9/20/02

Field Notes
by DAVE PAYNE SR.

This year, the Division of Natural Resources is asking hunters to kill more deer. Some hunters, concerned about the deer herd's future, aren't happy about that.
For the past few years, biologists have proposed liberal antlerless seasons to shrink the herd size. 
Every public hearing I've attended on the subject has been packed with angry hunters who are sure each new season's regulations will spell the deer herd's demise.
This year, the division is implementing the most liberal antlerless season in history. In addition to the traditional antlerless season in December, hunters also may kill does during both weeks of the traditionally "bucks only" gun season and in a special three days season right after Christmas.
Many hunters are concerned that this time the division has gone too far.
I find it hard to be so critical. Maybe I'm naive, but I think the biologists know what's best for the state's deer herd. 
 If not for their management efforts there might not be a single deer left in the state to hunt.  
When deer management began in the early 1900s, white-tailed deer extirpation seemed imminent. 
The last known bison was killed in 1825, near the headwaters of the Elk and Tygart Rivers in Randolph County. The last known elk was killed in 1912 in Pocahantas County. Only the state's wildlife management efforts kept the white-tailed deer from suffering a similar fate.
Today, the state's deer herd is 800 times larger than it was in 1910. In fact, more state deer were run over by trains from 1978-1980 or by hunters in the 2,000-acre Jug Wildlife Management Area last year than all state hunters bagged in 1923.
When I was a boy, my grandfather often told me hunting stories from his youth, like when his brother fell and busted a glass fruit jar full of cold coffee he carried in his back pocket or the time that same brother was bitten by a snake in the Blowing Spring Hollow.
But rarely did a story ever end with someone killing a deer. Once, I asked him why. 
"Because there were no deer to kill back then," he said.
Deer were so scarce then, hunters hunted for weeks over a single hoof print, he said.
My grandfather was 11-years-old in 1945 when a then record-high 2,367 deer were harvested across the state. Last year, hunters killed nearly 100 times that many.
A lot of factors contributed to the decline in the deer population. Overhunting, habitat loss from overharvesting timber, reduction in mast as a blight wiped out the American chestnut trees that dominated forests in the Eastern U.S. are all to blame. 
By 1910, officials estimated there were only 1,000 deer alive in the state. Virtually all of them lived in remote and craggy areas deep in the eastern mountains.
In 1923, the Game and Fish Commission, as the state's wildlife management agency was then known, began trapping some of these animals from remote locations and transporting them all across the state. 
Populations took hold as the state strictly regulated hunting and by the late 1940s, deer were having a baby boom of their own.
Over the years, hunting seasons have progressively become more liberal, except for several counties in the southern part of the state, which have been closed to gun hunting since the late 1970s.
The agency has done its job so well the deer herd is too large and overcrowded in most of the state. 
But the land can only feed so many animals.  When deer become overcrowded, they are more likely to be stricken with plagues, like chronic wasting disease and hemmoragic diseases. They are also more prone to mass starvation during cold winters.
Deer wander onto highways, farms, and even cities in search of food.
Talk to just about any farmer and they will tell you deer are eating them out of house and home.
Deer are also causing problems for state motorists, whose vehicles struck and killed 19,323 deer last year alone. 
 Carolyn Strock, manager of the Wood County Airport, said deer sightings are commonplace at the airport, and it airport workers spend countless hours shooing the hoofed interlopers away.
Workers have built barriers all around the airport to keep deer out.
The fringes of the Wood County Airport look like a prisoner of war camp with 6.7 miles of five-strand electric fence, flanked in spots with a six-foot high chain link fence capped with three strands of barbed wire. Many deer still find their way through. 
My grandfather's last hunting season before he died was 1997, during which a record-breaking 80,029 does were killed.