I've lived in Berkeley Co ALL my life, and there'squite a few BIG RACKED bucks on the remaining farms, and living near the Interstae.(I saw a 10 pointer 50 ft from I-81 chasing a doe during the 2nd week. Hunting on 1500 ac, you have the deer there(Jefferson/Berkeley/Morgan have remained somewhat steady in the harvests).. and I can't imagine the herd being as pitiful as you described. Like I said, there isn't too much of the 3 counties that I HAVEN'T hunted.... you obviously missed about the 12 pointer killed outside Shepherdstown...my future son-in-laws' grandfather owns 3 farms off of Rt #45... deer aplenty... nice bucks too...just remember tha deer are adapting to living in the ever increasing developments, where hunting isn't allowed.Home sites are the new "thickets" for the game... but the deer are still here,you just have to stop the low-livesthat arepoaching the deer...and there's plenty of those to go around, from what the landowners(mostly farmers/orchardist)are telling me.

yep... less deer means less sign... which in my opinion... is wonderful. Now we're seeing NICE bucks... and NOT 1000 does...and so what if you don't see a gazillion deer in a day on the stand... it's quality, or quantity... can't have both...and I'll take quality everytime.

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not neccessarily........ the bigger bucks arent here like had been up til 3 years ago...... i used to see atleast 5-6 different bucks per week on the farm during buck season..... and they ranged between 6-12 pointers with plenty of good active rubs and scrapes

last year one 6 point was seen.....the year before was a spike and this year was a 4 point and another with an unkown total

i jsut hope we go to a 1 buck limit.....

i did hear a rumor that they were going to a 2 buck limit

It's hard to discern what those harvest numbers truly mean. Whatever it is, It's hard to believe it can be linked to any kind of optimistic overview of the current deer situation in the mountain state.

Where I hunted in Hardy county, there seemed to be a decline in quantity and quality of bucks. I let a couple of scrags walk but overall there were only a couple of bucks taken on our 300 acres (they were all 3, scrubs). Most of us that hunt that property try to practice control on shooting small bucks but some still have that good ol'attitude (any buck is better than no buck). Generally speaking, this season has been somewhat disappointing as far as word of mouth reports I've gotten from many I know and my own observations. I did see a nice buck or two where I hunted in Jefferson Co. during archery season and am gonna hunt the last 2 days of muzzleloader.

Back to the harvest numbers.I believe many hunters in WV don't practice QDM (i'm not complaining(i'll save that for another post) just stating my opinion), therefore I would be willing to say that even though the buck harvest numbers have went way, waydown overall in the last 5 years the quality has not significantly improved either. so then, what does that say. nothing good to me. I agree that more strict limits should be imposed for bucks and I also believe antler restrictions would be great. Perhaps we are reaping the seeds of the outlandish bag limits of recent years. hopefully it will turn around. we killed two coyotes the first day. and although there were some beautiful days during rifle season-the overall weather was poor I thought --wind was a b_tch.

You're right about the wind, Hillbilly.

Was everybody else seeing LESS hunters? Like I said, we saw less than ever. That stirs the deer less.

We practice QDM to a point. We have 2 hunters that are in their mid 70's and they are of the old mindset that a buck is a buck. It's my farm, but I don't mind if they take a couple small bucks out each year.

We are still split on the spike thing. I shoot all "long" spikes that I see. If I see a 6" spike, it's safe. When I see 8-10" spikes, I usually take them because from my experience of aging deer, they are older than 1.5 most of the time.

Any other opinions on that?

I let all spikes walk, especially since I haven't seen any that may be old deer.

I have some friends who have huntedon the national forest near Wardensville for probably two decades. They had the worst year ever up there, seeing few deer and only getting scrub bucks.

Liberal doe seasons are nice to help drive down overall deer numbers, but we need restrictions on bucks too if we want them to survive a few years and grow!

i've heard from a few people this week that we are going to a 2 buck total limit next year!!!........

anyone else heard this?....i hope its true

Me too. Heck, I'd love to see a one week rifle season and ONE buck limit, all weapons. Seems there's too many days to kill deer with guns nowadays.

Sounds like the same problem alot of Northern states are having. Pennsylvania, New York and now West Virginia all having serious concerns on deer numbers.