Deer season ends Friday and many local hunters are making a final dash to the woods for a last-second hunt before time runs out.

Chet Chapelle, with Rountree Outdoors, said he has talked to people this week from states as far away as Ohio who took the entire week off to come to this area and hunt.

“There’s no cure for it,” Chapelle said of the feeling hunters get when the season winds down, sometimes referred to as the ‘deer flu’ or ‘deeritis.’ “If you are in the South, it is going to happen.”

Chapelle compared the feeling to the feeling football fans get when college football season comes to an end.

“Deer hunting and college football go hand in hand,” Chapelle said. “You are going to watch college football and you are going to deer hunt [if you live in the south]. That’s just the way it is.”

Chapelle said the season was very successful, despite the wide range of weather the state has seen over the last few weeks.

“We’ve seen some really nice deer come through this year but the weather did have a lot to do with it,” Chapelle said. “One weekend it would be 70 degrees. The next weekend it would be 40 degrees with rain and then of course we had this blizzard we just had.”

Tim Wood, general manager of the Central Alabama Farmer’s Co-Op, described this season as a “mixed bag.”

“It has been the worst season for us that I remember in a long time,” Wood said. “I don’t know if it is a combination of weather or if it is feeding because it is legalized to feed deer right now. It is hard to decipher what is going on because there are some factors that are new.”