Curtis Taylor with a gobbler he bagged during a recent spring hunt. Good brood success the last couple of years should bode well for hunters next season. Photo by John McCoy.

Editor's Note: Every year, West Virginia Game & Fish sits down with a leading West Virginia wildlife official to determine the state of the state's hunting resources. For this year's interview, outdoors writer John McCoy, of the Charleston Gazette, conducted a lengthy interview with Curtis Taylor, Wildlife Section chief for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR).

* * *

Game & Fish: No thorough discussion of West Virginia's wildlife could take place without talking about deer, so why don't we start there?

Taylor: Absolutely. That's the thing everyone wants to know about. We enjoyed an increase in our deer harvest last year; our hunters killed 145,577 deer, which was 6 percent more than they killed the previous year.

G&F: Why such an increase from one year to the other?

Taylor: I think the deer-management plan we've implemented is working; we're sticking pretty close to that. There are areas of the state where we propose to be liberal with our hunting seasons, and there are areas where we propose to be more conservative.

G&F: What do you base your management goals on?

Taylor: We base the management plan for each county on the number of deer, the environmental conditions and the sociological conditions that are present in that county.

G&F: So what are the numbers telling you? Are we looking at dramatic increases in the number of available deer anytime soon?

Taylor: I would say no. We've said for years that we had allowed the deer population to get too big in a lot of places, and we've made a concerted effort to bring that population down where it ought to be. The level we have now is not only good for the deer, it's also good for deer hunters.

G&F: Explain that, please.

Taylor: We've started to manage a few large wildlife management areas (WMAs) specifically for older-aged deer. We're tracking the harvest data on them to see if it's having the impact we anticipated, or if it's not.

G&F: What if it's successful? Are we going to see a move toward regulations that require deer to have a certain rack size before they're legal?