Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412140040
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: D-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
All hunting regulations are scheduled for review in the spring as the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries follows its format of making season and bag-limit changes every other year.
Regulations are scheduled to be proposed March 16-17, then come up for a final vote May 4-5 during meetings in Richmond. Before that, look for a series of public hearings across the state as game officials solicit the opinions and comments of sportsmen.
Even before those hearings, game officials should have a better idea than ever of what hunters are thinking. The game department, with assistance from George Mason University, has conducted a survey to measure such factors as hunters' effort, hunters' success and where they hunt.
``Tied to that, there were pages of hunter preferences for different seasons and hunter attitudes on a number of subjects,'' said David Steffen, a research biologist supervisor for the game department.
But hunters shouldn't expect to get everything they want.
``You are not going to be able to please everybody,'' said Matt Knox, the department's deer research biologist. ``There are 300,000 deer hunters out there, and if you were to ask every one to take out a piece of paper and tell how the season should be set - bag limits and everything - you would get 300,000 different answers.''
So what is the correct answer?
Knox, who will play a major role in shaping deer regulations, feels the current seasons are pretty much on target.
``I think we have a fairly equitable distribution of recreation users: archers, muzzleloaders and gun hunters,'' he said. ``They are going to quibble and squabble about the archers killing deer first and the muzzleloaders killing all of the big bucks, but I think when you look at it there is a good bow season, a good muzzleloading season and a good firearms season.''
Any tinkering with deer regulations, Knox predicted, would involve adjustments from time to time in the number of days of antlerless-deer hunting during the firearms season.
``If you use one thing as your steering wheel to determine where you want to go in deer management, you could use the either-sex days of the firearms' season,'' Knox said. ``That is going to control your deer population more than any one thing.''
Certain to get an airing is the addition of doe days in the far southwest section of the state, which is the last bastion of bucks-only hunting. There also may be a move to have the western firearms season lengthened from two to three weeks.
But when deer hunters get more days afield, other hunters often are impacted.
``Any time you start maneuvering the deer season you impact the squirrel hunters, the grouse hunters, the bear hunters,'' Knox said. ``All of these people have as much right to the resource as the deer hunters.''
Game officials hope the survey will provide hard data on how the two-week muzzleloading season has changed hunting habits.
Officials know the muzzleloading season is attracting record numbers of hunters. But are these hunters giving up days they would have devoted to the firearms season to tote a black-powder gun?
``That is going to be one of the good things about the survey,'' Steffen said. ``We are going to learn about hunting pressure and the changes in hunting pressure.''
by CNB