by Geoffrey Norman

About the author: Geoffrey Norman is an editor-at-large for Forbes FYI.

The white-tail is, generally speaking, what most people have in mind when they think of deer. It ranges across most of the United States but is concentrated most heavily east of the Mississippi. Wildlife biologists estimate that there are considerably more white-tail in North America now than there were when the first Europeans arrived. And there is no question that deer are vastly more numerous than they were twenty, thirty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. I can remember hunting deer in Alabama in the fifties with little hope of success. In those days, if a hunter killed a deer he could almost count on getting his picture in the local paper. The few deer left in the state lived back in the river bottoms...