It's West Virginia north

Our farm is starting to look like West Virginia north.

Not West Virginia in the sense of multiple cars up on blocks with a couch and refrigerator on the front porch of our mobile home. No, our farm is being overrun with deer.

Yesterday, I counted 17 deer in our main hay pasture. Those were all does, too, mainly of breeding age. This warm winter has extended the breeding season so I'm sure every female deer has been bred...even last spring's fawns. In the early hunting season last year we had a rash of spotted beagle-sized deer - late season births to the previous year's fawns. That's combined with warm weather and a good crop of food in the woods to ensure a light winter kill, indicating we will have another bumper crop of births.

The warm, rainy weather depressed the state's 2005 deer kill, despite a huge population of animals. I killed my four deer limit, but took three of them at my father's farm, leaving the survivors at our farm to go forth and multiply. I could have killed 100 deer. Too many deer is bad for the environment and the herd - it results in weak deer and a forest with no undergrowth. In West Virginia, it got to the point where you could legally kill 7 deer a year, and the deer herd continued to increase.

It may be time for Ohio to consider liberalizing deer hunting harvest limits.