Sutton actually prefers to hunt what he calls the peak of the pre-rut, when he gets to call bucks with rattling horns and grunt tubes. Some of his best bucks were fooled by his crashing horns, stomping the ground and grunting up a storm.

"Again, this map can help you figure that out, too," he said. "The peak period for calling deer with rattling horns is 10 days to two weeks prior to when does come into estrus. The bucks have already started fighting to establish dominance. You can get into a buck's home area, start up a good, loud fighting sequence, and the biggest buck around will have to come to defend his range or, at least, to look and see if the bucks battling in his area are ones he should deem competition.

"You get a short window of opportunity there -- a week or so before the does come into estrus. Once they're hot, you can forget that calling stuff. A buck won't leave a hot doe for anything, not even to defend his territory."

According to Dacus, biologists are busy tracking the southeast Mississippi deer herd and the impact of Katrina. He expects that both quantity and quality will rise in the coming decade.

Already, with quality deer management practices observed on big deer clubs, biologists and sportsmen are beginning to see the kind of first-quality bucks that Zone 2 counties can produce. Antler restrictions should also produce similar results on public land -- and there's a lot of that.

"We have some really big tracts of very remote deer habitat in southeast Mississippi," Dacus said. "We've got some that are really, really difficult to hunt and obviously those are probably where some of the better deer are because they aren't under as much pressure."

Two of those areas would be the Pascagoula WMA on the east and Old River WMA on the west side. "I'd bet there's still some areas back in those WMAs that rarely have or never been hunted because you can only get to them in a boat," Larry Walker agreed. "You can get as remote as you want to get. Obviously, the only thing that bucks have going for them in antler growth down here is age.

"Let's face it: We don't have the genetics and we don't have the mineral-rich habitat or soil quality to help. The best we can do is let them get old and see what happens. We see a couple of good deer each year come out of Leaf River and a few at Chickasawhay, but those WMAs get a lot of pressure."

The extended rut has yet to attract a lot of upstate Mississippi "Yankees" down to Zone 2 for some late-season hunting, at least not on the WMAs.

One reason, Chad Dacus suggested, is the difficulty in hunting the WMAs hit so hard by Katrina, as all the downed timber makes it hard to see deer and get around. "You can't imagine just how difficult it is," Walker said. "I'm excited about it because I really believe we've got a lot of bucks at these WMAs that will reach full maturity before being seen, and many that will die of old age after producing more deer."

Dacus likened the difficulty in hunting to that experienced in the early 1990s after the severe ice storm that hit the north Mississippi Delta and other northern areas. "Similar situation, totally different causes," the biologist explained. "The ice snapped most of the trees in the Delta in half that winter and made hunting up there impossible for the next decade; Katrina did the same, if not more, in southeast Mississippi. Long-term I think that it could help. Opening up that canopy lets the sun hit the forest floor and it promotes growth of browse and grasses that can feed the deer."

Thanks to the Magnolia Records Program, it's getting easier to see the kind of bucks that the southeast counties can produce, and the kind that will be available during the late rut.