On a recent chilly morning, Robbie Whitehead was getting ready for work when she heard a commotion outside.
When she looked out the window she expected to see her 11-month-old puppy, Oakley, chasing a squirrel. Instead, the frisky Aussiedoodle was face-to-face with a just-as-frisky young white-tailed buck deer, one of two in her backyard.
Pets and deer often come in contact in rural settings, but this was in Roanoke’s Raleigh Court neighborhood, far from the nearest large tract of woods or agricultural land.
“I rushed out there in a panic and tried to get the deer to run away,” said Whitehead, a pharmaceutical representative. “They just looked at me.”
Eventually the young bucks sauntered down the overgrown alley behind the home, leaving Whitehead shaken and wondering if Oakley had been in danger or if the dog-vs.-deer sparring match was just a case of boys — animals in this case — being boys.
Late fall and early winter is mating season for whitetails — the time of year when the animals are often most visible and most likely to cross paths with humans. Mostly the interactions are relatively benign, like the one Whitehead had recently.
Sometimes, such as when drivers collide with deer, things are more serious.
Driver fatalities from deer collisions are rare, but collisions are not. Over the past few years, Virginia Department of Transportation crews have received about 20,000 calls for road-killed animals annually. The vast majority are for deer.
With deer populations expanding in suburban and urban environments across the commonwealth, those interactions are becoming more frequent and happening in areas where deer haven’t been a traditional part of the landscape.
A million whitetails
The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (formerly the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries) manages Virginia’s white-tailed deer. The agency sets hunting seasons and relies on legal hunting as the primary method to manage deer populations.
Using in-depth population reconstruction, the department estimates that Virginia’s whitetail population currently stands at about a million animals.
That number reflects an increase of nearly 4,000% from the estimated population of 25,000 in 1931, a point at which deer had started recovery from being nearly completely wiped out due to over-exploitation that started soon after the arrival of European settlers 300 years earlier.
Because Virginia’s landscape is so diverse, managing the statewide herd is a challenge — one that requires a patchwork of regulations that are reviewed and updated every other year.
Because a single buck can breed with many female deer, or does, the key to reducing or expanding populations is to manage the take or protection of does. In short, increasing the number of female deer taken by hunters in an area should reduce the overall population. Protecting does should increase the population.
The Department of Wildlife Resources’ current statewide deer management plan, which runs through 2024, generally seeks to reduce or maintain deer populations across most of the state. Primary exceptions to increase herds are found in counties in the southwest corner of the state (Buchanan, Dickenson and Wise) and in Virginia’s highlands (Alleghany, Bath and Highland), where deer numbers are relatively low.
The statewide record deer kill peaked at more than 250,000 in 2009. It has averaged about 200,000 over the past 10 years. The tally does not include deer killed on roads or by other means.
Shifting herds
Over the past century, there has been a marked shift in where the state’s deer are found, and where hunters target them.
Over roughly the past three decades, deer populations — and hunter pressure — have shifted from public lands, such as state-owned wildlife management areas and the million-plus acres of the Jefferson and George Washington National Forests, to private lands.
From 1994 to 2014, when the DWR’s current deer management plan was implemented, the annual deer kill on public land west of the Blue Ridge range dropped from 14,000 to roughly 4,000.
Only part of that decline is likely attributable to public land deer numbers. During that same period, the number of hunters using those lands fell from more than 100,000 to just 60,000.
Justin Folks, the new head deer biologist for the department, grew up hunting with his father on family land in Highland County.
“I remember as a kid driving up 250 west from Staunton and going through national forest land to get to Highland County and every pull-off spot was full of trucks, campers and that sort of stuff,” recalled Folks, who started his position this past June. “Then it seemed like every year after that there were fewer and fewer vehicles.”
The primary reason is simple: Private land now has higher deer densities and better opportunities for hunter success.
Across much of the state, hunters can target deer from October through December, at a minimum, and take nearly unlimited antlerless deer on private lands with proper licenses and tags. Those liberal seasons and bag limits have enabled the Department of Wildlife Resources to be largely successful in meeting management objectives.
Suburban urban whitetail explosion
But while hunters do a good job of helping keep deer numbers relatively in check in rural Virginia, suburban and urban areas are a different story.
“There are oodles of incorporated cities and towns that are overrun with deer,” Folks said.
That leads to more deer-car collisions, and lots of complaints about deer damage.
“Most of the calls we get are for deer damaging landscaping,” said Bob Cowell, Roanoke’s city manager.
Urban and suburban areas can offer excellent habitat for deer — plenty of food and cover and few natural predators. But hunting can be impractical if not impossible.
“Houses can be on top of one another,” Folks said. “And many of those localities have ordinances that restrict the discharge of firearms and other weapons.
“Deer are not stupid. They are going to go where they are not bothered and where they have plenty of resources available.”
