2012 Deer Forecast

North Carolina sportsmen have many choices when it comes to deer hunting. Here are some of the state’s hottest whitetail hotspots.

It became gin clear after the 2012 Dixie Deer Classic and the release of harvest figures from the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission for the last hunting season that North Carolina’s deer herd is in good shape.

It’s also fairly obvious that Wilkes County in the state’s northwestern corner has the state’s most-avid hunters and one of its healthiest deer populations, while three counties in the northeastern corner of the state are once again home to the most whitetails in North Carolina.

As for trophy deer, the Classic revealed — again — that counties from the northern Piedmont host a pretty good percentage of the state’s trophy bucks. Eight of 16 category winners at the South’s oldest deer expo came from those regions.

In fact, Alamance County — located near the state’s geographic center but mostly a suburban bedroom region for people working in Greensboro, Durham and Chapel Hill — may be the top trophy deer venue in the Tarheel State.

One of the most-impressive bucks taken during the state last season was Steve Shaw’s 18-pointer, which carried a non-typical rack sporting six drop tines totalling 180 3/8 Boone and Crockett Club points. Shaw shot it with a muzzleloader in southern Alamance County.

Greenboro’s Ron Collins killed a near-perfect 10-point buck in Rockingham County that qualified for the B&C Club’s all-time record book at 170 5/8 inches, and 40 miles to the west Jeff Hamilton of Pilot Mountain downed another near-perfect 10-pointer that qualifed for the all-time record book at exactly 170 inches, the minimum for entry.

Orange County produced the second-largest buck ever killed by a bowhunter, as Doug Malinowski of Burlington arrowed a massive 167 7/8-inch non-typical buck in Orange County, Alamance’s neighbor to the east. The buck actually wound up as a typical because its typical score is closer to the B&C minimum than its non-typical score, but it was the second-largest ever taken in North Carolina in either category.

Robert Powell of Fuqua-Varina displayed the non-typical gun winner with a 177 5/8-inch Wake County giant, while Austin Shelton of Greensboro traveled to Caswell County with his dad and used one shot from a .50-caliber muzzleloader to bag a wide-racked 5×5 that topped the youth division at 148 6/8 inches.

Those were six of the best North Carolina bucks at the 2012 Classic this past March. Other category winners impressed the 23,000 visitors to the Raleigh deer show as well, but the inference should be obvious: Most of the state’s big deer still make the Piedmont their homes.

Not only that, but it’s clear the rest of the state won’t be long in catching up. Dozens of huge 8-pointers were taken across the state, boding well for the future.

Overall hunters bagged 173,533 whitetails in North Carolina last fall, the third-highest harvest on record.

Three issues stood out immediately upon a study of the 2011-12 harvest: Wilkes County has something to offer every deer hunter, the Roanoke River drainage continues to harbor the most whitetails of any of the state’s three major regions and crossbow hunting — legal only for the second year — proved effective for some hunters but were not the killing machines predicted by opponents.

“There are a lot of deer hunters in Wilkes County and surrounding counties in the northwestern section,” said biologist Evin Stanford, the Commission’s big-game specialist. “I think hunting probably is a family tradition, handed down from generation to generation. Right now, I think entire families are involved, from moms to dads to sons and daughters.

This part of the state also has good habitat for deer, good forage, lots of fields, fruit trees, some crops, oak ridges for mast (acorns), and people have been hunters up there for a long time.

“I guess they also could like the taste of venison.”

Wilkes County placed in the top 5 of six categories the Commission uses to measure the annual harvest, and was sixth in another deer-kill category. No other county matched that record.

Primitive weapons seem to be a favorite of Wilkes deer chasers, as crossbow bolt-throwers led that category with 161 reported deer. Muzzleloader hunters also topped that division with 777 tagged whitetails. For bow hunters using more traditional weapons, Wilkes hunters finished second at 345 behind highly populated Wake County, which had 480 archery harvests.

