Friday, October 02, 2009
Whitetail boom: Deer season opens Saturday
Three months of action begins Saturday for roughly 300,000 Virginia deer hunters.
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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As Ralph Barton strode up the steep mountain road, beads of sweat rolled off his forehead.
This was hard work, but you wouldn't have known it by Barton's expression, one of unfettered anticipation and excitement.
"I love this," said Barton, an avid deer hunter who was an hour into a preseason scouting mission on national forest land near Montvale.
For Barton and Virginia's roughly 300,000 deer hunters, the past few weeks have been dragging. The dragging ends Saturday, opening day of the early archery deer season.
The bow opener ushers in three months of deer hunting, during which hunters will go afield with archery tackle, muzzleloaders and conventional firearms in pursuit of whitetails.
In terms of popularity, nothing touches the whitetail in Virginia.
The next closest game? Spring gobblers, which draw about 60,000 hunters.
Virginia deer hunters have a lot to love. Literally.
Biologists hate to throw out deer population estimates. Coerce them into picking a number and they'll pin the state's deer herd at around a million animals.
Last season the state's hunters killed 253,678 deer, a record and the first time the kill has ever topped a quarter million.
This season should be another great year.
Deer aplenty
Few Virginians are as interested in the state's annual deer tally as Matt Knox.
One of the managers of the deer program for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, Knox knows that the kill numbers are directly related to population numbers. The higher the kill, the larger the population.
But while deer biologists once managed to increase whitetail populations, those days are over in most states.
Virginia's deer management plan calls for either stabilizing or reducing private land deer herds in all but a handful of counties.
So Knox and his cohorts don't want to see new records every year.
"I'm hoping at some point the deer kill will drop," Knox said. "And I think we're getting there."
In an effort to increase pressure on female deer, the primary method of controlling deer populations, the DGIF has implemented increasingly aggressive management strategies, including liberal daily and seasonal bag limits to encourage hunters to take female deer.
While that approach has worked to a degree in some areas, the agency had to take an additional step last year, implementing what it called an earn-a-buck regulation in a number of problem counties.
The rule required hunters to tag an antlerless deer before they were allowed to kill a second buck.
Many hunters, not wanting to risk having to pass up a buck later in the season, took preemptive action and killed a doe as soon as they got an opportunity.
The regulation seems to have worked.
For example in Bedford, an earn-a-buck county, the deer kill soared from a state-leading 8,296 in 2007 to an unprecedented 10,011 last year.
"The earn-a-buck program, on paper, was very pleasing," Knox said. "It was more successful than we were hoping for."
But it will take a couple of years of data -- data that shows the deer kill dropping -- before Knox is comfortable that the population is dropping.
Even in non earn-a-buck counties, hunters are doing better at tagging does. The doe kill of 119,524 last season represented 47 percent of the total, and was up 4 percent over the previous year. In fact, the increase in the total kill the past two years has been almost entirely due to increased doe numbers.
Deer not aplenty
While whitetail populations are strong on private land, it's been a different story on many public tracts.
The public land deer kill has been plummeting.
A generally low population is only part of the issue.
Because of the lack of deer, hunter success is low. When hunters who become discouraged stop hunting public land, the kill drops more.
A root of the issue is the maturing forest as logging has largely come to an end on public land.
While mature woods can produce good amounts of food during the autumn when acorns drop, they are short on the early successional plants that provide important browse during the rest of the year.
"It's terrible deer habitat," Knox said, bluntly.
While many counties will have expanded either-sex hunting days on private land this year, so-called doe days will be further restricted on public land in many areas.
Some counties will have only a single day during the firearms and muzzleloader seasons when hunters can kill an antlerless deer on public land.
So if deer are so sparse on public land, why does a hunter such as Ralph Barton even bother?
As he stood on that old road on the cool recent day, Barton swept his hand and pointed at the vast expanse of wooded ridges and valleys ahead of him.
"That's thousands and thousands of acres," he said. "And it's all ours."
Barton said he isn't particularly protective of his hunting spots -- national forest land off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Bedford and Botetourt Counties -- because few hunters are willing to put in the time and effort to reach the better areas.
"It's too much work," he said.
Scouting trips help him find areas that should concentrate deer.
One challenge this fall could be the abundance of acorns he's found. Food is so plentiful the deer could be anywhere.
It's not like Barton doesn't have access to private land.
"I've got a good spot in Bedford county," he said. "But I save it for when I take my kids hunting because I know we will see deer."
And that pretty well captures Virginia deer hunting.
Hunters who focus their efforts on private land over the next three months should have little trouble putting venison in the freezer.
Action will likely be slower for those who hunt on public land, but hunters who are willing to put miles on their boots and hours in their stands should still have some exciting days in the deer woods.
