WV Buck Harvest Up Dramatically for 2011

The small 3-point I took this past Rifle Season.

By Chris Lawrence of WV Metro News - Outdoors

Biologists with the West Virginia DNR expected the 2011 buck season to be better than 2010, but nobody expected it to be this good. Preliminary harvest figures indicate West Virginia hunters killed 59,835 bucks during the two week season.

"The magnitude of the harvest increase certainly was a pleasant surprise," said DNR Game Management Chief Paul Johansen. "I personally didn't expect it to be that high."

The southern counties of West Virginia and the western counties saw the highest percentage increase over the totals from 2010, but Johansen said it didn't really matter where you looked everybody was killing more bucks this year.

"Those trends were apparently across all of our districts at least as reflected in the overall buck harvest," Johansen said. "It was pretty much a statewide phenomenon."

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