Photo by John R. Ford

Curtis Taylor serves as chief of the Wildlife Resources Section for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR). Recently, he sat down with long-time West Virginia Game & Fish correspondent John McCoy to discuss the status of the state's hunting seasons.

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Game & Fish: Let's talk about deer first. The numbers have come in, and the statewide buck kill is down to just 64,547. Hunters are starting to get unhappy. What do you say to them?

Curtis Taylor: We go back to the deer management plan. It's based on county units. We had some counties where we were actively trying to reduce deer population. We achieved that. We're sticking to our plan. As we speak, our guys are looking at tags, looking at data. From that, they'll determine their proposals for the 2006 buck and antlerless-deer seasons.

We still have some counties that are above the harvest objectives, where there are still too many deer. We're going to continue with aggressive seasons in those counties. Conversely, there are other counties where deer numbers are down so far that we're going to have to be very restrictive, particularly on our antlerless-deer harvests.

Having said that, the deer population in the state will never go back to support the buck kills of 100,000 that we had in the mid-1990s. It's not good for the deer; it's not good for the habitat, and it's not good for the other species of wildlife that share the forest with deer. We're trying to strike a balance in what the habitat can support, what people can live with, and what we need to have to keep our hunting heritage alive.

G&F: When the deer-kill pendulum swings toward a happy medium, as I presume you fellows are trying to have it do, what sort of buck harvests and doe harvests would we be looking at?

Taylor: I think, more than come up with a finite number, we would like to get to a point where we're harvesting as many does as bucks throughout the entire season. That will allow us to even up the buck-to-doe ratio, which hunters seem to want. At the same time, there's a clamoring out there for bigger bucks.

G&F: You guys are working on that right now. Let's talk about it a little bit. DNR Director Frank Jezioro has asked you to look into the possibility of older-aged deer management on some public hunting lands. What's the status of that?

Taylor: It's ongoing -- actually more than ongoing. We started last deer season in some areas trying to collect some baseline data. We wanted to go out and look at animal weights, beam diameters, spreads, number of points, etc., so we would have a yardstick to go by when we propose our management guidelines for those areas. That way, we can look at those same things a few years down the road to see if our management plan made any difference.

G&F: What are the general parameters Director Jezioro is pushing for?

Taylor: The goal is to have one or two sizable older-age deer-management tracts in each of the state's six wildlife management regions. He's asked for areas of about 10,000 acres. That's a goal we might not be able to make in every district, but we think we'll be able to provide at least one within reasonable driving distance of every hunter in the state.

What the director wants to do is to provide different types of hunting experiences for different types of hunters. There are still people out there who just want to kill a deer. They couldn't care less whether it's an 8-point or a 10-point. Others want to kill only trophy deer. We want to have something for everyone.

G&F: Is West Virginia diverse enough in habitat and deer herd size to justify this sort of approach?

Taylor: Oh, I think so. The state really is diverse enough in its habitat that we can do a lot of different things. For example, we could put all the antler restrictions we wanted in the Eastern Panhandle, but with the lack of soil fertility there, you'd never get the sort of racks you have in Wyoming or McDowell counties, or along the Ohio River.