Which way should you go for good bowhunting in Oklahoma?

Well, from almost anywhere you sit in the Sooner State, going east would be a good idea.

I'll get into the details and numbers in a moment, but I want to point out simply that bowhunters kill more deer in Eastern Oklahoma, and especially northeastern Oklahoma, counties than in another part of the state.

Part of the reason for that is habitat and terrain.

The eastern third of Oklahoma is mostly rugged and forested. The middle third is mixed prairie and woodlands with rolling, gentle hills. The western third, for the most part, is flat and devoid of trees except for those that have been planted by landowners and for a few stately cottonwoods growing along the banks of streams.

Oh, of course you can find patches of densely tangled post oak and shinnery out in the western counties, but they're scattered. It's rare to find miles of continuous forests like you find in the east, where deer can travel from one side of a county to the other under the cover of dense forests, save for the occasional road or stream crossing.

In the last 40 years, the deer herds in central and Western Oklahoma counties have grown tremendously. When I was growing up in Enid and starting college in Alva, my friends and I got excited about seeing just a deer track in the river bottom sand. We only dreamed of seeing an actual deer some day.

For the past couple of decades, though, you've had to be careful driving at night in those same areas because there are so many deer prowling about.

So, it's not for lack of a healthy deer population that bowhunters kill significantly fewer deer in central and western counties. It's more because good places to ambush deer and get close enough for effective bowhunting are fewer and farther between out there -- at least in comparison to Eastern Oklahoma.

Let's take a look at a recent year's data and numbers for the archery deer harvest.

Since the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation's state deer harvest statistics for 2008 aren't available at this writing, the 2007 totals will serve to illustrate my point, as every previous year's harvest totals in recent decades do.

There were nine counties where bowhunters harvested 200 or more deer in the fall and winter of 2007. All nine of those counties, shown in the accompanying chart, lie east of Interstate 35, which splits Oklahoma pretty much down the middle.

Those totals don't reflect the managed hunt harvests on wildlife management areas, which are tallied separately. Both Cherokee and Pittsburg counties have such lands.