This month, October, brings in the firearms deer season for the state of Georgia, more than a month ahead of our neighbors over in Alabama as well as the panhandle of Florida.

Since most of us have difficulty reading into the future, we won’t know whether it will be chilly opening morning or not, but if the first of the month is any indication, we should not be bothered with insects, at least early in the day.

Just a few days off you most probably should scout your area before hunting it the first time. You may end up like the guy that killed 10 rattlesnakes from his truck to where he thought would be an excellent place for his stand.

Not having hunted that piece of property, he did scout it out during the daylight hours. Had he not he may have been in a fight for his life. You should always scout an area before you hunt it.

Looking at the spot in broad daylight you may not find a single deer track. There is one solid thing about a deer. He will leave a track where he has walked, and if there are no tracks anywhere you look. There has not been a deer in that area in quite a while.

Deer tracks don’t mean that you will get a deer or really even see a deer when you are hunting. However, I believe I would take my chances on getting a deer where I find plenty of tracks, instead of trusting my luck going to a spot where the are no tracks and no sign.

Back when I was a kid in the 1950s, there were so few deer in our area that seeing a deer track was something to talk about. They were fairly well protected and folks really thought hard of you if you shot a doe, female deer.

Through some good conservation practices, we now have a lot of deer in Georgia—and especially southwest Georgia—and are looking forward to keeping it that way. Any time we want the herd to increase in numbers, all we have to do is stop killing does. Eliminating the either-sex day will allow more female deer to survive and raise more young ones the following year.

Then we have to look at the other side of the equation.

More deer means a bigger chance that disease will get into the herd, and if that happens it could well wipe out most of the herd and will take several generations to get it back, if ever.

A balancing act between quantity and quality of the deer herd is something that we must think of each and every time the laws concerning hunting is concerned. That gets almost above my pay grade and I will have to go along with what the folks up at state say. Hopefully we won’t have to worry about anything like that.

Deer season on the 16th and all the rest of the seasons coming in slowly until Thanksgiving.

Everything will be in, including sucker netting season, for that holiday weekend.

Family will be in for Thanksgiving, and we can entertain them with a good hunt and possibly a fish fry. They can go back to the big city and tell their friends and co-workers what they enjoyed on their holiday trip south. The ones that know anything about this will be jealous and the ones that are unfamiliar with true southern ways will just look at them and never realize what they have missed. What they have missed is enough ß fill a book and have several.