The first point would cause a decline in the total number of deer available. The second and third conditions Ruth mentioned would curtail deer movements, denying hunters opportunity to harvest as many deer.

On an anecdotal level, there have been countless stories of hunters seeing a lot of deer sign in the woods in 2004. But their actual sighting of deer, and thus their harvest, was down noticeably from previous years. I hunted on three different tracts of land last year where this seemed to be very obvious. In all three instances, there were lots of tracks, but we simply did not see deer as much as we normally did. However, driving home after dark, we'd see plenty of deer. The same thing often occurred in the mornings: An hour or two before dawn, deer would be moving.

Ruth said, "Deer movements are directly linked to hunter success because hunters are less likely to be successful if deer movements are low. Finally, if the drought decreased reproduction, recruitment and survival of deer, it would likely be expressed in terms of fewer young deer available to harvest in 2003 and 2004. Evidence appears to support this. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that availability of deer in the affected age-classes will be reduced until deer born following the effects of the drought replace those age-classes."

That brings us to the overall outlook for the 2005 season. Because of the above issues, this is a tough call, Ruth admitted. "There are several things going on and there's no way to tell what the most influential reason for the decline was. If the primary factors were poor hunting conditions, specifically too much food and weather too warm, then we could easily see an upswing with more conducive weather and food conditions.

"However, if the main player in the decrease is the drought, then we could be looking at a harvest near the same or less. That's especially true if the drought impacts linger for a while longer. Of course, if recruitment into the deer population the past two years was excellent, we could be past that drought influence this year. We really won't know for a while," he said.

However, one thing Ruth does feel he's safe in saying: The deer hunting in South Carolina in 2005 will be among the best in the nation.

"Looking at the raw data, deer hunting in South Carolina is very impressive," he said. "We had an average of 12 deer per square mile harvested in South Carolina in 2004. Relative to other states, we have sensational hunting based on that figure."

Even though this harvest figure is less than the 2003 figures, it was still good enough to tie us with Georgia for the most deer harvested per square mile in the entire Southeast last year. (Harvest figures from other states were not available for 2004 when this data was complied).

"If you go back to 2002, South Carolina was hands down the top deer harvest state in the Southeast. But with the emphasis by many hunters on quality animals (harvesting fewer deer), it is not necessarily a bad thing. You can't have a huge quantity of deer and massive quality. There's a good mix of quantity and quality we hope to achieve. Based on antlers we scored from deer harvested during the 2004 season, we're seeing some really big deer harvested around the state," Ruth said.

Although he does not have harvest data from all the states in the country, he did note that the Southeast is nationally recognized as a hotbed for deer numbers being harvested. Since South Carolina ranks near or at the top in the Southeast, we're in the same basic position when you consider harvest per square mile on a nationwide basis.