Whitetail harvest numbers keep rising, and North Carolina continues to offer quantity and quality.
Deer hunters in North Carolina set another harvest record during the 2008-09 season, and the upward trend probably will continue this fall and winter.
Last season’s harvest for the state’s 100 counties totaled 176,297 animals, an increase of 3.8 percent over the previous season. That total doesn’t include road kills, disease, poaching and predation, so actual whitetail mortality last year reached considerably higher than 200,000 animals.
“It’s a small amount (above the 2007-08 total), and I don’t know I’d have predicted a record harvest two years in a row, but the trend is moving upward each year,” said Evin Stanford, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s supervising big-game biologist.
The Tarheel State herd, estimated at 1.2 million animals, seems healthy and, if there are no disease outbreaks, should provide plenty of hunting opportunities in the coming season, which starts in early September and ends Jan. 1, 2010.
“The only thing that might hurt would be hemorrhagic disease,” Stanford said, “but we haven’t had an outbreak the last two years. Typically, it occurs when we have a hot, dry summer, followed by a wet late summer and early fall.”
Those weather conditions allow the biting midges (gnats) that carry the disease to proliferate and spread the illness to deer. Humans aren’t susceptible to the disease from insect bites and can’t contract it by eating venison from a deer that has contracted EHD.
Stanford had a simple answer to a simple question: Why were hunters able to harvest more North Carolina whitetails than ever before last season?
“They shot more deer,” he said, with a chuckle. “Actually, it’s possible the bonus (doe) tags had an impact. I think that’s what must have happened the previous year when we had a big increase in doe harvests.”
During the 2007-08 season, hunters added 17,713 more deer than the previous year, and 16,772 of them were does; the overall doe harvest jumped 21.7 percent from 2006-07. Meanwhile, the buck harvest dropped two percent, which is good news for trophy hunters.
But during 2008-09, the doe harvest remained stable, with 77,887 taken, a tiny increase over the previous season’s 77,434. Hunters tagged 85,051 bucks last season, two percent higher than 2007-08.
North Carolina has approximately 280,000 licensed hunters, and it’s likely a great percentage of them hunt whitetails.
From anecdotal evidence, the Tar Heel State is producing more “quality” deer — one need look no farther than the March 2009 Dixie Deer Classic in Raleigh, which showcased many trophy bucks.
That trend has continued since 2000, when the Commission introduced the 2-buck limit for the Central, Northwestern and Western deer sections. Eastern counties continue to operate under a 4-bucks season limit.
“The 2-buck rule has helped quality deer,” Stanford said, “and a lot of hunters seem to be interested in being more selective in what they shoot and interested in having larger bucks with larger racks.”
The “trophy belt” continues to be a northern tier of counties from Northampton in the northeast to Ashe and Watauga in the northwest corner of the state.
The finest whitetail habitat in the state probably belongs to the northeastern corner of the state, with large agricultural fields surrounded by swamp lands. However, trophy production seems limited, probably by dog hunting or overall hunting pressure.
On the other hand, northern Piedmont counties like Person, Caswell, Rockingham, Guilford, Stokes and Forsyth continue to produce some of the state’s largest bucks.
Person County, in fact, may have had the best year last season of any in North Carolina, as five bucks won categories at the 2009 Dixie Deer Classic. Randy Jarrett, Ethan Dunn, Cory Moyer, Nicole Johns and Ron Briggs each won a Classic category with a buck from Person.
However, exceptions occur, such as young Tyler Hickman’s 183 4/8-inch non-typical giant that sported 21 points and fell in Bladen County on Opening Day of the eastern gun season to one shot from the 11-year-old’s .30-30. But it was only the second Dixie Deer qualifier from Bladen in the last 10 years.
Chucky Baker captured the Classic’s muzzleloader non-typical award with a 193 6/8 monster he downed in Onslow County, a deer that jumped up while Baker and a friend were searching for a wounded doe.
But no other eastern buck broke the Piedmont/Northwest stranglehold on the Dixie Deer’s other 20 trophy categories.
If deer hunters are looking for top areas to find deer, the northeast “Peanut Belt” continues to be the prime candidate. Three northeastern counties — Halifax (6,276 deer taken last season), Northampton (6,212) and Bertie (5,777) ranked 1-2-3 for the most deer tagged during 2008-09.
Pender County, just north of Wilmington and containing the huge Croatan National Forest (64,743 acres) rated fourth at 4,152 tagged deer, followed by Wilkes County (4,135) in the northwest. At fifth was Franklin (3,525), then Duplin (3,458), Beaufort (3,388), Anson (3,339), then Edgecombe (3,318).
Only Anson bucks this general trend of northern-tier big bucks, but it’s in the southern Piedmont near the South Carolina border and contains the deer-rich Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge, where only permit hunts are allowed.
Franklin, Duplin and Beaufort are east of I-85, while Edgecombe is in the Roanoke River drainage.
None of those counties produced a Dixie Deer Classic champion during March, despite being among leaders in numbers of harvested whitetails.
Eastern North Carolina also led the state in the harvest of antlered bucks, with Halifax No. 1 at 2,799, followed by Northampton at 2,627, Bertie (2,463), Pender (2,051), Duplin (1,833), Wilkes (1,842), Columbus (1,748), Beaufort (1,739), Bladen (1,676) and Wake (1,611). That seems to indicate while the east has plenty of bucks, it has few of trophy caliber.
Wilkes County, a traditional deer-hunting hotbed in the northwestern mountains, was the lone non-eastern area among the top-10 buck counties last season.
Oddly no eastern counties were in the top 10 in the muzzleloader harvest category. The best counties for smokepole hunters to score on a deer included Wilkes (687), Ashe (623), Chatham (495), Alleghany (486), Stokes (472), Iredell (428), Montgomery (428), Caswell (417), Anson (411) and Granville (394).
Not surprisingly, the top-10 archery results follow the same pattern. Only one eastern county is in that group, as most bow kills occurred in the piedmont and northwestern regions of the state — where the season is the longest. That’s also a long-standing pattern.
The leading bow-kill counties included Wilkes (517), Harnett (460), Alleghany (438), Ashe (373), Stokes (370), Anson (352), Yancey (315), Rockingham (305), Iredell (282) and Chatham (282).
Wilkes, Alleghany, Ashe and Yancey are in the northwest, while Stokes and Iredell are semi-foothill regions. Rockingham and Chatham are in the “Trophy Belt.”
Harnett, ranking second in bow kills, lies between Raleigh and Fayetteville, two areas populated by many bowhunters, and on the edge of Jordan Lake Game land, with the Cape Fear River drainage slicing through its middle. Geographically, Harnett is considered an eastern county by the Commission, but it’s terrain more closely resembles the southern Piedmont.
The top-3 counties for does harvested — Halifax (2,996), Northampton (2,947) and Bertie (2,804) — are in the northeast, while fifth-rated Pender (1,818) and No. 9 Franklin (1,523) are in the east, with 10th-place Edgecombe (1,505) also a northeastern county. Anson (1,735) is in the southern Piedmont with Chatham (1,563) in the central Piedmont. So it’s good northeastern hunters are keeping doe numbers in check, because that region boasts the state’s most-prolific whitetails. Pender, Franklin and Chatham are within two major river drainages (Tar-Neuse and Haw-Cape Fear) with Anson split by the Pee Dee.
With its 85 game lands, North Carolina has plenty of places for Tarheel State hunters to hunt whitetails that have spread into every nook and corner of the state.
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