Deer numbers leaping ahead

Deer are a common sight across Central Virginia but state game officials and hunters are trying to keep their numbers down.

Virginia hunters reported nearly 254,000 deer kills in the 2008-09 season, according to the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. That total was 4 percent higher than the year before and 15 percent higher than the 10-year average of 220,000 deer killed annually.

DGIF projects similar deer populations and buck kill levels during the current season in this region.

Bedford County saw the highest number of deer kills reported with just more than 10,000, but the county still has a high white-tailed deer population, said Matt Knox, a DGIF deer coordinator in Forest.

“We have more deer than we had a decade ago,” Knox said. “We’ve never had a shortage of deer around here.”

To compensate, a regulation that requires hunters to kill does and young bucks called ‘Earn a Buck’ was started in eight counties in Virginia, including Bedford, in fall 2008 in an effort to manage deer herd density.

Bedford is the only locality in the Lynchburg region to have the new regulation, which became mandatory on private lands during all open deer seasons in the eight counties. Under the regulation’s guidelines, hunters have to kill at least one antlerless deer before they can kill their second antlered buck of the season.Knox said the first season with the new rule was “tremendously successful” and he hopes it will help Bedford County turn a corner in managing deer population. The regulation resulted in a nearly 60-percent increase in doe kills in Bedford, he said.

“We have been trying for years to increase the doe kill through ‘please shoot’ policies,” Knox said. “We were just asking people to shoot does. We never got the amount we wanted.”

At least one group is benefiting from the increase in deer kills: Hunters for the Hungry, a Bedford County nonprofit, has harvested 300,000 pounds of venison this year with much of hunting season remaining, said director Laura Newell-Furniss.

The organization provides the venison to food banks that have a lack of meat donations and since 1991 has generated 3.7 million pounds of venison, which Newell-Furniss said is enough to equal 14.9 million quarter-pound servings.

“Hunters are being very, very generous in bringing in deer,” said Newell-Furniss. “We are utilizing a natural resource in the deer herd.”

Deer kills this past year (percentage of female deer)
Bedford 10,011 (54.8)
Amherst 3,243 (43.8)
Appomattox 1,431 (41.5)
Campbell 2,241 (41.6)
Nelson 2,589 (40.4)
-Source: DGIF, 2008/2009