Deer gun season will get off to shivery start Preparing to fire
Weather forecasters are calling for a midwinter-type chill the next few days before temperatures climb toward the norm and rain spritzes late in the week.
For those who live inside walls, Monday’s cold wind followed by yet another November chill will be not a big deal, possibly until the heating bill arrives. On other hand, tens of thousands of deer hunters outdoors in pursuit or in a perch during this upcoming gun week, which runs Monday through next Sunday, are likely to feel differently from the bulk of their neighbors about frozen mornings and highs in the 30s.
Some hunters will revel in the bracing weather. Many will feel at least mildly pleased about the natural refrigeration that preserves the delicate venison without so urgent a need, as can occur during warmer spells, to get it pronto into cold storage.
During the seven-day hunt, some 70,000 or so whitetails will be transformed from the rank of eating creatures to the store of the eaten, or soon-to-be eaten. Venison enters the human food bank as roasts, chops, stewing bits and ground meat that nutritional studies suggest is healthier than grain-fed cattle cuts. Such studies must exempt, but should never overlook, the sausage and the jerky.
Wild venison is lean, meaning that for some culinary uses fat needs to be added. Additionally, meat from wild deer contains no residues of antibiotics or of any other additive besides those contained in acorns, corn, beans, hostas, dogwood leaves and the like. Of course, the corn and beans might have been genetically altered, but why go there and ruin a frontier fantasy?
The statewide gun season a year ago yielded 72,509 deer, a tad above the Maurice Craft of Glen Burnie, Md., readies his bow and arrows as he sits in his tree stand during a controlled deer hunt at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Refuge in Laurel, Md., about 25 miles southwest of Baltimore.
three-year average. Times when as many as 100,000 whitetails were checked in Ohio during gun week are growing more distant and less likely to happen as they did only a decade or so ago.
The reasons are multiple. Deer are more widespread across the landscape than a generation ago, allowing hunters to stay closer to home and hunt during a lengthy archery season that starts in September. That factor alone reduced the need to travel to deer-saturated parts of the state in order to take advantage of the window that gun week provides.
Ohio’s legalization of the crossbow helped push archery hunting to the point that the number of deer killed with crossbows, compound bows and traditional bows during a hunting year exceeds the number of whitetails taken during gun week. Fifteen years ago, bow hunters accounted for only about one-fourth of the whitetails taken in the state during the four-month season.
Numbers checked during the combined archery and gun seasons have declined considerably in recent years. The drop-off has occurred in part as a result of efforts by the Ohio Division of Wildlife to shrink the whitetail population in counties where their numbers were deemed too high to maintain robust deer, and to
keep agricultural damage at a tolerable level.
Nonetheless, counties with a history of producing deer continue to lead during gun week. A year ago those familiar counties included Coshocton, Tuscarawas, Muskingum, Ashtabula and Guernsey. In central Ohio, Licking is among the most productive counties in the state each year for deer hunters.
Through early last week, hunters had checked 67,881 whitetails, 35,726 of them antlered, since late September. A year ago at the same point of the season, the total stood at 67,291, some 34,930 antlered.
In a twist designed to increase herd sizes on some public areas, hunters may take only a single antlerless deer during the hunting year on most public land. After gun week, only antlered whitetails may be taken on most public hunting areas for the rest of the deer season that runs through Feb. 3, 2019.
Favored by decent weather for a change, youngsters age 17 and younger checked 6,563 whitetails statewide last weekend during the two-day youth gun hunt. That represented an increase of 1,605, or 32.4 percent, from the 4,958 taken in 2017.