State wildlife officials are proposing a swift, silent and close-range weapon for towns and urban centers besieged by marauding deer: a special hunting season for archers inside city limits. The draft regulation by the N.C. Wildlife Commission sets up a local option for town and city governments to hold a five-week season open only to bow hunters shortly after the Jan. 1 end of the regular hunting season. The commission holding nine public hearings around the state on this and other proposed changes to hunting and fishing regulations.

Although hateful to many city dwellers and suburbanites, hunting is the best way to keep deer from outstripping their food supply - and help keep Bambi from chewing the shrubbery or ending up as a hood ornament, state wildlife biologists say. Tim Ward, a keen and strictly legal bow hunter who already stalks deer in a suburban landscape, might be the perfect candidate for the proposed program. Ward, a senior at North Carolina State University who studies fisheries and wildlife sciences, hunts two small tracts near Garner that haven’t been swallowed by development - one inside the Beltline, one just outside. Perched in a tree stand next to a hiking trail and within sight of houses, Ward arrowed his first buck this fall - one with an eight-point rack of antlers. His hunting buddy killed two trophy-sized bucks on the same two-and-a-half-acre homestead outside the city limits of both Raleigh and Garner. One behemoth weighed more than 200 pounds. “I’ve never seen deer this size in my life,” said Ward, 22, noting the mountain deer near his hometown of Robbinsville are scarce and small.

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