Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Weather likely kept pressure light on youth deer day
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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No one who cares about the future of hunting should have a problem with a program intended to bring youth into the activity, right?
Yet earlier this year when the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries started considering adding an early season, youth-only deer hunting day, the move was questioned as to its necessity.
Virginia already has a great youth deer hunting rule that allows hunters ages 15 and younger to take one antlerless deer at any time in counties that have at least one either-sex day.
So, for all intents and purposes, every day of deer season is a youth day.
One of the concerns with youth days is that when a special program is slated for a single day (or weekend), bad weather can pretty much shoot the event out of the water.
We've seen it in early April with the youth turkey hunting day, which a couple of years fell on a day with snow and freezing temperatures.
And we saw it Saturday, the day when that DGIF-approved youth deer hunting day fell.
The weather was tolerable across much of the region in the morning. But the rain got progressively worse throughout the day.
Even in a pop-up blind, rainy weather can be a real drag. Mentor and youth teams who stuck it out for the evening hunt deserve a medal.
Plenty of hunters did get afield and had some success.
One of them was 14-year-old Spencer Roberts of Independence.
Spencer was hunting with his father, Jeff, when a beautiful eight-point buck came into view. After a well-placed shot from his .243 rifle, Spencer had his hands on his trophy. (To see a picture of Spencer and his buck, visit my Wild Life blog on roanoke.com.)
Youth hunters electronically checked 951 deer Saturday by phone or the Internet, according to preliminary data record by the DGIF. The breakdown was 373 antlered bucks, 496 females and 82 male fawns, or button bucks.
The electronic numbers don't tell the whole story, because hunters are also allowed to check deer in person at authorized check stations.
But if the trend is similar to during the regular season -- when nearly two-thirds of hunters check their deer electronically -- its likely that the total youth day kill was in the 1,500 range.
This being the rule's first year, it's hard to put that number in perspective.
Assuming hunters end up killing about 250,000 whitetails in the state this year, a youth day kill of 1,500 would represent about half of 1 percent of the overall deer kill.
By comparison, the turkey kill on youth day this past spring was 365, or just over 2 percent of the 16,611 total for the season.
There are fewer adult spring turkey hunters than deer hunters -- roughly 60,000 to 300,000 -- so it stands to reason the pool of youth turkey hunters would be smaller too.
So either youth turkey hunters had a much higher success rate than deer hunters. Or many of those young deer hunters and their mentors opted to not deal with Saturday's weather.
My money is on the later. There is simply less urgency among deer hunters.
With roughly three months of hunting ahead, many hunters simply chose to just sit it out and wait until conditions are better.
Short wins striper tournament
The Smith Mountain Striper Club strayed from tradition when it welcomed the public to its Saturday tournament at Smith Mountain Lake.
But a couple of the club's traditional big fish hawks were the ones who ended up on the top of the leaderboard.
Kenny Short won the event with two fish combining to weigh 21.9 pounds. Second went to Mackey May, who had two fish weighing 19.68 pounds.
James Gray was third. He had only one striper, but it weighed 17.32 pounds, which was the tournament's lunker.
Dewayne Lamb, whose Captain's Quarters Marina hosted the weigh-in, said the tournament's 39 competitors boated loads of fish, but said larger fish were rare.
"We caught 6-pounder after 6-pounder after 6-pound," Lamb said of his own experience.
Most of the fish were caught on live bait on downlines on the Roanoke River arm between Hales Ford Bridge and Bernard's Landing, Lamb reported.
