Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Fortunes vary during hunting season
Mark Taylor is outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times.
mark.taylor
@roanoke.com
981-3395
Mark Taylor
Outdoors coverage
- Notebook: Outer Banks beach-driving plan kicks up sand
- Outdoors commentary: Many Sunday hunting cons
- Winter tourneys invite fishermen out in the cold
- Visit our Outdoors page
The Wild Life blog
It's an issue every treestand-bound deer hunter faces: the dreaded call of nature.
Jordan Brake may be only 10, but he's a hunter. And as the clocked ticked past 9 a.m. Saturday morning, he knew he had to go.
And had to go bad.
"Come on, Dad," he begged.
But this was the opening day of Virginia's general firearms deer season. And Johnnie Brake knows that every minute on the stand counts.
"Can't you just hold it a bit longer?" urged the father, who was sitting next to his son on a two-man ladder stand on some family land in rural Roanoke County.
Finally there was no more waiting.
First, though, Brake took a final look around.
And that's when he saw the buck that was approaching from behind them.
He alerted Jordan, who quickly forgot all about other distractions, grabbed his .243 and calmly dropped the tall-tined seven-pointer, which is nearly 22 inches wide.
This is that time of year when a hunter's fortune can change in an instant, and at any time during the day.
Some hunters have, like Jordan, been rewarded for being in the right place at the right time.
Others have been out there wondering where all the action is.
Ellen Horn is one of the latter.
As a hunter and the owner of a sporting goods store -- the Hunter's Den in New Castle -- she always has a pretty good idea about what's going on in the Craig County woods.
Or, what's not going on.
"Everything is kind of quiet," she reported Monday afternoon.
Horn does a lot of hunting on land secured by the Humble Harvest Hunt Club, where the harvest has been more humbling than usual.
Only one hunter has killed a decent buck at the club, where small bucks are a no-no.
Customers are also passing along little good news.
"Nobody is seeing deer on national forest," Horn said. "They think all the deer are on private land.
"But nobody is seeing anything on private land, either."
Horn said she normally has checked 75 to 100 deer by this time in the season.
"This year I've checked maybe 30 deer," said Horn, who knows that the deer didn't just up and vanish.
They're out there, somewhere.
She concedes it's possible that more hunters than ever are reporting their kills by phone or the Internet. But that many more?
At the Southern States co-operative in Bedford, Larry Hicks said the store has seen only about a quarter of the deer normally checked by now.
"It's been real slow," he said.
Weather conditions haven't helped. Temperatures have been pretty balmy, which can reduce daytime deer movement and also reduce hunting pressure.
Then there was the heavy rain that fell over much of the state for a good part of last week.
Department of Game and Inland Fisheries deer biologist Matt Knox said those days were virtual wash-outs in terms of deer kill.
Knox tracks the numbers as closely as he can by monitoring the game department's electronic checking system figures.
So far this year, things haven't been slow on electronic checking.
"It's running virtually the same as last year," Knox said of the total. "The archery kill was down about 5 percent from last year, but the muzzleloader kill has been up about 5 percent."
There are daily variations, of course.
"It put us out of business," Knox said of last week's rain.
But hunters made up for it on Saturday. They checked in 9,500 deer that day by phone and the Internet, nearly double the number checked electronically on last year's firearms opener.
Barring bad weather, this coming Saturday -- an either-sex day in many counties -- should be even bigger. Last year the electronic total on the second Saturday topped 11,000 and was by far the biggest day of the year.
Even if Saturday is another blockbuster, some hunters will come back from the woods thinking there's not a deer left in the state.
That's just the way it is.
But the more days you can go, the better the chances of being out there when things break loose.
