For North Carolina hunters who don't have access to private land and aren't thrilled with the idea of braving the crowds on game lands, there is a third category of hunts that basically provide the best of both worlds -- semi-public access to good land and deer management that's closer to what you'd expect from private lands.

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission holds dozens of permit-only hunts on public lands around the state, and other government agencies -- the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Army, for example -- open up their acres on an annual basis to allow hunters some top-drawer hunts.

Hunters send in applications and a small handling fee, and if they're drawn, they get access to land that's not heavily hunted, land where their chances at a quality hunt are better than on wide-open public land.

The biologists who manage the land -- either for the state or federal government -- come up with a certain number of permits they issue, based on the number of hunters that an area can handle at one time, factored into an equation that includes the number of deer that need to be harvested to keep the herd in a healthy state, plus the quality of the habitat.

Scott Osborne, Scott Bebb and J.D. Bricker are three who have to crunch numbers every year and make sure that everything is in order for the hunts that take place on the lands that are in their charge.

Osborne recently retired as the big-game project leader for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission; Bebb is the assistant wildlife biologist at Fort Bragg, and Bricker is the refuge manager on the Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge.

The commission runs 146 permit-only hunts on 10 different game lands or other pieces of property every fall. Fort Bragg opens up large portions of its 140,000 acres every year for hunters who buy daily permits and hunt in tightly controlled areas. And the Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge conducts four three-day, permit-only deer hunts, in addition to a couple of one-day hunts for youth and handicapped hunters.

Commission field-staff members sit down every year to look at the game-lands areas where permit-only hunts are scheduled. According to Osborne, they take into account the acreage involved, the number of hunts, and the number of hunters that is most desirable.

"You try to see what kind of harvest you want and what the population can accommodate and the number of hunters you can take," Osborne said. "You don't want to have too many people in the woods to where they're stepping on everybody else's feet.

"The field staff will sit down and discuss the size of the game lands and what number of hunters it can accommodate. You start out on the conservative side, and as you go through several hunts, you get an idea of the participation so you can change or modify the numbers. You sit down and talk about what your objectives are and what you want to accomplish. Do you want to keep the harvest the same or have it go up or down?

"The number of hunters you can have will vary from place to place. Some of your bigger game lands can not only accommodate a greater overall number of hunters, but greater hunter density.