After two hours Jan. 7, the crowd of sportsmen, estimated at 800-plus in Graham High’s auditorium, had melted away to perhaps 100 diehards at the District 5 N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission’s public hearing.
No one had questions of lead-off man Bob Curry, the WRC’s fisheries division chief. He covered 34 statewide proposed fishing changes for 2009-10 in 15 minutes then sat down.
But deer and turkeys were a different kettle of, well, not fish, but the WRC might as well have declared it was going to ban Christmas.
Deer hunters, turkey hunters, bear hunters and small-game hunters were upset at proposed regulations that would: (a) chop a month off bow season, (b) remove the daily bag limit for deer; (c) put bow and muzzle-loader hunters in the woods together for the first time, (d) move the Central, Northwestern and Western counties (except the farwestern District 9) into the Eastern Zone deer season, (e) open those counties to the maximum either-sex deer season, (f) move Moore County into the eastern zone (meaningless if the Central season is pushed into the Eastern Zone), (g) replace Youth Turkey Day with a Friends and Family Afield Day and (h) open the spring gobbler season a week earlier (the first Saturday in April) than in the past.
“What is the biological reason for removing or shortening the bow season?” said Chris Sexton of Granville County to David Cobb, Wildlife Management Division chief.
Cobb, not answering Sexton’s question about biological reasons, could only reply “it would allow people to use bows during muzzleloader season.”
“That would create chaos,” Sexton said.
Two sportsmen, Phil Thomas of Sanford and David Hendrix of Greensboro, said, respectively, the shortening of archery season may cost Thomas 75 percent of his business and cost Hendrix (the archery expert at Gander Mountain of Greensboro) his job.
“(The Commission) needs to think about that when you make proposals like this,” Thomas said.
Sportsmen apparently were incensed the WRC had been influenced, allegedly, by insurance companies who are taking a $60 million hit because of deer-car collisions and want the herd reduced.
But Cobb disagreed with that assessment.
“No proposal has been made at the behest of the insurance industry,” he said, “and anyone who says that is absolutely wrong.”
One sportsman told Cobb that he was a lawyer who knew the insurance industry was behind the proposal at the legislative level, to which Cobb replied again that wasn’t true.
“But the Commission could oppose it and you’re not doing it,” the sportsman said.
WRC District 5 commissioner Nat Harris, when asked if he’d seen a staff report that recommends only taking more deer at several counties in the state’s northeastern section, not statewide, said he was unaware of the study.
Hunters also were angered that for the fourth time, the WRC floated a proposal that would move opening day of spring gobbler season ahead one week. Biologists with the WRC, including its past retired turkey-project leader and the N.C. Wild Turkey Federation, have battled this proposal each time it has appeared.
“You can take an ugly girl and put her in a new dress, but she’s still ugly when you get her home,” said Mason Dorsett. “Why does this proposal keep coming up, over and over?”
The 2008 Wild Turkey Brood Survey — compiled by the agency’s deer and wild turkey project leader — concludes that in order to keep too many gobblers from being killed, N.C.’s spring season doesn’t need to be opened earlier than the second Saturday in April.
But turkey hunters were even more upset the proposal would eliminate the Youth Turkey Day (during past years a week before opening day of regular spring gobbler season) with a “Friends and Family Day,” then crank up the season the next day (Sunday). They viewed “Friends and Family Day” as new clothes dressing up a proposal pushed several times in previous years by the current District 2 commissioner.
Another proposal, to allow bow hunting on Sunday, would mean only archery hunters would get first crack at turkeys in the spring of 2010 on Sunday — if the proposal is adopted by the 19 WRC commissioners.
Most of the proposals opposed by sportsmen came from the WRC’s Big Game Committee, composed mainly of commissioners, and not those generated by staff biologists.
But Gordon Myers, the WRC’s executive director, said the proposals “were not staff or commissioners proposals. They’re agency proposals.”
However, during an Oct. 2008 meeting at the WRC’s Pisgah Center near Brevard, two sets of proposed changes (one by staff, one by commissioners) in 2009-10 fish-and-game laws were presented to the Big Game Committee by the Division of Wildlife Management.
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