As for antlered bucks, Wilkes hunters were third at 1,816 and fourth in doe kills with 2,034. Gun hunters finished sixth in that category with 2,939 tagged deer.

Wake County and Rockingham County also finished high relative to other counties in three categories. Interestingly enough, Wake proved the theory that the suburbs provide whitetails with great habitat.

As noted, Wake County hunters topped the archery list, but besides suburban bucks, Wake County’s total was helped by the presence of three major game lands around the county’s periphery. That’s where archery hunters from Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill were able to find excellent habitat and set up tree stands to ambush whitetails.

Jordan Lake, Butner-Falls and Shearon Harris game lands have most of or parts of their acreages in Wake County, where bowhunters tagged 485 deer, leading game-lands harvest from across the state, including the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests, which cover more than a million acres.

Wake hunters also finished second on the crossbow list with 128 registered deer, undoubtedly helped by game-land territories to hunt. In addition N.C.’s fastest-growing county in terms of human population and the center of state government finished ninth in buck harvests with 1,434.

Rockingham County, on the other hand, couldn’t be more different than bustling Wake County, which is crisscrossed by a web of super-highways.

Situated north of Guilford County and metropolitan Greensboro, Rockingham County is almost totally rural, with the exception of the small towns of Eden, Madison and Reidsville.

Its key elements for deer habitat include three river drainages (Dan, Haw and Mayo) that snake through this northern piedmont venue, large agricultural areas that feature corn and soybeans, plus it borders deer-rich southern Virginia. Whitetails from the Commonwealth have no trouble slipping down the three river drainages that meander across Rockingham’s landscape. In fact, Rockingham may be the best-kept deer-hunting secret in North Carolina.

Rockingham County hunters held their on in various categories compiled by the Commission. The county produced 604 deer for blackpowder hunters to rank fourth, and it was fourthin bow kills with 308. Rockingham County tied for seventh as its crossbow hunters tagged 99 deer.

Perhaps another reason it also produces more than its share of trophy bucks is that a majority of hunters are apparently selective and try to keep the deer herd in balance. In 2011, they took more does than bucks — 1,381 to 1,148 or 54.6-percent does to 45.4-percent bucks.

It’s axiomatic among hunt clubs whose members want to improve the potential of their bucks to focus on harvesting more does, basically because the strategy relieves hunting pressure from antlered bucks and lowers current and future doe numbers. Rockingham County certainly qualifies in that respect, and recent big bucks y prove the approach works for creating quality deer.

Stokes, another Piedmont county east of Wilkes, also qualifies as a whitetail enclave. The Dan River meanders from Stokes’ northwest corner to the southeast before entering Rockingham County, and Virginia whitetails also have followed its course to infiltrate this foothills region.

The county is mountainous in its northern reaches and rolling hills in its southern reaches, and important to the deer herd is that its only urban areas are King and Walnut Cove, towns near the southwestern and southeastern corners. The remainder of Stokes is wild land with houses scattered along winding hollows and vacation homes on plots gouged out of hillsides or on mountain tops.

The key for Stokes as a deer mecca is that its center is untouched by development, as Hanging Rock State Park and its 6,921 acres is part of the Sauratown Moutain Range. No hunting is allowed in the park, so Hanging Rock, in effect, is a deer sanctuary. And when whitetails wander off that safety zone, hunters often are waiting for them.

Kenneth Nance of Sandy Ridge bagged a 154 5/8 gross 8-pointer in Stokes with a crossbow last September, and Stokes also was in the top 10 of three harvest categories, including muzzleloader (second with 708), archery (sixth with 266) and crossbow (third with 122).

Another county in the state’s northwestern corner, tiny Ashe County, ranked third statewide in muzzleloader kills with 607.

As for crossbows, worries that these weapons would make a major difference in the harvest did not come true in 2011. Hunters carrying the “advanced” archery weapons downed only 3,885 deer last season, two percent of the total recorded harvest.

