ATLANTA – Deer hunters in both ends of the state will have a season that opens and closes at the same time beginning in 2016 under rules the Board of Natural Resources learned about Tuesday.
The proposed rules will be made public next week. The board will formally approve them in June after a trio of hearings next month and a period for the public to submit comments. If past comments are any indication, hunters will like the change.
It was because the vast majority of comments in recent years requested it for simplicity.
“Regardless of where you are in the state, you want to have the deer season open on the same day and close on the same day,” said John W. Bowers, the Department of Natural Resources’ game management chief. “We’ve been following this with surveys, and we’re at a point where a decision needs to be made. We have very strong support among hunters. That’s all hunters. That’s deer hunters.”
Current rules have different dates for the northern part of the state than for the southern part. To make it uniform, hunting in the South will give up those extra days, but they would have fallen in the middle of the week anyway.
“We’ll hear from folks in the South,” said Board Member Philip Watt.
But Jeff “Bodine” Sinyard, another board member, applauded the proposed rules.
“It just makes such sense in making that work,” he said. “It’s something that we’ve really, really wanted for a long time.”
There will still be differences in the days for bagging either sex, depending on the deer population in each of several regions and in the wildlife management areas or hunting over bait.
The department is also talking with the vendor who provides online licensing to begin offering hunters a way to report their kills by phone, text or online. Legislation allowing it recently passed and is awaiting the governor’s signature.
Other changes in the hunting regulations include opening alligator season 14 days earlier since the state’s population for the critters has increased from 850 to 1,000. And changes in bear hunting, which coincides with deer season, are designed to allow deer hunters to bag bears in places where they could become a danger to humans or a nuisance to farmers, Bowers said.
“We want deer hunters, if they see bears, to be able to take them and reduce those bear-human conflicts,” he said.
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