ORIGINAL: jf5

Whitetails:
A Deer Season To Remember
It is all about habitat
By Wayne Laroche
I am expecting the deer season of 2006 to be “THE deer season to remember.” There will be more “racked” bucks in the field this year than in any year in my memory.
Oh yes, deer numbers will vary around the state. What’s new about that? When I was a boy, there were no deer to speak of in Franklin County where I grew up. Nobody griped about it then because there hadn’t been any deer in Franklin County for the previous hundred years. On the other hand, there were a ton of deer in the southern half of the state. That situation is now reversed.
It was all about habitat then. It is all about habitat now! Most of all, it is about winter deer yards. You will be hearing a lot more about deer yards in the coming year. We need to know how much winter deer habitat exists today. We need to know how good it is, and we need to know where we are losing it and gaining it. We need to manage so that we can avoid “boom and bust” deer populations.
I plan to head the Fish and Wildlife Department into a comprehensive deer yard assessment next year. Once we get an inventory of the current condition, we will be better prepared to decide how best to manage deer and deer habitat in Vermont.
I have high hopes for the deer seasons of 2006. The commissioner’s job does not let me spend as much time in the field as I would like. Still, in the little time that I have had this fall, I have seen more “racked bucks” than I have ever seen during any fall in my life time. Deer numbers seem to be up in most parts of the state. Last winter helped by being very mild.
More deer is good for the hunting opportunity this year. But, we have to be careful. Too many deer will be bad for future deer hunting if we fail to balance deer numbers with enough winter deer habitat to handle them without destroying it during bad winters. We only issued 8,915 antlerless permits for 2006 out of the 9,150 that were available. Only six years ago in 2000, the Department issued 20,673 antlerless permits. That means that more than 10,000 hunters didn’t apply for a permit this year.
Why are hunters not applying when most people are seeing more deer? The word that I hear at gun shops and country stores is that hunters are not applying for antlerless permits because of the two deer limit. They don’t want to invest in three tags if they only have a chance of getting two deer.
This year we did not have enough antlerless permit applicants in WMU A, F1 and Q. Land posting in these areas may also be contributing to our inability to issue permits. We will need to talk about land posting. We will also need to talk about getting the three deer limit back.
We need the tools necessary to manage the deer herd for both quantity and quality. We may also want to adjust the buck:doe ratio further in favor of bucks. This could both increase the legal buck population and help prevent major fluctuations in deer numbers.
I plan on spending some time at check stations in November. I hope to see you there with the best buck of your life. I hope that you have a deer season to remember for years to come. Good luck.
Wayne Laroche is Commissioner of the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department.