"I'm not really sure what's going on in District 3, which includes Wake Halifax and Northampton counties," Stanford said. "The harvest in District 3 was on par with all the other districts in 2006-08. But the District 3 harvest increase was several percentage points lower than in the surrounding districts for the 2007-08 season. Now for the 2008-09, season it has jumped again."

District 3 has always had a substantially higher harvest than other districts. It has excellent deer habitat and high hunter effort. Therefore, what happens in District 3 will always have substantial bearing on the statewide deer harvest. Watching that particular district may prove to hold the key to predicting statewide deer harvest trends.

The 2008-09 game land harvest was virtually unchanged, with 6,843 deer compared with 6,845 in 2007-08.

Each district's game land harvest as a percentage of the district's total harvest was as follows: 4.3 percent in District 1, 4.0 percent in District 2, 3.0 percent in District 3, 3.7 percent in District 4, 4.4 percent in District 5, 4.0 percent in District 6, 0.9 percent in District 7, 4.3 percent in District 8, and 23.9 percent in District 9.

In 2007, there was an outbreak of hemorrhagic disease in the western part of the state, causing harvests in districts 8 and 9 to suffer. The deer population's recovery from hemorrhagic disease probably led to a substantial increase in the mountain regions' game lands deer harvest in 2008-09. Nevertheless, these districts have been historically erratic in terms of deer harvest. The deer population density in these districts is also typically much lower than in some other parts of the state, so these districts do not contribute significantly to the statewide harvest.

By far the preponderance of the harvest came from the modern firearms season, during which 148,929 deer -- 84.4 percent of the total harvest -- were killed. The total deer harvest taken by muzzleloader hunters was 15,076, or 8.6 percent of the total. The deer harvest taken by bowhunters was 12,292, or 7.0 percent of the total. These trends in the harvest percentages by weapon have essentially stayed the same during all years in which harvest records have been kept.

But there was an interesting jump in the percentage of bowhunter harvest of nearly 1 percent. Time will tell if increased bowhunter harvest becomes a trend.

The antlerless deer harvest of 91,246, including 13,359 button bucks and 77,887 does, exceeded the antlered buck harvest of 85,051. The antlered buck harvest last season was an increase from the 83,665 antlered bucks killed during 2007-08, but not quite to the level of 85,458 taken during 2006-07. A decline in antlered buck harvest and increase in antlerless deer harvest held true for a second season and is a significant departure when compared with all previous years.

In the past, antlerless deer consisted of approximately 40 percent of the harvest. But in 2007-08, antlerless deer comprised 51.3 percent of the harvest and in 2008-09, comprised 51.8 percent of the harvest. A small percentage of the increase may be because of the use of bonus antlerless harvest report cards, which may have resulted in some people reporting antlerless deer harvests that were unreported in the past.

"We've been trying through regulations and rules changes to increase doe harvest to control our deer populations," Stanford said. "With two consecutive years of higher harvests, we are optimistic that these trends in doe harvests will remain high over the long term.