Big Buck Harvest down This Season
Another Lone Star State whitetail deer season has reached its end in North Texas, while the season is heading towards the finish line in the Brush Country of South Texas.
And so far, the 2006-2007 deer season confirms that long-standing drought conditions doesn’t help the business of taxidermists when it comes to mounting big trophy whitetail bucks.
“Oh yeah, our entries are way down this year across the state,” said David Brimager, assistant vice president of operations for the Texas Wildlife Association and the director of the Texas Big Game Awards program (http://www.texasbiggameawards.com ), now in its 15th year.
“Now granted we have score sheets still coming in every day, but in general, across the state, I’d say that entries are going to be down,” Brimager added, noting that this season’s entry deadline for TBGA is March 15th.
But while overall entries are down, that doesn’t mean that hunters have found the state void of big deer. Hardly since some areas had better precipitation trends in 2006 than others did and because many ranches in Texas now intensively manage whitetails. “These are unofficial scores at this point, but the largest buck that I would know of so far is a Kerr County deer that nets 248 1/8 inches non-typical, taken by Norman Huddleston,” Brimager said. “After that, the biggest non-typical deer I would have would be the Keith Chassin deer from Webb County which scores 207 1/8 net.”The Big Game Awards aren’t the only game in town. Huddleston and Chassin currently lead their respective categories in both the Texas Gulf Coast Deer Competition and the Los Cazadores Deer Contest with only a few weeks remaining.
“On the typical side, Steven Zieschang took a big typical eight while hunting in Maverick County,” Brimager added. “That deer scores 179 5/8 inches net.”
When asked if there were any surprising areas, Brimager had an answer.“Out in West Texas, the Trans Pecos has probably had the most rain they have had in 10 years, so the antelope and mule deer and whitetails coming in from out that way have been extremely healthy,” he said.
Brimager should know, having harvested a big pronghorn antelope in Hudspeth County that currently and unofficially ranks as the state’s second best antelope entry with a net score of 82 6/8 inches.
Clayton Wolf, big game program director for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, agrees with Brimager that the 2006-2007 deer season has been down.
But already, he is hopeful for next season since some areas of the state have received beneficial rains this fall and winter.
“I do think unless we get hammered with low precipitation in the spring months, we’re set up better this year than last year,” Wolf said. “In many places, there are green forbs starting to come up and we didn’t have that last year.”
