As we discussed in Part I of this article last month, epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) appears to have played an important role in why Tennessee's overall deer harvest was significantly lower last season. Nor surprisingly, the 2007 buck harvest was also affected, but there is a silver lining in this deer cloud.

With somewhere around 60,000 deer falling prey to the disease, there was more food available for remaining deer and they were less pressured because of the EHD factor.

The media scare created by the outbreak left many hunters at home instead of in the woods. Less pressure and more food should equate to a healthier herd this fall and that prediction includes the general health of our bucks.

Hunters shouldn't expect to break the overall harvest set back in 2006 when over 180,000 whitetails were harvested, but we can expect to see some seriously healthy deer in the woods.

Among those deer will be some very nice bucks. Tennessee keeps plenty of statistics on where the biggest bucks come from. Here's what the trends show.

A QUICK 2007 RECAP
The 2006 harvest of 182,093 seems a distant number compared with the final harvest take of 164,413 in 2007. It's definitely going to take a season or two to rebound from last year's EHD effects in terms of total harvest numbers.

Of our 95 counties statewide, only 19 of them had a harvest increase in 2007. In addition, the totals for every weapon category were decreased.

The wildlife management area (WMA) hunts, which help add to the overall statewide harvest, were also down significantly because of lack of hunter participation and EHD. In 2006, we took over 7,000 on WMA hunts, but only just under 6,000 last year. Overall, deer managers and biologists calculate that we lost somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 potential deer in last year's final harvest figures.

OUR TOP BIG-BUCK COUNTIES
It's no secret that the densest populations of Volunteer deer reside in Middle and West Tennessee. It stands to reason that's where most of the big bucks come from, and they do.

Hardeman County led the state in overall deer harvest, but that's not the case when it to comes to the bigger bucks. Hardeman did lead the harvest in the number of bucks with 7 and 8 points, but for bucks with more than 8 points, Hardeman County was not the leader.

Fayette, Henry and Montgomery counties led the state in the harvest of bucks with more than 11 points in 2007. Fayette produced the most of these bucks, with 68 being tagged, followed closely by Henry and Montgomery counties' equal take of 64 big bucks each. Giles County deserves an honorable mention with its total of 51 bucks with 11 or more points -- a dozen more than Giles County hunters killed in 2006.

Not surprisingly, there's a fairly strong correlation between counties where hunters kill many 9- and 10-point bucks with counties that produce high totals of bucks with 11 or more points. Montgomery County, for example, was not only among the leaders in the latter category, but was also best when it comes to bucks with 9 and 10 points -- hunters here took 273 of those high-caliber bucks. Fayette County was next with 266 bucks tagged with 9 and 10 points. Maury County hunters put their county in the statistics highlights with 249 bucks with 9 and 10 points.