As expected, Minnesota's firearms deer harvest is down. Way down.
After the first three days of the season, the harvest was down 52 percent from 2013 in Northeastern Minnesota (Series 100 deer permit areas) and down 36 percent statewide, said Leslie McInenly, big game program leader for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
The statewide harvest was 54,000 for the first three days of the season, which opened Saturday. That's down from 84,000 in the same period last year.
The firearms deer season opened Saturday and continues through Nov. 23.
“It’s about what we thought,” said Jeff Lightfoot, DNR regional wildlife manager at Grand Rapids. “It varies a little bit by permit area. To a large extent, the change is in the antlerless harvest. But even the buck harvest is considerably lower in some permit areas than it was a year ago.”
Those antlerless deer were not killed because the DNR had declared nearly all of Northeastern Minnesota a bucks-only hunting zone this fall. The agency wants to protect antlerless deer in an effort to rebuild the deer population. That’s what happened after the severe winters of 1995-96 and 1996-97, and the population rebounded quickly.
Many hunters, in anecdotal reports, have said they have seen few, if any, bucks and not many does. Others said they saw little buck sign, such as the scrapes and rubs bucks make during the mating season.
Opening weekend weather, cold with high winds, might also have affected the harvest in Northeastern Minnesota, but lower deer densities were also a factor, Lightfoot said. The harsh winter of 2013-2014, with intense cold and deep snow, took a toll on the deer population.
The number of deer hunters was also down about 10 percent from last year as of the Friday before opener. As of that day, about 393,000 hunters had bought deer licenses compared to about 434,000 last year.
“Any time we make forecasts, people do pay attention to the forecast,” Lightfoot said. “They don’t see a lot of deer, and they hear us talking about not a great season, they might find other things to do.”
While hunting success is down, John Chalstrom is getting plenty of bucks to process at Chalstrom’s Bait and Tackle north of Duluth. On Monday afternoon, Chalstrom was at work, cutting a buck into steaks and chops.
“I’m surprised that we’re getting as many as we are,” he said, “knowing it was going to be a tough year. At this point, we’re about the same as last year.”
He had 40 deer in the cooler awaiting processing. The difference, he said, is that in some previous years when he got more deer than he could handle, he had to turn some hunters away. This year, he hasn’t had to do that.
“The rut (peak of mating season) really timed itself perfectly for the bucks that are out there,” Chalstrom said. “They were really in the rut.
In the big years, Chalstrom has processed as many as 350 deer. Last year, he did about 250, he said. This year, he expects to do about 200.
On Wednesday, Steve Jenson of Fisherman’s Corner in Pike Lake said hunters had been weighing in some big deer.
“We’re getting a lot of deer coming in now,” Jenson said. “We’ve had a couple 180s (180 pounds or more), a couple over 200. It’s been picking up with the snow and everything.”
Deer hunters prefer to hunt in snowy conditions because it’s easier to see deer in the woods and easier to track them after a shot.
More bucks are coming from closer to Duluth than from farther north, Chalstrom said.
“Hunting is better for the people around here than people up at hunting camps 40 miles north,” Chalstrom said. “The deer concentration has moved closer to the residential area because that’s where they lived last year (during a harsh winter). The best deer herd we have is in Duluth.”