Many cities and towns, and even a few suburban counties, have opted into special urban archery seasons, which allow for bowhunting antlerless deer in September before regular seasons begin, and from January through March after those seasons end. About 50 municipalities across the state participate in the program.
Those seasons, however, have a minimal impact. Of the 184,968 deer killed by hunters in the 2022-2023 hunting season, for example, only 722 deer were taken by hunters during special urban archery seasons, according to Folks.
Trying to keep urban deer numbers in check, then, can force municipalities to implement culling programs, primarily using trained sharpshooters.
More than two decades ago, a citizens work group in Roanoke recommended using a combination of urban archery and sharpshooters to address the city’s growing whitetail population.
Folks said that is his preferred management approach.
“I see hunting and sharpshooting going hand in hand,” he said. “Allow hunters to do their best, and if it’s not enough then sharpshooting can occur after the hunting season.”
Roanoke officials opted not to join the special urban archery program but contracted with a private company for sharpshooting culling.
Cowell said sharpshooters helped keep the city’s deer population in check, typically taking more than 100 deer annually.
If it seems like the city’s deer population is on the rebound, it’s almost surely because the program was put on hiatus during the COVID pandemic.
“With their ability to reproduce as efficiently as they do, deer numbers can jump up exponentially pretty darn quickly,” Folks said. “Once you start [a culling program] you’ve got to keep after it.”
This October the city signed a contract with a private wildlife management company to renew the program, with culling to start in January.
The contractors will not be on call to address individual residents’ specific deer complaints, Cowell noted. Rather, they will identify tracts where they can connect with property owners to operate.
“The program serves a couple of purposes,” Cowell said. “It is not only to reduce the deer population, but the venison is donated to the Rescue Mission for their feeding program.”
The $40,000 contract equates to taking about 150 deer, which works out to more than $260 per deer, including the cost of processing the deer at a butcher.
In short, while sharpshooter programs are effective, they are not inexpensive.
Diminishing hunter numbers
If suburban and urban deer management isn’t challenging enough, Virginia and most other states are facing what may be the biggest threat to deer management — and one that creates an impact on their being able to manage non-game wildlife. That problem is a steady and steep decline in hunter numbers.
In the mid-20th century, Virginia had about 35,000 licensed deer hunters. By 1973, that number had topped 300,000, which is where it stayed until the mid-1990s. Since then, the proverbial bottom has dropped out.
In 2021, Virginia had approximately 185,000 licensed deer hunters. And the trend isn’t softening.
In an article in the DWR’s Virginia Wildlife magazine, Virginia’s recently retired longtime deer biologist Matt Knox reported that modeling by Penn State University’s Duane Diefenbach predicts that Virginia will have only 118,000 licensed deer hunters by 2030, and about 75,000 a decade later.
The reasons for the decline are varied but include the transition of rural landscapes into suburbia, changing interests of both adults and youth, and the fact that baby boomers who helped drive the increase in hunter numbers are aging out of the activity.
Changing attitudes about hunting don’t seem to be a problem. Countless surveys have shown that public support for legal hunting remains strong. For example, a 2019 survey by Harrisonburg-based Responsive Management found that 80% of Americans approve of legal hunting, an increase from 73% in 1995.
State wildlife agencies, with support from hunter advocacy groups, have implemented initiatives to retain existing hunters and recruit new ones, but those efforts are falling short. In his Virginia Wildlife article, Knox noted that a survey of 37 states and four Canadian provinces found that nearly 80% are experiencing deer hunter declines.
“There is no way Virginia will be able to consistently harvest 200,000-plus deer annually with falling deer hunter numbers,” writes Knox.
That trend doesn’t just spell trouble for the already difficult challenge of managing deer herds across the entire landscape.
In Virginia, deer hunting has long been the driver for hunter numbers overall, with hunting-generated revenue playing a key role for the agency, which doesn’t receive any general fund tax revenue.
In 2022, hunting license sales, including federal grants based on hunter numbers, was $22.5 million. But that was a drop from $26.4 million just four years earlier.
Declining hunter numbers were the culprit.
Because total resident and non-resident license sales — numbers that include special tags and licenses such as for archery, bear and waterfowl — fell from 529,181 in 2019 to 428,770 in 2022, federal grants fell from $12,792,000 to $8,460,000.
Falling hunter numbers means the agency will not only have less money to manage deer, but also less to put toward its vast array of other programs, such as managing non-game wildlife, including threatened and endangered species such as the peregrine falcon and northern flying squirrel.
Federal legislation, such as the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, may help states account for some budget challenges created by declining hunter numbers.
“If that goes through, it will help,” Folks said. “But if it doesn’t, then you know we’re still going to be left scrambling to get all the funding we need.”
Folks is blunt with his concern about the future.
“It’s definitely going to be a huge issue,” he says of the decline in deer hunter numbers. “Not just in Virginia, but across the United States.”