Photo by D. Robert Franz.

The official tally is complete and it's more good news for the state's hunters of white-tailed deer. North Carolina's hunters set a new harvest record last season, killing a total of 154,273 deer. Tar Heel hunters not only set a new record, they absolutely smashed it.

"We set a new record for deer harvest in 2005," said North Carolina Wildlife Commission deer biologist Even Stanford. "But we had been dancing all around the previous record set in 2001 for a few years until 2005 when the harvest was 144,315. It was kind of surprising when the new record was set in 2007 because it exceeded the 2006 number by about 7 percent."

The total Tar Heel hunter deer harvest in 2001 was 142,847 and set the state's all-time record at that time. In 2002, the harvest dipped to 118,174. In 2003, it increased to 134,507. In 2004, it rebounded even further to 140,311. The 2006 record included increased harvest over 2005 across all regions except for the far western mountain region.

In District 1, there was a 2.4 percent increase, Stanford said. In District 2, there was a 6.5 percent increase. Districts 3 and 4 had increases of 8 percent. District 5 was up 6 percent. District 6 was up 10.2 percent. District 7 was up 6.6 percent. District 8 was 10.8 percent. Although District 9 had a deer harvest that was down 1 percent, that essentially means no change in the total harvest for that district, since it has a low harvest and low population compared with the other regions of the state.

"Altogether, the statewide deer harvest was up 6.9 percent," Stanford said. "It was a surprise, although in the beginning of the season I thought it might be up a bit from the year before. By the end of Thanksgiving week last year, I knew it was going to be another record harvest."

Even the commission's game land harvest showed a bright picture -- in fact, the deer harvest from game lands showed a higher percentage increase than did the private lands across the state. The game land harvest was 6,845 in 2006, whereas in 2005 it was 5,976. That's a big increase, or about 15 percent over 2005.

Stanford said environmental factors, rather than a large growth in the deer population, probably drove the record statewide harvest. For example, excellent hunting conditions on a few key Saturdays in a deer season can increase harvest numbers whether there are more deer around or not. Nevertheless, the herd may be showing a slight increase.

"In most places, it's stable or increasing," Stanford said of the deer herd. "From 1995 until 2 or 3 years ago, our populations were relatively stable. But record harvests in recent years show it's likely to be increasing in some areas again. The trends are too early in the model to tell us exactly what's going on. But we will know better in a couple of years as we add more data to the model. The harvest data is the figure that essentially drives the model. We take a cross section of the age structure from our DMAP (Deer Management Assistance Program) and check station data and relate that directly to the rest of the herd. We take into consideration how many deer may die of other factors than hunting, automobile collisions for example."

Besides the possibility of an increasing herd adding to the harvest numbers because of greater availability to hunters, there have also been increases in season lengths that could have accounted for some of the record numbers in several of the wildlife districts. Other factors that led to record harvests in 2007 included good weather that allowed hunters across the state to actually participate, especially along the coast where there were minimal strikes from tropical events and a low incidence of midge activity or a low severity of the year's EHD strains.

Midges are the vectors that transmit EHD to deer, and the virulence of the EHD viruses in any given year can be more or less severe, depending also upon how much immunity the deer have developed to that particular strain. Like influenza and colds in humans, certain mutations in the genes of each season's EHD organisms are worse than others.

Stanford said some deer with sloughing hoofs indicative of EHD infection were found at the end of the 2006 season, but there was no observed mortality. There were six symptomatic deer seen in Onslow County, one in Richmond County and two in Catawba County.

"We need to watch out for EHD," he said. "It's reoccurring and there can be some residual immunity after an event. But the immunity goes away with time, so our deer could be again susceptible to it at some point."

Another factor in harvest was increased season lengths.

"We increased seasons in the central and western regions mainly because of hunter requests," Stanford said. "But we are really afraid of those areas losing benefits of the two-buck rule. There have been three season extensions over a four-year period. The two-buck rule was aimed at increasing antlered bucks and the number of older antlered bucks. But by lengthening the season, more people harvested two or more deer in those areas, but (that harvest) included more antlered bucks."