Canis lupus hominis

In West Virginia, this is a week of great significance.

Although the rest of the country experiences the Thanksgiving holiday at the end of this week, rural West Virginia begins its yearly ritual on the Monday of this week.

Of course, I am talking about the beginning of the modern firearms season for antlered deer. This holiday has always eclipsed Thanksgiving. Because we always got the whole week off from school, most school children and nearly all adults from this part of the state call this break “Deer Season.”  Thanksgiving is an afterthought. Deer hunting is far more important.

In the halcyon days of the Northeast Ohio industrial economy, many people from West Virginia  wandered up “Route 21″ (now I-77) to the land of high wage union jobs. With that disposable income and good vacation times from their jobs, they would return home for Deer Season. I remember those years when the small rural county where I grew up would virtually double its population on the weekend before the first bucks could be legally shot.

In that one week, these urban workers got a chance to reconnect with their rural pasts, meet again with old friends, and shoot guns.

Many people would join hunt clubs that set up “primitive” hunting cabins, where the bullshit and booze tended to flow rather freely. Some people were always more interested in “beer hunting.” The song may have been The Second Week of Deer Camp, but for some sportsmen, it was more likely the Second Day or maybe the Second Hour.

Those days of large hunt clubs have mostly passed. The industrial economy has faded away.  The incomes that once sustained the deer camp ritual have gone. The deer are now so numerous that they can be shot off the front porch (albeit illegally).

But I’m sure that in those remaining deer camps, the traditions are still going strong. Maybe someone will actually get that Thirty Point Buck.  (I promise this will be the last cheesy deer hunting song! The deer in that video have far bigger antlers than any I’ve ever seen!)

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Virtually every small business around here caters to deer hunters. I checked out the weekly paper, I saw a big full page ad with a list of all the official game checking stations, as well as the businesses that were offering deer hunter specials.

I laughed when I saw the two photos of cervids that were posted at the top of the ad.  Neither species could be shot in the county. In fact, they couldn’t even be shot illegally.

On the left hand side was a photo of three mule deer, one of which had its twisty, black-tipped tail raised. There have never been any mule deer in West Virginia. The other was that deer from the genus Cervus that we call elk. Those once ranged here, and they could potentially move up from Eastern Kentucky, where a healthy population of these animals now exists all the way up to the West Virginia border. Of course, we’re a long way from Kentucky, and I doubt those big deer are going to make their way up here any time soon.

Although you may have not been able to shoot an elk, you could eat an elk burger. That’s because on Saturday night, the local cafe had a big game special on which you could have an elk or bison burger with steak fries.

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The internet daily news report for my county will have the opening day kill totals from the checking stations. I will update this post with a link to the report.

With a poor mast this year, it is likely that a lot of deer will be killed. The deer will be out in the open foraging, simply because there are not enough acorns and other nuts to feed them all.

For many locals, venison will be the main protein source for this winter. This will be particularly true with this bad economy.

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As noted earlier, Deer Season tends to eclipse Thanksgiving.

On that day, the hunters typically go out in the morning, and then return home around noon. They then wash-up for dinner and settle in front of the TV for the Thanksgiving football games.

By the weekend, the guns start to draw silent. Only those truly die-hard hunters who have yet to kill their limit go into the woods.

Because Sunday hunting was voted down in a referendum, Deer Season week is usually done by Saturday evening. Buck season with modern firearms lasts another week,  but because it doesn’t coincide with a federal holiday, the number of hunters in the woods is but a mere fraction of what it was on opening day.

I hope that I haven’t bored you with this little account of a rural American custom that is slowly disappearing.  There are better states to hunt deer than West Virginia, and so we really don’t get the big trophy hunters coming here. And West Virginia’s population continues to get smaller, and the collapse of the Midwestern industrial economy means that large numbers of West Virginia transplants won’t be coming down the interstate to blast a few bucks.

The deer have no significant predators here other than people. Bears and coyotes might take the odd deer, but they do very little to reduce deer numbers. Even with the presence of coyotes, we now have more deer per square mile than we have ever had.

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Having such large numbers of deer is a relatively recent phenomenon.

In the old days, those people who lived in the Allegheny Plateau and Ohio Valley regions of West Virginia had to travel into the High Alleghenies to find deer that they could legally shoot. This part of the state is associated with spruce forests and bogs. This area gives one the impression that one is in the Canada or Maine. Only the trademark dense thickets of Rhododendron that grow on the mountainsides give the location away.

Centuries of unregulated hunting and then market hunting had reduced the population of white-tails significantly. The only parts of their range where they were able to survive was in the high mountains.  The Alleghenies had largest populations of white-tails in the East. It is partially from these deer that the other parts of the East were restocked with white-tails.

So if the deer are eating your flowers in parts of the the East or Midwest, you can partly blame West Virginia for your troubles.

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Here’s a really good analysis of what deer season means to this part of West Virginia.

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Update: The first day totals from my home county. Does can be taken during this season, but far fewer of them are usually checked in.  Only one human fatality statewide– a heart attack  (more common than you’d think, because going up and down steep hillsides and then dragging 100-plus pound deer can stress the body a bit too much).

Another guy fell out of a tree stand but survived.

No ATV accidents or accidental shootings (which are quite a bit more rare, because most deer aren’t wearing hunter orange!)