We are about ready to enter into the hunter's big casino, the opening day of the regular firearms deer hunting season.

With 95 percent of the leaves dropped, the visibility factor is on the hunter's side. The only factor that would increase it would be snow and that is not likely. Absent rain, the woods are carpeted with crunchy leaves. With precipitation, the leaves will quiet down except on frosty mornings.

I have hunted in four areas so far and the buck sign looks great. The leaves still cover most travel ways, but the residue scrapes are impressive. On occasion you spot a rub. A rub is where a buck has rubbed his antlers against a sapling or small tree to remove velvet from his antlers.

Acorns continue to be a deciding factor in a deer's life. They are also an important factor in a turkey's life. It is easy to determine who has been feeding on the acorns because of the multiple areas a turkey will scrape away and the limited areas a deer will scrape away in search of acorns.

New Hampshire has a deer hunting advantage in that Sunday hunting gives the average hunter an extra day for weekend hunting. Fish and Game has even created this year a program for taking back your weekend just for all in the family to enjoy the hunting opportunities. The concept is simple: You assemble a "honey do list" and check them off during the week. According to Mark Beauchesne of New Hampshire Fish and Game, "For me, Saturday and Sunday used to be something I called 'catch up' day because that is what I did, 'catch up" on yard work and shopping and working on my truck." Beauchesne's hunting life changed for the better when he got some solid time-management advice from a friend who always seemed to be having fun. "The guy told me to take back the weekend. He told me to do the things I have to do on Wednesday or Thursday, before or after work so I can have time to go hunting on Saturday or Sunday. It worked."

This week's rain has been a real blessing in wetting down the crunching leaves. Now the only time they will be a problem is when they dry out or when we experience a frost that will leave them super noisy. I also observed a lack of hunting pressure. I don't know if this represents a decline in license sales or the number of doe days in each WMU that have shifted hunting pressure over to the units that still have doe hunting. WMUs C1, C2, D1, E, F, I1, I2 and J2 are antlered deer only for the entire deer season. In other WMUs, the doe days vary from one to two, with the exception of WMUs L and M, this will run from Nov. 12-21.

The deer checked in at Marshall's Firearms may be telling a different tale about the health of the herd. Deer have a class factor that is measured in terms of age. Yearlings are the first class and usually consist of a larger portion of the deer killed each year because they haven't developed defense mechanisms. The longer they live, the smarter they get. Only two of the yearling class have been checked in so far.

One possible answer to this situation may be that many of this class did not survive last winter given that acorns were scarce. The biggest buck check in had an eight-point rack and weighed 206 pounds; the largest doe weighed 140 pounds. Without having the teeth checked, which is the only true method of gauging the age of a deer, I would estimate the age of both to be around 3½ years. What is missing from this grouping are deer older than 4 years. The suspicion being that after the rut, the older, mature bucks were so spent that they could not recover and did not survive the winter. But then again, this is only muzzleloader season and all of the action will take place starting Wednesday.

I have two black bear tales to share with you that don't relate to birdfeeders. I could relate to birdfeeders at a different time, but these two tales are related. Hunters place trail cameras on normal travel ways to determine who is visiting the site. In the first case, a hunter noticed that his trail camera had been severely vandalized. He thought that this might be a youthful indiscretion.

He had managed to salvage the film from the camera and had it developed. It turned out that a black bear was infuriated by the flash that went off each time a picture was taken and the more time a picture was taken, the more infuriated the bear became and the last frames on the film show the bear destroying the camera.

Tale 2 also involved an irritated black bear. Once again, with each flash the bear's aggressiveness increased. The camera was destroyed. It was replaced and the replacement suffered a similar fate. Not to be outdone, a third camera was placed in the same location, only this time an infrared camera was aimed at the flash camera. Sure enough, camera three was destroyed, but the destroyer was caught on infrared film: a black bear.

The bear season on Nov. 12 remains open in WMUs C1, D2, E and F and remains open in these units until Nov. 25. I would expect that until the temperature drops, bears will not den up as long as the food sources remain available for forage.

(Bob Washburn can be reached at hunterscorner@aol.com.)