Volunteer whitetail hunters deal with many factors for success throughout the season. Some are controllable, but most aren't. Last year's epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) outbreak dealt a huge blow to overall success for not only Tennessee.

We'll look at these effects, including weather, mast crops and pressure, along with others as we plan our 2008 whitetail comeback this fall. The bottom line is that if you want to take deer, you have to be out there regardless of the factors facing your success.

For many hunters, last year's deer season was not what was hoped for. If we expect to bounce back this year, we'll need to do our homework early. To help, here's a region-by-region forecast of the best places to get your deer, based on the latest data from the TWRA.

2007 IN A NUTSHELL
The record harvest in 2006 was the target on many deer hunters' minds when the 2007 season opened, but with an occurrence of epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD), visions of setting a new all-time harvest record quickly faded. The 2006 harvest of 182,093 seems a distant number compared with the final harvest take of 164,413 in 2007.

At some point, Tennessee hunters will set a new record for deer harvests, but it's going to take a season or two to rebound from the effects on the deer herd of the EHD outbreak last year. If you run the statistics, you'll see that last season's harvest was really only down by 9 percent when all things are considered.

Daryl Ratajczak, Tennessee's big-game coordinator, said that isn't a horrendous drop in the overall whitetail harvest, but it was far from what was expected from a very healthy deer herd going into last fall. As the deer hunts opened in September, Tennessee's whitetail herd was estimated at nearly 1 million deer, and we were primed for a record harvest.

After biologists and managers have had nearly a year to look at the overall effects of the disease that struck much of the country, it appears the rough estimate is that 60,000 deer were lost to the disease statewide. The biggest effects were naturally where the deer population was the densest -- in Middle and West Tennessee. Of Tennessee's 95 counties, 83 of them were hit hard by EHD. Of the 60,000 deer that perished, Ratajczak believes that had an effect somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 in the decline of the overall harvest.

As mentioned in the July issue's story on our top draw hunts statewide, the EHD outbreak, along with the media scare, appeared to keep many hunters out of the woods. One factor that Ratajczak relies on in his analysis is the decrease in the fall turkey hunt harvests that had been going gangbusters. EHD didn't affect turkeys, but the lower harvest suggests to managers that there were not as many bowhunters in the woods (bowhunters during parts of the year when both deer and turkeys are legal normally account for much of the fall turkey harvest). Either the bowhunters just decided not to shoot turkeys, or they simply were not in the woods as much as in the past.