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Deer season mostly in the rearview mirror

All year we hunters wait for deer rifle season like excited little kids holding our breath for some big, special treat. And then rifle season arrives, we run ourselves ragged, and suddenly…a switch is thrown…it is all over.

Where did all our fun times and friends and family go? Why, they were sitting with us having dinner and laughing just minutes ago, and adventuring around the beautiful woods together just hours ago…and now…now my life seems so very quiet, and humdrum.

Like the three days of bear season, the two weeks of deer season are so highly anticipated, and yet they are also then over so, so quickly. I guess this is the way of all fun times.

This year I can’t think of any woods I hunted in that had many or any acorns. This absence of food literally caused mountain deer to migrate. It was wild to see, or not see, as the word “see” can be taken to mean, because we hardly saw many deer in the mountains. Sure, we took some, and I have no complaints, as I know plenty of people who did not even get a shot at a deer, much less see any. I was able to pick and choose some shots, and one that I declined on a very nice buck I regretted soon after. That shot was not a “good” shot, but would have hit him right in the middle of the ribs. A liver shot, and almost immediately fatal. But a tracking job nonetheless, and not a shot I would have been proud of.

And so that buck lived to see another day, and because I had not filled my buck tag in 2019, I felt both very grown up for having made the correct decision and also very foolish for having not taken what was given to me.

But the mountain hunters did not have a lot of luck in rifle season, the best hunting having happened in October and early November during archery season. Plenty of browse and some few acorns were available for the deer then, and they were not feeling so pressured and anxious about food as they are now. No, the mountain hunters sat and waited, or did drives and yet still waited to see deer. But the deer, desiring not to starve to death, migrated on to whatever food sources they could find, and there they still sit.

Well, the fact is that the north country is seriously socked in with deep snow. Like a solid two to almost three feet in most places. The deer can hardly move through this, let alone paw or browse for food under it. Additionally, as soon as warm temperatures arrive, or a few hours of rain, that deep snow will have a thick, hard crust on top of it. And the deer will not be able to walk on it, stand on it, feed on it. Like we had in 2005, we will probably see a serious deer die-off across big parts of the Big Woods north country from this deep snow in the coming week. In 2005, after a similar deep snow with a heavy crust, I recall finding dozens of deer carcasses all over the mountains around us. In some instances the coyotes were able to close the distance and just pull them down, but in a lot of situations, the deer just laid down on that crusty snow, curled up, and starved to death.

Pretty sad, even for conservationists who know the mountain deer herds needed to be thinned out for the sake of forest health.

Down in the farmland, the deer seemed to be doing just dandy. In farm country, edge habitat browse and waste grain are so abundant that the plague of four-legged deer locusts have no trouble making a living, deep snow or not. Flintlock season cannot come too soon for the farm country, where our own tenant farmer informed me a few weeks ago that the deer have eaten all of our profit to the point where we can no longer afford to grow corn or soybeans. Going forward, we will only be growing hay.

For hunters having trouble understanding what this means, let me explain. If the farmer cannot make money from farming because the over-abundant deer eat up his profits, then the farmer cannot afford to pay the land owner a healthy per-acre rent that pays the land taxes and covers many annual maintenance costs. If farming won’t pay the costs of farm land, then maybe a few house lots here or there will pay…and thus is beautiful, sacred farmland slowly, inexorably, sadly converted to pavement. By deer no less.

And so in farm country, deer managers like me see deer more like rats than like deer. Rats are vermin, the overabundant deer become vermin, and deer hunting becomes less of an adventure, and more of a chore, or a jihad, to protect the beautiful landscape from becoming one more housing development.

These are some reflections on deer season. I have not killed a deer with a flintlock in many years, and hopefully this season I will. God knows, the farmland needs all the help it can get.

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