Archive for February, 2009

Bowhunters clash with NRA over So. W.Va. deer hunting

Friday, February 20, 2009

Meetings of the West Virginia Natural Resources Commission are usually rather sedate affairs. Boring, in fact.

The standard meeting goes somthing like this: Representatives of hunting- and fishing-related groups step up to a microphone and comment on the state’s hunting and fishing regulations. Commissioners then solicit input from the pertinent Division of Natural Resources employees, and — armed with all that information — set future regulations accordingly.

Necessary, but boring.

The commission’s most recent meeting generated quite a bit more excitement.

Officials at the National Rifle Association, apparently at the behest of some of the organization’s Mountain State members, sent out postcards advocating a gun season for deer in four West Virginia counties currently closed to firearm hunting. The postcards instructed members who wanted firearm hunting in Logan, McDowell, Mingo and Wyoming counties to forward the cards to DNR Director Frank Jezioro.

Bowhunters in the southern counties went ballistic. They’d had those counties all to themselves since 1979 and had reaped considerable benefit from the arrangement. Unmolested by firearms, the area had developed a reputation for producing record-breaking bucks.

The bowhunters not only got mad, they got organized. They chartered a bus to carry them from Beckley to the commission meeting in Flatwoods. Their numbers swelled the meeting from the usual two to three dozen attendees to nearly 200. At one point in the meeting, 152 bowhunters stood to oppose the idea of a firearm season.

Interestingly, no one from the NRA showed up to defend the idea. Jezioro held aloft the 263 postcards he’d been sent and told the crowd he’d return them to the NRA “because [the NRA] chose to work outside the usual system for setting hunting and fishing regulations.”

A couple of days after the meeting, an NRA spokesman said the bowhunters “overreacted” because the postcards were simply meant to gauge hunters’ opinions on a firearm season.

Overreaction or not, the set-to injected a bit of excitement into an otherwise dull meeting of bureaucrats and policy makers.

Posted in Hunting, West Virginia, WV DNR | No Comments »

As W.Va. bears move west, can they be controlled?

Monday, February 9, 2009

Now that West Virginia’s black bears have filled their ecological niche in the state’s eastern and southwestern counties, their next frontier appears to be the counties between Interstate 79 and the Ohio River.

“Any time you get animals migrating into areas they haven’t historically inhabited, you generally see their numbers expand dramatically,” says Curtis Taylor, wildlife chief for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. “We think that’s going to happen in the western counties sometime in the foreseeable future.”

Problem is, bears tend to increase in number until they start causing problems for humans. Wildlife officials usually try to minimize those problems by encouraging hunters to kill more bears. Problem is, land ownership patterns in West Virginia’s western counties won’t allow the style of hunting that has proven most effective.

Taylor believes the western counties lack the large tracts of land necessary for bear hunting with dogs. “Most tracts in those counties are 100 acres or less,” he says. “There’s no way you can turn a pack of dogs loose without causing problems with [neighboring] landowners.”

Hunters who use dogs have much more room to roam in the eastern counties, where the Monongahela National Forest provides nearly a million acres of public hunting land. Most of the land in Southern West Virginia is privately owned, but most of the coal and timber companies that own it allow hunters to roam freely.

Taylor knows that won’t be the case in the western counties, and he believes DNR officials will have to get creative to keep bears from becoming overpopulated.

“We’ll have to manage bear numbers in the western counties through expanded gun hunts, bow hunts, buck-season hunts and things like that,” he says.

Posted in Hunting, West Virginia, Wildlife | No Comments »

There’s a saying, “You can’t eat antlers…”

Monday, February 9, 2009

Bowhunter Chris Parsons has to wonder whether his glass is half full or half empty.

On the half-full side, he did manage to bag two Pope and Young-class bucks during the recently concluded West Virginia archery season.

On the half-empty side, he didn’t get a single scrap of venison from either deer. One got eaten by coyotes, the other by bears. Sunday’s Gazette-Mail column has the full story.

Posted in Hunting, West Virginia | No Comments »