Accounting for roughly 80% of the reported deer hunting check-ins, hunters in the state of Virginia reported 167,736 deer online this year. While numbers still remain below the 10-year average for the state, the online check-ins represents a 12 percent increase from last year’s hunt.
Matt Knox, deer project coordinator with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries strongly believes a bumper mast crop combined with an outbreak of hemorrhagic disease in the eastern region of Virginia were the leading causes of the low numbers in recent years.
The state is still in the process of tallying the traditional paper check-ins from this season’s hunt, but Knox told The Daily News-Record that he believes they should add up to an additional 50,000 more recorded kills.
The state’s reported check-in numbers first dipped below 200,000 for the first time in 2014, a low that hadn’t been experienced since 2000.
