With deer populations hovering at a consistently high level, Arkansas deer hunters expected a banner season in 2009-10. And they got it.

Although the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had not tabulated final numbers at press time, it appears that the 2009-10 deer season might have equaled, if not exceeded, our kill of 184,991 deer in 2008-09.

According to preliminary numbers compiled by the AGFC, hunters checked a total of 170,724 deer. Of those, 83,351 were antlered bucks, and 13,948 were button bucks. Hunters also checked 73,427 does. Those numbers do not include deer killed on state-owned wildlife management areas or on properties enrolled in the AGFC's Deer Management Assistance Program, said Brad Miller, the AGFC's deer program coordinator. Those numbers, he added, might boost the preliminary total by as much as 10 percent.

"It was a really good year," Miller said. "It seems like we've been fighting with Mother Nature a little the last couple of years. We had the ice storm that caused a lot of damage, and then we had all the flooding. Those two things may have affected the deer harvest here and there, but generally the state had a good year."

At the beginning of the season, that didn't appear to be possible. Record rainfall in early autumn caused severe and extended flooding in eastern Arkansas that closed much of the modern gun deer season in bottomland areas in that part of the state. Those areas typically account for a generous percentage of Arkansas' annual deer kill, but hunters there were mostly forced to watch the game from the sidelines.

Floodwaters drove deer out of the bottomland forests into crop fields and onto levees, where they were exposed for weeks. Many hunters were frustrated to see huge herds containing potential record-book bucks milling about in the open in broad daylight. To their great credit, hunters largely resisted the temptation and left those deer alone. Had the season remained open in those areas, hunters might have killed too many deer, possibly reducing the population to a level from which it might take years to recover.

However, that experience prompted the AGFC to revisit its regulations for its eight primary flood-prone zones along the White and Black rivers. The main areas of dispute are flood-prone zones E, F and B. Flood-prone Zone F is on the shipping canal that connects the White and Mississippi rivers, but the water level that triggers its closure is on the upper end, at St. Charles. David Goad, chief of the AGFC's wildlife management division, said falling water on the Mississippi River sucks water out of Zone F quickly. The St. Charles river gauge is at a bottleneck on the White River and more accurately represents water levels in Flood-prone Zone E. Though E might be flooded, F could be dry, but it remains closed because of the reading at the St. Charles gauge. That unfairly shut out a lot of Flood Zone F hunters last year, Goad said, and the AGFC is considering removing the St. Charles gauge as a criterion for closing hunting in Zone F, and that's good news for hunters!

As always, hunters killed the most deer on opening weekend of the modern gun season. For the 2009 season, those dates were Nov. 14-15. Hunters bagged 18,788 deer on opening day, including 11,151 antlered bucks, and 6,082 does. The rest were button bucks. Hunters killed 11,913 deer on Nov. 15, including 6,406 antlered bucks and 4,607 does. The tally for opening weekend of modern gun season was 29,939, or about 18 percent of the total annual kill.