It was a slow season for deer hunters last year -- but that could turn into a silver lining for Cotton State whitetail hunters this fall.

The harvest was down a little overall last season, and the southern two-thirds of the state had an outstanding mast crop, so it's thought that the deer are apt to have made it through last winter in better shape than is usual. And that could lead to a bumper crop of whitetails for Alabama hunters this year.

"Last year's deer season was average at best, but more likely a little below average," said Chris Cook, the deer studies leader for the Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries.

He also said it was a strange season, at least in the west-central part of the state where he works.

"The first couple of weeks were really good, and I thought it was going to be an outstanding season," he observed. But then it slowed down and it never did pick back up, even in January, when Alabama hunting is usually at its best.

"We had a bumper crop of acorns down our way and they fell a little later," Cook explained. "When the deer got on them, the movement slowed way down."

The hunting was especially slow during spells of warm weather -- and that's something that Alabama hunters just have to deal with on a regular basis nowadays. "When it cooled off, it would pick up a little," Cook said.

The trend for the season in a lot of places was that hunters either got a nice buck or didn't do much at all, but we'll look more at the trophy buck action in Part II of this series next month.

Cook and other biologists around the state noted that the slow deer movement doesn't mean that few deer are left in Alabama, although it's evident that some hunters might tend to the first condition implies the second. The scientific professionals maintain that while deer numbers continue steady, conditions can just make the hunting tough.

The continual pressure on antlerless deer over the past several seasons also meant that does are wiser than they've ever been. They can be just as wary as the bucks once the guns start going off.

The state's biologists also said more and more Alabama hunters rely nowadays on green field hunting. In years of warm weather and plentiful mast, such hunting just doesn't produce the deer sightings that it can at other times.

"We biologists are sure glad for game cameras," Cook said with a laugh. "Without them, the hunters might think all their deer were gone. But the cameras often show deer using fields after dark."

Last year, late summer saw a touch of epizoötic hemorrhagic disease reveal itself among Alabama's whitetail herd, and that no doubt took out at least a few deer. The farther south you go in Alabama, the less impact the disease had. But outbreaks were reported in the northeast and northwest corners of the state. "It was worse in the northwestern part of the state than it was in the northeast," Cook reported.

The disease, transmitted by a biting gnat, is essentially a virus that can cause hemorrhaging in various tissues of a deer's body. Deer that get the disease often go to water, and carcasses can be found near water sources.