Jan. 26–Conservation police have moved on to urban archery, small game and fishing enforcement, but around Lynchburg sportsmen still are talking about the big game season that closed this month.
It was a wild deer season for local hunters this winter, as an acorn shortage and late rut led to windfalls for some sportsmen and disappointment for others.
“It was feast or famine,” said Steve Crist, owner of W Novelty Co., which sells hunting equipment and serves as a deer check-in station.
The Department of Game and Fisheries is expecting Virginia’s total harvest to be up about 17 percent from the 2012-13 firearm season, said Deer Project Coordinator Matt Knox.
Local hunters, however, have questioned the department’s methods. They say a regulation introduced in 2008 — intended to cull the herds through the killing of does — instead incentivizes hunters to lie about their number of kills, inflating the size of the reported harvest.
Knox bases his projections on the number of kills reported online and by phone. Generally, about 75 percent of all kills are recorded by one of those two methods.
Through Jan. 4, the final day of the rifle season, 185,928 kills had been reported online or over the phone by hunters in Virginia. However, that number also includes deer killed by archers and hunters using muzzle-loaded firearms.
Knox has been working since season’s end to register all the kills reported through physical tags before declaring a final state-wide number and releasing numbers on individual localities.
Preliminary data suggest the harvest will also be up in the Lynchburg area, including BedfordCounty, which has led all Virginia localities in total deer kills every year in recent memory. In 2008, Bedford topped 10,000 reported kills.
Knox expected this year’s local harvest to be down after years of good hunting.
“We’ve been really hitting the deer herd very hard,” he said.
But then something happened that changed the behavior of the deer and those who hunt them.
A colossal failure of the acorn crop caused deer to alter their foraging patterns. Knox said deer were forced into more compact areas where they could find food rather than spreading out. Hunters who could find those pockets had some good opportunities to land a trophy.
Folks who hunt in woods — particularly along the mountains — had a tougher time than in years past, local hunters said.
The beginning of the season seemed especially slow, Crist said. However, it picked up, perhaps as hunters learned where deer were likely to roam.
Deer also are more active during the annual rut, or mating period, which was also later this winter, likely due to mild weather, Crist said.
Landing a handsome buck in the Lynchburg area often means a trip to Arrington’s Orchard, which processes deer to make trophies and foods like venison sausage.
Barry Arrington saw more business in the recent season than he has in several years. He saw larger deer than usual, too.
“Overall, it was a good year for the nice bucks,” he said, but added that he only came across a couple truly behemoth bucks.
The commonwealth has made Virginia hunters put in more work to take those bucks in recent years. Under 2008’s Earn a Buck regulation, sportsmen may kill one buck, but must take at least one doe before claiming each additional buck.
The regulation is designed to thin populous herds, since the number of fawns born in a given year is more dependent on the number of females than the number of males. For example, a population of one doe and five bucks can result in at most one litter, while a population of five does and one buck could result in upward of five litters.
Hunter John Ayers said the Earn a Buck program encourages some hunters to lie about their harvest, skewing the state’s numbers. Dishonest hunters can call in to report that they have killed a doe so they can have permission to legally shoot a buck, he explained. Hunters today can report a kill over the phone or online without having to present an actual carcass.
Knox has defended the number of reports, saying Virginia hunters are “spectacular” about accurately reporting their kills.
“We feel really good about the numbers,” he said.
And while Knox acknowledged that “phantom does” do occasionally get called in, he said they make up less than five percent of reported doe kills in BedfordCounty.
Surveys of hunters in the commonwealth indicate most are honest, he said. Virginia has required hunters to report their kills since 1947, so nearly all have grown up with the expectation of recording whenever they take a deer, Knox said.
Hunter Joe Laslie also said he believes some sportsmen falsely report taking does so they can shoot bucks. When approaching a group of deer, a hunter may only get a single shot that spooks the rest of the deer. Especially in a year with uncertain hunting, a shooter might want to use his chance on a buck, he said.
Laslie is the manager at Laslie’s Auto Body. The past fall and winter have been a bit atypical, in terms of vehicle wrecks with deer, he said.
Generally, his work starts to pick up in September or October, when he might see three or four deer wrecks per day. The rush this year didn’t start until November, further evidence of the late rut, he said.
In the past, most of his customers hit deer on country roads. But this season, his mechanics saw an uptick in cars that wrecked with the animals on highways, Laslie said. He wondered if scarcer food made the deer more likely to roam, causing them to come into greater contact with drivers.
The cost for repairing a wreck varies considerably but generally runs about $2,500, though highway crashes are more expensive to fix, he said.
Such crashes are one of the main reasons game and fish officials want to manage herd populations.
“Deer also inflict millions of dollars in damage to crops, trees, and gardens…” authorities wrote in the current edition of the Virginia Deer Management Plan published in 2007.
“Under optimal conditions, a deer population can double in size annually. … Sources of mortality other than hunting (e.g., diseases, injuries, predation) are typically not sufficient to control deer populations,” the report states.
Knox hopes to reduce the herd in the Bedford area by 25 percent.
The land is prime for deer because it offers a mix of woods and fields, he said. Deer especially like the edges between the two, where they have access to cover and food, he explained.
Knox pulled up a satellite image of the area, noting that it looks “like a checkerboard” of woods and fields.
The recently concluded rifle season was for all big game. In addition to deer, it includes elk and bears.
Elk have not been seen in the area in decades, Knox said, though the bear population has exploded.
The animals used to be confined to the mountains, but have ventured farther into the lowlands in recent years. In BedfordCounty alone, hunters took 133 bears in the past three seasons.
This year’s numbers will not be available for a few weeks, said Jaime Sajecki, the commonwealth’s Bear Project Coordinator. Collecting such data takes more time because bears must be reported in person.
Authorities collect a tooth from each bear, which helps them determine the animal’s age to study the population, Sajecki said.
And now that the big game rifle season is over, game and fish officials are setting their sights on new projects.
They keep busy monitoring duck, turkey and small game hunters, said Lt. Chris Thomas.
Conservation officers are also looking out for fishers by stocking waterways with trout. Locally, they stock the Piney, Rockfish and TyeRivers.
