Photo by Charles R. Brower III

Warm weather, three hurricanes and a whole bunch of acorns did not do any favors for deer hunters during the 2004-05 hunting season. Still, what was bad news for hunters last year is great news for sportsmen this year, as wildlife managers expect the deer that were not harvested last fall to be there and be bigger this season.

Georgia's 2005-06 deer hunting season opens Oct. 22 and hunters will be flocking to the woods trying to emulate the success achieved during the record-setting 2003-04 season. The action runs through Jan. 1 in the Northern Zone, but sportsmen in the Southern Zone may continue hunting through Jan. 15, 2006. Like last year, there is a 12-deer limit, only two of which may be antlered and one of which must have at least four points on one side.

An added bonus for metro-Atlanta area hunters is the addition of an extended archery season for Clayton, Cobb, Dekalb, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett and Rockdale counties. These seven counties will be open to either-sex deer hunting with archery equipment only from Jan. 2-15, 2006.

The 2004-05 deer season was a pretty rough one all the way around, according to Kent Kammermeyer, senior wildlife biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division and chair of the Statewide Deer Committee.

"There were so many acorns on the ground that the deer didn't use food plots like they usually do," he said. "Hunters were slow to change their habits of hunting near food plots and this resulted in fewer deer being harvested."

Kammermeyer anticipated last year's kill to be lower than the record 484,000 deer harvested during the 2003-04 season.

The WRD took a lot of criticism at public hearings and other venues for the perceived poor harvest of last season, Kammermeyer pointed out. Hunters said they saw and harvested less deer and they attributed this to over-harvest of does in previous years. However, when results came in from last year's WMA harvest, where doe harvest regulations have been the same for many years, harvest rates were also down 15 to 20 percent over the previous year, the same percentage as on private lands.

"It points to the universal factor of a huge crop of acorns, no food plot use and depressed deer movement," Kammermeyer offered.

All this also had a huge impact on the rut, causing it to come and go without a whole lot of pizzazz. Even if there had not been so many acorns on the ground for the deer to eat, the lack of cold fronts moving through the state in November did not help keep the deer from being active. Cold weather finally arrived in December, but it was too little and too late.

However, despite the difficulties of last year, Kammermeyer predicts a better season in 2005.

"The deer are out there," he emphasized. "The ones that weren't harvested last fall are stockpiled for this coming season. I can stand here and say with confidence that I think the season will come in like gang-busters this fall."

Last year's mast crop is also a good indicator of the quality of this season.