Burke County, in eastern Georgia's DMU 7, yielded two big-racked bucks. And Morgan County has accounted for many wallhangers in the past, and did so again this year, providing two bucks that won the non-typical firearms and non-typical archery categories. Both of the Morgan County whitetails were taken on the same farm by hunters from a single family! Lamar Banks took the highest-scoring rack, a 185 7/8 nontypical rifle-killed buck, while his son, Loy, arrowed a 171 6/8 P&Y non-typical.

The Banks family intensively manages their 3,000-acre farm with a view to fostering deer of quality. Supplemental feeding, food plots, conscientious doe harvest, and a policy of shooting only mature bucks have combined to render this Morgan County property a prime producer of whopper whitetails, surrendering several wallhangers every season. In fact, the other son in the family, Jeff, bagged the No. 1 firearms typical in Georgia during the 2001-02 season on the farm.

Another recent hotspot: the metro Atlanta area. Despite its extremely high human population and dearth of forested acres, it still gives up several creditable bucks every year.

The success is due in part to the limitation of hunting to archery only here. With no hunters using scoped rifles, the deer harvest is typically lower, bows and arrows having limited range. More bucks live longer and get to grow bigger racks in the scattered woodlots.

In the 2004-05 season, the largest archery kill in the state came out of DeKalb County, where Taylor McCann took a 174 7/8-point buck in 2004. In fact, Fulton County leads the state in Pope & Young bucks. In 2005, two P&Y bow bucks taken in Fulton qualified for the Big Deer Contest -- Phil Lewis' 137 3/8 and Shane Petsch's 129 3/8.

On the western edge of Georgia, Harris and Meriwether counties are known for serving up a substantial number of high-quality deer. The former is responsible for several Boone and Crockett and Pope & Young heads that've made the cut for those organizations' all-time record books over the years. Last year, archer Larry Garner Jr. bagged a 137 2/8-inch Harris County beast -- his fourth P&Y record-book buck.

In addition to the Big Deer Contest, another indicator of buck quality is the harvest data collected at hunts at wildlife management areas. The WRD collects detailed information from deer killed at WMAs and analyzes the numbers.

Trophy bucks haunt most WMAs, and many are taken every year. However, several such tracts are designated as Quality Buck areas in which only does or trophy bucks may be harvested. In most cases, these WMAs feature prime habitat amid which small young bucks are allowed to age to the stage of life that sees the sprouting of impressive racks.

The harvest data from these WMAs also reveal the size, health, and potential of the bucks in the surrounding region. There are nine Quality Buck WMAs: two in North Georgia, four in the west-central region, and three in the upper coastal plain or Piedmont. The two in North Georgia are Dawson Forest and Dukes Creek, at which 99 and 15 deer, respectively, were slain last season, 18 and four of those being "quality" bucks, which averages to 0.5 and 0.6 "quality" bucks harvested per square mile. Not surprisingly, the mountains in which these WMAs lie aren't known for large quantities of giant bucks, but there are some.