Photo by Willy Onarheim.

While composing this annual deer-hunting forecast, usually I can point with a certain degree of smugness at the passage of another successful season for me in the Golden State.

However -- and I hate to admit this -- I did not kill a buck in my home state in 2006. Certainly I tried, but evidently not as hard as I should have. And the only buck I shot at, I missed. Hard as it is to believe, I seem to remember that I’ve “been here, done that” before.

My usual hunting partners did much better than I did. But then, my son Mark and son-in-law Robert are way younger than me, and much more energetic.

Robert got a nice 4x5 blacktail in the morning, and Mark got a bigger-than-average forkhorn that afternoon.

In the big picture, weather had a lot to do with hunting success across the state this past season.

During years when a few good storms occur, hunting success is considerably higher than in years when heat is the main ingredient.

In 2004, the last year that several storms graced the deer seasons, the harvest of bucks was nearly 37,000, according to the California Department of Fish and Game.

By comparison, 2005 was warm, and the take dropped dramatically -- to 28,276 bucks.

Not surprisingly, the latest figures show that in 2006 the take was even lower, at 27,028 bucks. While success in some individual zones was considerably higher, the state average was about 15 percent.

In 2004, when the weather was much more favorable, hunters scored more than 20 percent of the time.

For an assessment on how things will go in the state’s upcoming deer seasons, California Game & Fish analyzed past years’ results and interviewed Craig Stowers, deer program coordinator for the DFG, to get a picture of 2006 harvests in every zone.

Overall, favorable weather for deer hunting will always result in a higher harvest and, said Stowers, we’re about due for a good season.

The stage is set for an increase in the take in 2007. And the real good news is that there should be a higher percentage of adult bucks in the mix. That’s because of the carryover from the last two years, when the weather contributed to a decline in the harvest statewide.

“The carryover from 2005 and ‘06 should be good,” he said. “And the open winter we had in 2007 was easy on the animals throughout the state.”

Stowers noted that herd composition also counts, and pointed to stable deer populations in most areas.

If there’s better hunting weather this fall, deer will move around more, and hunters will feel like expending more effort. Naturally, the combination will lead to more hunters being in the right place at the right time.

All that now remains is to see if an increase manifests itself in the overall harvest. I, for one, certainly hope so. It’s not unusual for an upward spike to occur every three or four years. The last such event was in 2004, so we’re about due in 2007.

The DFG looks at total deer harvest in two ways: the actual reported take, and the estimated take. We’ll use the latter figure here, since it takes into account those tags that were filled but not returned.

Stowers said he expects the tag system to be computerized before long, and with modernization will come some sort of mandatory tag-return process. It will be interesting to see how that all plays out and how it might change the way we view harvests in the future. But for now, the estimated harvest formula is what pulls the wagon, so to speak.

Here, then, are the latest harvest stats available for the 2006 season deer hunts throughout California.