Taylor: No. We don't want to do what's been done in other states and require that every buck killed must have at least a 14-inch spread. We have all kinds of deer hunters out there. Yes, there are guys who hunt exclusively for trophy bucks; they're after those 8- to 10-pointers with the 14-inch-plus spreads. But we also have folks who just want to kill a buck. Heck, we have folks who just want to kill a deer. So, we're trying to satisfy a wide array of hunters. I think that with our private lands, our WMAs and our national forests, we have a place for everyone to go. I think that's one of the reasons we attract so many non-resident hunters. We have a lot of opportunity. We have 1.5 million acres in this state that you don't have to ask permission to hunt on. You can just buy a license and go.

G&F: I'm hearing from DNR antler-scorers that hunters killed a lot of trophy bucks in 2007. What are you hearing?

Taylor: I've heard the same thing.

G&F: What do you attribute that to?

Taylor: I think we had a fair number of carryover bucks from the preceding season, and that showed up in the gun harvest.

G&F: But why the increase in the archery counties?

Taylor: I think you can track that back to the mast conditions. Mast was spotty last year; deer were on the move more. Yet, we had enough mast to power a pretty good rut. I think those things contributed to a harvest of bigger, older-aged deer.

G&F: One thing that really surprised me was the sheer number of deer killed in the bow-only counties this year, particularly Wyoming and McDowell counties.

Taylor: Absolutely. McDowell and Wyoming were in the top 10 (producers). So, the argument can no longer be made that there are no deer in those counties. When you kill 1,000 deer with bow alone, you have a fair number of deer available to hunters.

G&F: That begs a question. Are those counties getting too many deer to maintain the big bucks people are used to seeing?

Taylor: We don't want to see the quality of those bucks go down, and we don't want to see 60 deer per square mile. We know from history that even though the habitat down in those counties is very good, the resource will degrade if we let the deer population get too high.

G&F: So what are you saying? Is some tweaking of the hunting regulations in order sometime down the road?

Taylor: I'm sure our biologists are looking at that. If we did propose some changes, it would be the sort of thing we'd want to discuss with the public before we came forward with it. There are myriad things we can do to regulate the deer population. We want to do what's best for the deer herd and for the hunting resource. I don't think anyone down in that area wants a gun season that would mirror the one we have in the rest of the state. We don't want to kill that many bucks.