NATCHEZ — Deer hunting is relaxing and enjoyable — a way to take a break from work and to spend time with friends or family.

But it’s also actually good for nature.

And if hunters were to stop, well, hunting, things could quickly get crowded in Mississippi.

There are currently about 1.6 to 1.7 million deer in the state, and hunters harvest approximately 300,000 of those deer per year.

If those 300,000 were left in the wild, the population would explode, said Chad Dacus, deer project coordinator for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks.

“You’d have an increase in deer-vehicle collisions, deer depredation on crops, more deer in neighborhoods eating people’s flowers,” Dacus said. “It can cause wide-scale habitat destruction on the forests. They can literally eat the forest, and if it’s bad enough, it could take generations for it to come back.”

Dacus said the state saw that happen in the early ’80s and ’90s. The deer population in Carroll and Montgomery counties grew so large that the forests were destroyed, and they’re just now starting to grow back.

“Deer eat five to seven pounds of food a day, and they continually eat,” Dacus said. “You can do permanent damage on hardwoods — if they eat the terminal bud off the top, it will stunt the growth of that tree. They eat all the buds off flowers, and once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

The only way for forests to recover from an over-population of deer, Dacus said, is by completely removing them.

And the best way to do that is to hunt.

According to MDWFP Management Indicator Species spokesman Curtis Thornhill, nearly 100,000 sportsman’s licenses have been sold this fiscal year, which runs from July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009.

The resident sportsman’s license, of which 97,523 have been sold so far, is a combination license that allows sportsmen living in Mississippi to hunt in all seasons and to fish.

“We have one called a resident all-game hunting and freshwater fishing license,” Thornhill said. “That does not give privilege to do archery or primitive weapons. We’ve sold 46,297 of those.”

Mississippi also sells a license that only allows archery and primitive weapons — 1,133 have been purchased this year.

If those sportsmen did not go into the woods to harvest deer during the winter, Dacus said the population explosion and subsequent damage to the habitat would be substantial.

He said deer eat anywhere from 1,800 to 2,500 pounds of food and usually breed about two offspring per doe each year.

If the population gets too big, he said, the deer will start showing up in more urban settings, which has already happened in Jackson and in some areas of Natchez.

“In some places you can see it in just a matter of years, and some places not even that long,” Dacus said. “It would depend on what the local populations are like, but if people quit hunting completely, deer would just be running over themselves.”

At that point, deer would cease to be afraid of humans — a problem Dacus said occurs when people try to keep wild animals as pets.

And once they’ve come into urban areas, it is harder to remove them. You can’t very well go shooting around people’s neighborhoods, Dacus said.

“In other states, like in Virginia and the Washington D.C. area, they do have licensed bow-hunting areas in neighborhoods,” Dacus said. He said that area has been overrun because of a decrease in hunting.

But over-hunting can cause problems too, he said. Hunting seasons were implemented in the 1930s because people were “literally shooting everything” and there were very few deer left in Mississippi — about 3,000, according to Dacus.

He said it would take a while for completely unregulated hunting to decrease the population that much again, but the seasons are in place to ensure a healthy population.

The area from Natchez up to Vicksburg and from I-55 in Jackson up to the Big Black River has the highest concentration of deer in the state, according to Dacus. The lowest population is in the Delta.

However, a survey done several years ago showed the Southaven area as having the highest instances of deer vehicle collisions.

But where there are rapidly expanding populations, like in the Mississippi portion of the Memphis Metro area, he said it is hard to tell if the deer population is increasing as much as it seems to be.

“We’ve moved into their backyards at the same time they’ve moved into our backyards,” Dacus said. “If you look around the Jackson Metro area and the Memphis Metro area, those have grown tremendously in the past 15 years.”

For those who are seeing deer in their backyards or eating their plants at night, Dacus said the best thing to do is not shoot them.

“One thing people can do around their houses is leave on lights at night or plant plants deer will not eat,” he said.

But the best way to keep that from happening is simple — keep hunting.