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Mark Freeman Commentary Bowhunters face tough conditions Bowhunters will hit the Southern Oregon woods Saturday for the start of the fall hunting season with a good-news, bad-news dichotomy. The good news is, the region�s high-elevation forest lands, where the deer and elk now reside, will be open to hunters despite widespread concern about hunters potentially triggering wild fires in the tinder-dry forest. "As far as closing things down, there hasn�t been a peep out of anybody (official)," says Greg Clevenger, the resource staff officer for the Rogue River and Siskiyou national forests. "There are no plans for that at all." The same hot weather and crackly forest floor that made a forest closure possible will still conspire to make luring or stalking blacktail deer and Roosevelt elk a slim prospect during opening weekend. "It�s pretty crunchy out there," says biologist Merv Wolfer from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife�s Central Point office. "It�ll be hard to sneak up on anything. The best chance for hunters will be to try to ambush something going by." But that�s late-August bowhunting in Southern Oregon, where archers are as used to tough early hunting conditions as they are sweating through grease paint and camouflage. "Bowhunters are used to this kind of stuff," says Don Pritchett, who fingers the pulse of the archery hunting world from DewClaw Archery Supplies in Medford. "They always talk about closing the woods, and there�s always talk about (tough) conditions. But bowhunters haven�t altered their plans at all. It�s sort of a que sera sera." Whatever the bow season will be, it will be starting Saturday. The general bow season for deer hunters in Western Oregon is a split season west of the Cascade crest. The first half runs Saturday through Sept. 24, which is the Sunday before the general rifle season opens; bowhunting returns Nov. 11 in the Rogue, Evans Creek and Melrose hunting units and remains open through Dec. 3. Central Coast hunters have a similar late-season bow hunt that opens Nov. 18 and runs through Dec. 10. Throughout the season, the bag limit is one deer, either a buck or a doe. The elk season for bow hunters is a bit different. In most southwest Oregon hunting units, bowhunters can take an elk only from Saturday through Sept. 24, which is the first half of the blacktail season. The late-season archery hunt for elk runs Nov. 25 to Dec. 10, but it�s only in the central and northern portions of Western Oregon. All bow tags must be bought by Friday night. Just last week, it looked like the eleventh-hour lines to buy a tag would be light as talk of a statewide forest closure came from Gov. John Kitzhaber. He was worried that hunters in the dry woods could start devastating wild fires. But public land managers rated fire dangers as no worse than most years, and a slight improvement over the weekend led land managers to keep tight fire restrictions in place but still allow hunters to go afield. "Usually, we end up talking about it for weeks before we decide not to do it," Clevenger says. "I�m not a big proponent of shutting the woods down. "We can say all we want," he says, "but if we do it, we have to be able to enforce it." Yet temperatures in the 90s, with dry wood and grass everywhere, still makes the hot August days a force hunters must deal with. Seasoned bowhunters know that the early season presents some tough hunting situations because the animals are less active than later in the fall. The deer and elk primarily have headed to high-elevation national forest lands, where there is more late-summer feed and cooler temperatures. The animals also are more concentrated on north-facing slopes, where the sun is less intense. They are also more apt to be in heavy cover near water sources, and they likely will be avoiding the heat of day. "The animals are going to be pretty low-profile, moving around after dark and when it�s cool," Wolfer says. "Early morning and late evening are going to be the best chances to intercept something." In other words, business as usual. "I just don�t see anything changing from normal, and I think we�ll have moderate success right off the bat," Pritchett says. "It sort of looks like an average year to me." The ODFW can quantify average. The 1999 season also was one of those years, when about 1,500 archers hunted the Jackson County�s popular Rogue Unit for deer during the early bow season. Of those, 16 percent bagged their buck, compared with 18 percent success late in the season, with about one-third of the year�s deer being does. While 925 Rogue Unit archers also bought a $29 elk tag, only 4 percent took an elk. So the bow season in the Rogue Unit remains mainly a quest for bucks. "It�s not a high harvest," Wolfer says, "but for those who get one, the $29 is money well spent." The stats differ for the Evans Creek and Applegate units, where hunter success was 30 percent and 25 percent, respectively, for bucks, but the two units together lured less than 300 hunters. (Staff writer Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. Call him at 776-4470, or e-mail him at: [email protected] ) Outdoor Journal Obituaries | Sports | Business | Classifieds | Tempo | Prime Times | So Oregon Sites | Outdoor Journal | Subscribe | Contact | Movies | Advertise | Real Estate Showcase | Archive | Editorials | Letters to the editor | Religion | Wake-up Call | NIE | Cyber Chef | Job Network | So Oregon Weather | WSJ Northwest | Forums | AP Wire | AP Money | F.A.Q. | Awards Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. 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