Brawley hunter Leon Lesicka with a handsome D12 buck. Lesicka is the founder of Desert Wildlife Unlimited and a crack burro deer hunter. Photo courtesy of Leon Lesicka.

California's deserts can be both awesomely beautiful and forbidding. Much of the lower third of the Golden State is desert. Despite the public perception that desert is worthless (unless you pave it and build houses), the huge expanses of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts have geological beauty and excellent deer hunting over wide areas of desert mountain ranges.

The eastern portions of San Bernardino, Riverside, and Imperial counties all have deer populations, ranging mostly in higher elevations of the desert wilderness.

Some of he best hunting here is found along the border with Nevada and Arizona, and much of that is adjacent to the Colorado River.

The D12 Zone is one of the most notable of the desert hunting areas. It's rated as about as interesting, but as tough, as anywhere in the West. According to information published by the Department of Fish and Game, D12 is the largest -- in square miles of useable deer range -- of all the D Zones. With almost 6,000 square miles of deer range, almost all on public lands, D12 is a giant stretch of empty country.

Most of D12 is genuine desert-- a mix of Mojave and Sonoran types. It encompasses the eastern half of Imperial County, more than half of Riverside County, and extends into the southeast corner of San Bernardino County.

That's a big chunk of ground, but the majority of it is either locked up in military gunnery ranges, or the Salton Sea or Joshua Tree National Park. Much of it is more desert bighorn sheep habitat than deer range.

Despite that, it's a big desert. The sprawling mountain ranges, especially along the eastern border of the zone at the Colorado River, do provide considerable habitat for deer that have become used to the conditions.

The strain of mule deer found here is mostly what locals call "burro deer." For them, the lower Mojave and the Sonora are home. The environment -- while always short of water -- is a rich one that doesn't support large numbers of deer, but manages to produce numbers of good bucks.

NUMBERS UP
"Last year, the deer take was up-- perhaps it was a bit too successful," said Jerry Mulcahy, a DFG deer biologist. "The overall population as we model it is about 2,000 deer for the zone. For the 2006 season, I got about 70 tag returns, which is pretty good for this desert zone. It's a bit high. Normally we see about 50."

It should be noted that DFG kill figures for a zone are always multiplied by an elusive factor that supposedly reflects the fact that the actual kill in any zone is typically higher than the number of tags returned would suggest. Tag return is not mandatory in California.

Seventy tags returned would give something like a 7 percent success rate. But big-game biologists "estimated" a kill of 114 bucks in D12 during the 2006 season and therefore, an "estimated" 12 percent success rate. It's not known which is closer to the actual deer take. But everybody agrees the deer numbers in D12, both overall and in buck kills, are up.

"We saw a lot of deer last year, and we were seeing the results of the rains of 2004," Mulcahy said. "We saw larger, more mature bucks in that three- or four-year class."

EXPERIENCE PAYS
Most of the people who get deer here are the ones who have hunted the zone for many years.

"You see the same names on tag returns year after year," said the biologist. The zone is huge and you have to know where to hunt.

"Overall, the zone looks good, but the hunt is going to be highly dependent on the monsoon for hunter success and diversity in the age-classes," Mulcahy said. "We have good numbers of forked-horn bucks, decent 3x3 bucks, and a few 4x4 bucks. It's a healthy population."

The forkhorn bucks are younger and dumber, said the biologist, and we see a lot of forkhorns.