If a hunter wants to go to the top region to find deer, the northeastern “Peanut Belt” counties still are the best choices, because of a predictable element — a river drainage — and it’s a huge one.

The Staunton and Dan rivers both begin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains and merge northwest of Clarksville, Va., to form the Roanoke. Downstream of the three major reservoirs (Kerr, Gaston and Roanoke Rapids), it flows through Northampton, Halifax and Bertie counties. Moreover, the Chowan River also sweeps through northern Bertie.

The vast Roanoke flood plain is the major difference-maker in the region’s large deer population. Until dams were built along its course for flood control, spring rains annually inundated hundreds of thousands of acres of river bottomlands. When the waters receded each spring, they dropped tons of silt, creating a landscape covered in deep, black, rich soil — some of the best crop-growing land in the United States.

Huge hardwood and pine forests covered thousands of acres of flat on either side of the river. Most of the hardwoods and a lot of the pines have been timbered; however, with the river under control, farmers quickly cleared the land, planting peanuts, corn, soybeans and cotton. Most of the swamps went undrained as it was too much work to siphon them, and there was plenty of fertile soil that only needed to be cleared before crops could be planted.

The Roanoke flood plain has become a veritable smorgasbord for whitetails that have populated its every nook and cranny. Much of the land remains in private hands, guarded and worked by descendants of the original landowners. However, many of the large former plantations now are preserves and offer some of the state’s best deer hunting.

For hunters without deep pockets, public lands are at their disposal. For the price of a $5 permit, the Roanoke River Wetlands National Wildlife Refuge Game Lands is open to deer hunting at specific dates. At 35,457 acres and located on either side of the river in Northampton, Halifax, Bertie and Martin counties, the bottomland hardwood forests remain untouched by chain saws (for the most part), and local farmers plant enough crops to keep deer interested.

Northampton, in fact, led the state in overall deer harvests last season with 5,289, followed by Halifax at 5,229 and Bertie at 4,348. This “Big Three” lineup seems to remain stable in North Carolina deer-harvest reports, only switching positions from year to year.

Another factor helping the three counties is a determined effort to balance the herds by focusing as much on does as on bucks. Northampton hunters bagged 2,284 bucks last season (second in the state) and led North Carolina with 2,525 does, a 47.4-percent buck harvest and 52.6-percent doe kill. Halifax was No. 1 statewide in bucks killed with 2,326 and second in does taken with 2,454, for a percentage still tilted to the doe side.

Bertie hunters downed 2,199 does (No. 3 in the state) and 1,771 bucks (No. 5), an even-better harvest ratio of 44.6-percent bucks and 55.4-percent does).

Across the state, most counties couldn’t match those excellent ratios, but North Carolina hunters overall tagged 80,014 antlered bucks and 78,185 does for harvest ratio of almost 50-50, slightly higher on the buck side. The numbers don’t include 15,354 button bucks that hunters probably thought were does.

Game lands harvest results are difficult to ascertain because they’re rated by individual counties that may have multiple game lands inside their borders.

Wake County was the leading area for game lands deer kills. It contains parts of Jordan, Butner-Falls and Shearon Harris game lands and registered 445 deer in 2011-12. Chatham, which also contains sections of Jordan Lake and Shearon Harris and part of the Chatham Game Lands, finished second at 417. Montgomery County’s No. 3 harvest was completely on the 45,000-acre Uwharrie National Forest, with 378 reported kills. Caswell County — which has only the Caswell Game Lands — followed in fourth with 276 registered whitetails. Pender, a coastal county north of Wilmington, has Angola Bay and Holly Shelter game lands and was fifth at 234 public-land deer kills.

North Carolina’s deer herd also survived a major outbreak of epizootic hemorrhagic disease that killed an unknown number of whitetails last fall.

“We had reports from 42 counties of EHD,” Stanford said, “but the disease probably occurred in every county.”