization/reduction management approach.
Knox said altering regulations to allow hunters to take antlerless deer during the entire season on private lands in Western Virginia could address the concern of not meeting doe kill objectives due to poor weather on key days. It's an approach Knox said the agency is exploring.
One concern with such liberalization is that hunters would hit does so hard in some areas that herd numbers would quickly fall more than desired.
That certainly hasn't been the case in the many counties where does are fair game during the entire season. Despite such liberal rules, the agency has had to take additional steps to increase the doe kill.
In some counties -- Bedford, Franklin and Roanoke among them -- hunters are required to tag an antlerless deer before they can kill a second buck.
Floyd County doesn't have such an earn-a-buck rule, but Knox and other biologists took the step this year of writing an "open letter" to Floyd County hunters more or less begging them to kill more does.
For now, a washout day such as Saturday is a bigger deal in Western Virginia than in the eastern half of the state. Most eastern counties feature a seven-week-long firearms season, so hunters have a much higher likelihood of making up for a slow day.
It's a bigger deal west of the Blue Ridge where the season is essentially two weeks long in most counties. But even in the those counties a lost Saturday is not as big a deal as it once was.
A few years ago opening day for the early firearms season was moved from Monday to Saturday, giving hunters a third Saturday during the gun season.
Increased interest in the early archery season since the legalization of crossbows has likely also helped reduce the potential impact of losing just one Saturday.
"The nice thing about having longer seasons is you take that [weather] variable out of it," Knox said.
Check numbers compiled so far provide some interesting information about how the season has progressed.
A few weeks into the archery season, check numbers were 26 percent above the number at the same point last season.
It's likely the percentage of hunters using electronic checking was up, as it has been since the program started. But it certainly wasn't up enough to account for that kind of jump.
The earn-a-buck regulations could very well have been at least partially responsible as hunters did their best to get that antlerless deer taken care of as soon as possible.
I suspect earn-a-buck is making a big impact in Bedford County, where hunters are on a torrid pace even by their standards.
Through Sunday, Bedford County hunters had checked in 3,689 deer by phone or the Internet. The next closest county was Loudoun, with 2,040.
Bedford's state-leading kill has been about 8,200 the past two seasons. With nearly two more weeks of gun hunting, plus the late archery and muzzleloader seasons yet to come, I would be shocked if the county doesn't easily top that figure this year.
