It’s the week of deer season in West Virginia. Opening day is today.
It’s s actually been deer season for a long time, but this is the one week out of the year in which one can shoot antlered deer with modern firearms.
We call it “buck season.”
I grew up in really rural West Virginia, and we used to get the whole week off. Supposedly, we got the whole week because Thanksgiving fell on the Thursday of that week, but that day was just incidental. We never called it “Thanksgiving break.” We called it “Deer Season.”
The reason why these rural districts allow a whole week for Thanksgiving and deer season is really simple: Attendance rates will be way down.
However, I don’t know if this same situation exists today. Very few people hunt– even in rural West Virginia.
At one time, a lot of hunting tourist would show up every year. Many of them had good union jobs “up in Ohio,” but because their roots were in the hills of West Virginia, they would come back every year to venture into the bleak November woods to gun for a hillbilly buck.
But deer are bigger in nearby Ohio, which has a season not long after West Virginia. Most of those jobs aren’t there anymore, and people have moved to the Sun Belt– a long distance from the little deer camps in the hills.
One thing West Virginia did have over a lot of other areas was a very high density of deer.
Not this year. The past winter was very hard, and last fall’s mast crop was very poor. Lots of deer starved during the winter.
This year’s mast was almost over-productive, and the deer can stay deep in the woods around choice oak and hickory trees.
That means the hunting will not be as easy as it was in the past.
And people would rather hunting be easy, especially if they haven’t spent weeks scouting out where the big bucks have been hanging out.
But seven with all of these factors, there will be enough hunters in the woods this week to make things interesting for the deer. Of course, most just go out the first day, and if they get nothing, then the game turns from deer hunting to beer hunting– as is so immortalized in this song by Da Yoopers:
among my most-vivid memories of deer season:
being very careful NOT to go into the woods – normally my second-home –
and having some pi**ed-off hunters TURN LOOSE our livestock one year, during deer-season… their footprints were clearly visible, where they opened the gate and drove the stock out, chasing them for good measure to scatter them —
they were angry because we had signed-off all our property with “No Trespassing” signs after a 22-caliber came thru the kitchen window during small-game season [when no one was home, luckily].
we spent 2-weeks gathering 3 to 4 sheep up, here and there, to reassemble our flock of 2-dozen – it was H***, especially as it rained for 4 days at one point, and the sheep were chilled and hungry.
tramping thru waist-high soggy brush, or lifting 5# boots plastered with clay as we walked thru stubble-covered corn fields.
when i turned 16-YO, i went hunting myself.
Some people are just assholes.
they were so angry because our parents bought the place from a couple in their 80s or 90s; they had been hunting it for 20 or 30 years, since the old-man quit.
they treated it like their own property, threw down cig-butts and cans [peaches, etc], came on it daylight or dark, very careless about WHICH WAY they shot.
so i was glad to have the property signed-off after 3 years of rude and dangerous behavior; but we made some enemies.
:—-(
People tend to think they own whatever they can tread on. Sometimes that even means you.
Glad you got the sign off on your property. We often have to post on our property or we would come out and be greeted by a tree stand in our own backyard.
We don’t mind the hunters, we just appreciate that they let us know where they are and when we need to keep the dogs in for a bit. Fortunately, the farmers in my area love our dogs. Know our dogs and often will just call us to say hunting season is open….
Missed a big buck out back this morning,
Bad case of buck fever.
Hunters are a fun breed of people.
Not knocking it AT ALL – I’m a huge fan of free venison, and antlers (hint-hint)
I’ll see what I can do :)