Hunters across Virginia took a record 241,576 whitetail deer last season, even without including the late special archery and firearms season. This figure is up more than 7 percent from the 223,198 deer taken in the previous season. Biologists in Virginia were thrilled to see that for the first time on record the doe harvest outpaced the antlered buck harvest.

Photo by Bill Lea

Matt Knox, Deer Project manager for the VDGIF, commented on the doe harvest, saying, "Most of the increase in the deer kill was an increased doe kill, which was up 13 percent. There were no regulation changes. We have had mast failures increase doe kills before, but only in far western Virginia and the increased doe kill this year was across the board. I think nearly 40 of 98 counties had record doe kill levels."

The number of antlered bucks harvested was 109,275. Hunters also shot 22,808 button bucks (probably in most cases mistaking them for does), making a total of 132,083 bucks tagged. There were 109,493 does killed. The doe harvest accounted for 45.3 percent of the total harvest, while the total antlerless harvest was 54.8 percent.

Breaking the harvest down further, we found that crossbow hunters arrowed 8,594 deer, which was up from the 7,051 deer taken the previous season. It was interesting to see that the percentage of does arrowed (52.8 percent) with a crossbow exceeded the percentage of bucks. Archers took 17,433 deer, and of those, 54.6 percent were does. The combined archery kill (all archery tackle) was 26,027 deer, with 54 percent of them being does. Crossbow users accounted for 3.5 percent of the harvest, while archers arrowed 7.2 percent of the total harvest. The combined numbers show that archery hunters claimed 10.8 percent of the total harvest. Again, these figures do not include the late special seasons, which were not available at press time.

This past season, the muzzleloader harvest was 55,689 whitetails. Only 35.9 percent of the smokepole deer, however, were does. The muzzleloader harvest did increase 6.2 percent from the previous season, when the harvest was 52,216 whitetails. Shotgun hunters tagged 70,254 deer and 49.6 percent of that harvest consisted of does. Rifle hunters took down 88,763 deer, of which 45.3 percent were does. Finally, pistol or handgun hunters killed 340 deer, with 51.5 percent of them being does.

Each season when we run this forecast, we encourage readers to look at our accompanying chart showing the number of deer killed per square mile of habitat in counties across the state.

Of the top 20 counties on our list, 14 had also been on the list the year before. New counties this year were King and Queen (9.8), Giles (9.6), Orange (9.1), Powhatan (9.0), Madison (9.0) and Northumberland (9.0).

We took the time to examine the harvest from last season and get comments from the biologists in each region about the upcoming season.

TIDEWATER REGION
Tidewater hunters took 59,037 deer last year. This represents nearly an 8 percent increase in harvest over the previous season's total of 54,571 deer. There were 24,075 antlered bucks taken, 7,155 button bucks and 27,807 does.