By knowing both his deer and those animals’ likely routes of travel, Hawk Bledsoe was able to ambush this fine Osage County buck on opening morning of 2006’s rifle season. Photo by Bob Bledsoe

The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation keeps records of trophy-quality deer killed in our state. It recognizes the deer and the hunter and publishes the information through its Cy Curtis Awards Program.

The Cy Curtis program, like the Boone and Crockett and Pope & Young trophy deer awards programs, keeps records based on a numerical scoring system for antlers.

Interestingly enough, the top five typicals and the top five non-typicals on the Cy Curtis list came from 10 different counties.

And that, patient readers, brings us to the point of this story: picking your place to hunt big bucks this fall. And, it tells us that it’s hard to pick a hunting spot solely on the basis of prospects for killing a trophy buck.

Myriad factors, many controlled by humans, determine whether a buck with the genetic potential to produce a trophy rack will get the nutrition needed to do so -- or will even live long enough to produce big antlers! The condition of the range, the minerals in the soil, the amount of hunting pressure (legal and otherwise!) and additional factors contribute to the production of trophy bucks and healthy deer populations in Oklahoma.

Many Sooner State hunters are happy just to find any kind of a deer-hunting spot. They hunt public lands or lands that may or may not have lots of deer.

Others put a little more work into finding good spots. They may have free access to Uncle Jim Bob’s 80 acres, but they’ll gladly spend hundreds of dollars for a different spot they think has more deer or has more potential for producing a wallhanger.

And then there are those who buy the really expensive leases -- properties where deer are aggressively protected and managed. Some hunters purchase guided hunts, or just buy land and manage it to grow trophies for themselves.

For most of us, it’s a crapshoot. Unless you have lots of cash to spend, you aren’t likely to get a hunting spot that has lots of trophy bucks wandering around.

Fortunately for those of us in average tax brackets, a trophy buck can stroll through just about any property anywhere in the state nowadays -- at any rate, that’s what the Cy Curtis list seems to indicate: As long as you’re in a spot in Oklahoma where you’re seeing deer, there’s a chance you’ll see a good one if you hold out long enough.

So how do you pick a good hunting spot? Well, here are a few tips.

LOOK AT HARVEST FIGURES
In some states the wildlife management agencies publish harvest figures within hours or days after the close of deer seasons. In Oklahoma, we always have to wait nearly a year: Official deer harvest totals aren’t issued until nine or 10 months after gun season, with a specific year’s county-by-county harvest totals usually being published online on the Wildlife Department’s Web site, ordinarily sometime in October.

Those figures remain fairly stable, geographically, from year to year. The Top 10 Counties one year are usually about the same that appeared last year, not necessarily in the same order and sometimes with one or two exceptions. Looking at those harvest figures can help a hunter figure out if there are a lot of deer around where he hunts.

But the figures can distort the truth, too. My favorite example is Osage County, which, because its annual deer kill is Oklahoma’s highest, is often touted as the state’s best deer-hunting county. Not reflected in that statistic is Osage County’s size: It’s by far the state’s largest county in land area. If you look at deer kill per square mile, Osage County barely makes the Top 10 in some years, and I don’t believe it ever made the Top 5 by that standard. Deer-harvest density is usually greater than Osage County’s in Cherokee, Craig, Nowata, Rogers and a few other counties north and east of Tulsa.