To renew an old acquaintance with Chestatee WMA, I visited with wildlife technician Frank Manning, who’s served as the area manager for Chestatee for the past 14 years. He provided and overview of the area during a recent visit.

The main roads on the WMA are in good shape, with plenty of gravel, and the gated secondary roads that are open for deer hunts looked good also. This tract, like most all WMAs in the mountains, is on national forest land, some of it in wilderness designation.

Totaling 68 acres are 41 official “wildlife openings” in which Manning has planted clover, oats, sorghum, clay peas and some corn on a three-year rotation, with about 20 acres reworked each year. When I saw these food plots in February, it was obvious that they had really been used by the deer, and their importance to the well-being of the herd was obvious.

Manning, who sees good bucks come off this area every year, talked about the positive effect the very rugged terrain has on the age-structure of the bucks. “There aren’t as many deer here in the mountains,” he said, “but a lot of those we do have reach real maturity.”

As we walked through a food plot checking, Manning picked up a fresh shed with a long main beam and 4 good points. “This one should still be around next fall,” he noted, “and even bigger.”

The western half of the mountain area encompasses not only a portion of the Blue Ridge Mountain physiographic region but the Ridge and Valley region in Georgia’s northwestern corner as well. This latter region is dominated by a series of parallel limestone ridges with a pine or oak/hickory mix for cover, depending on soil moisture. This area can be just as rugged and challenging to a hunter as the true mountains more to the east.

Wildlife biologist Adam Hammond, who oversees this section, is headquartered at the WRD office in Armuchee. In addition to being a biologist, Hammond is also an official scorer for the Boone and Crockett Club, and in that capacity measures a good many trophy bucks from the region. When it comes to what constitutes an upland trophy in Georgia, however, he didn’t cite the B&C scores he’s so familiar with.

“A trophy buck is only a trophy in terms of the quality of a hunter’s total experience,” he asserted, “the amount of effort he has put into the taking of the animal -- not just the score tallied up on the antlers.”

As he said this, I thought back to my first mountain buck that I told of at the beginning of this article, and nodded agreement.

One question that may come to mind is: Why are there fewer deer up here, with all this land, than in middle and South Georgia? “Basically,” Hammond said, “the soil overall is not as good, the food is more limited, and the habitat is just not as friendly to deer.” He went on to explain the effects of the acorn crop, the weather, and the lack of agriculture on the vast areas of government land in the mountains. “We don’t have as many deer, but we do have a better age structure in the mountains, thanks to the ruggedness and difficulty of access, than the non-quota public hunts farther south.”