When Ohio University students return to campus to hit the books next week, hunters throughout the state will hit the forests for the start of deer-gun season.
Monday marks the beginning of Ohio’s seven-day deer hunting season for shotgun users, which is markedly shorter than other Midwest states. Indiana and Michigan both have 16-day seasons, while Kentucky’s season is either 10 or 16 days, depending on the location.
Nevertheless, almost 87,000 deer were harvested during Ohio’s deer-gun hunting season in 2012, about 2,000 of which were shot in Athens County — the 12th-highest county total in the state, according data from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
A lot of what makes Athens County a hotbed for hunters is the amount of public land available, especially at Wayne National Forest and Strouds Run State Park, said 62-year-old Larry Birchfield, who lives just south of Albany in rural Meigs County.
Birchfield, who’s been wielding a shotgun to hunt since he was 22, said he’s looking forward to the annual tradition of hunting on his private property along Raccoon Creek in Meigs County.
The area’s oak and hickory trees help sustain a large local deer population year to year, said Gary Chancey, spokesman for Wayne National Forest.
“We don’t appear to have any shortage of deer,” Chancey said.
For the last 40 years, Southeast Ohio’s hunting culture has remained fairly steadfast, Birchfield said, adding that the biggest changes have been the rising deer population and the disappearance of private lands.
Extending the deer-gun season in Ohio would help curb the number of pesky deer and keep drivers safe on rural roads, Birchfield said.
“For the amount of deer hit on the roads, you’d think they’d want to extend (the season),” he said.
But ODNR has kept the seven-day model in place since the officials experimented with a 14-day season in 1995, said Lindsay Rist, spokeswoman for the department’s Athens district.
List said she doesn’t see a need to expand the season anytime soon.
Regardless of the season’s relatively short nature, Rist said she anticipates some OU students will head out to hunt on public land the first week of December.
Ohio’s hunting industry is said to be worth about $800 million.
@SamuelHHoward
sh3355311@ohiou.edu
