By Mannix Porterfield
Biting rainfalls and snow squalls bombarded hunters across a southern swath of West Virginia this week and last, but elsewhere, the hunt went on unabated by nasty weather, and the Division of Natural Resources is looking for a bigger kill this season when all the racks are counted.
And the reason is simple.
Counties in districts with typically higher kills weren’t plagued by foul weather, so more bucks were taken, and the increases there can overcome any declines in regions with normally small numbers that were hit with all that rain and snow, DNR biologist Ray Knotts explained Wednesday.
“Based on our observation the first week, the statewide deer kill will probably be up slightly,” he said.
A year ago, hunters bagged 67,213 in the bucks-only season.
“Certain parts of the state did not have the best of weather the first three days,” he said of the annual two-week extravaganza that lures some 360,000 hunters into West Virginia’s vaunted forests.
“Typically, hunters don’t care for hunting in the rain. The more time went on, the harder it rained. I’m sure that impacted the deer hunt some on (the first day of the season).”
A day into the hunt, winds whipping across much of the state sloughed snow through the woodlands, decorating forests through Upshur, Tucker, Pocahontas, Tucker, Pendleton and Webster counties.
All that deposited a 10-inch pack of snow on the ground, and with the temperature rising and falling, the snow thawed and refroze.
“That made it crunchy and difficult to walk around in,” said Knotts, the biologist for District 3 in French Creek.
“Of course, they probably got on Monday and Tuesday an additional 8 or 10 inches on top of that.
That typically impacts our deer kill some. Snow can be a good thing, unless there’s too much of it or it’s crunchy, because it aids a hunter’s visibility.”
Five deaths have been linked to the hunt — same as last year — with the special firearms season set to close out Saturday.
None of the deaths, however, was linked to a bullet.
A higher-than-normal deer harvest is projected in Districts 1 and 6 that embrace the entire Northern Panhandle, along with Wetzel, Wood, Jackson and Wirt counties, and it is in that region where hunters normally shoot about one-half of the state’s total.
So even if hunters are less successful in Region 4, taking in Raleigh, Fayette, Summers, Monroe, Greenbrier, Mercer and Wyoming counties, where the kill is considerably much less — normally in the 8,000-buck range — a potential bigger take in the northern counties can make up the slack, Knotts pointed out.
“Those counties (in Districts 1 and 6 ) typically have a much higher deer population than the mountainous counties,” he said.
“You can see it’s very easy when you have a county that’s killing 2,000 and another county killing 700, if one killing a couple of thousand bucks goes up 10 percent and the one killing 700 goes down 10 percent, the overall net is going to be positive, not negative.”
— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com
