Photo by Mark Werner

The end of an era is upon us. From now on, it'll be a fluke if West Virginians harvest more than 200,000 deer during a single whitetail season. It'll really be a stretch if sportsmen take 100,000 bucks again in one season.

The Mountain State's deer herd isn't what it was just a few short years ago. Partly by design and partly by mistake, wildlife officials have allowed whitetail populations to dwindle to levels not seen since the early 1990s. The bottom line is: Deer harvests have plummeted. Last year, hunters killed just 179,066 animals during the buck, antlerless, muzzleloader and archery seasons combined. Not since 1994 has the total been that low.

Curtis Taylor, chief of wildlife resources for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR), blames the dismal harvest on bad timing.

"For the past several years, we've focused on lowering the deer population in some parts of the state by encouraging hunters to take high numbers of antlerless deer," Taylor said. "While that was going on, we had two mast failures and two hard winters in a row. We had a lot more winter kill than anticipated -- especially in the high-altitude counties -- but we didn't realize it until we analyzed last year's big drop in the buck kill."

The outlook isn't universally bad, however. Faced with the realization that deer populations had reached lower-than-desired levels in some counties, DNR biologists decided that hunters should take fewer antlerless deer.

The altered regulations are designed to allow overhunted deer herds to recover a bit while still putting the hammer down on overpopulated regions.

Even with the slight decrease in hunting pressure, biologists say hunters shouldn't expect to enjoy another record harvest any time this year -- or any time soon, for that matter.

WHAT TO EXPECT
Nature's ebbs and flows make it virtually impossible to predict which areas of the state will enjoy good deer hunting and which ones won't. Astute sportsmen can make educated guesses, however, by examining the previous year's harvest data and determining its implications for a given area.

Fortunately for whitetail hunters, the DNR keeps meticulous records on all the deer killed in the Mountain State. Other states rely on imprecise surveys and estimates to compile their harvest data, but West Virginia law requires hunters to register at state-sanctioned game-check stations every whitetail harvested during the season.

Registration information includes the date of harvest, sex of the deer, method of harvest and the county and general location of the kill. Armed with this information, DNR biologists determine which counties' population densities fall within desired levels and which ones don't.

The DNR officials then make the information available to the public. Each spring, agency administrators publish the West Virginia Big Game Bulletin, a soft-cover compilation of the previous year's harvest data.

The most revealing page in the entire publication is the table that shows each county's deer kill per square mile of habitat -- the higher the number, the better the hunting. It's as simple as that.

Well, almost.

The kill per square mile tends to skew higher in small counties where there isn't a lot of public hunting land. For instance, tiny Hancock County averages more than 28 deer killed per square mile, a phenomenally high number. But with just 61 square miles of whitetail habitat, Hancock can accommodate only a relative handful of hunters.

The key to interpreting the DNR's data, then, is to look for counties more than 250 square miles in size where the deer kill per square mile is higher than the statewide average of 7.82. Counties that contain good-sized tracts of public hunting land are even better bets.