I have been asked by a number of hunters about how the deer hunt went this year. This is the first year since I have worked here that I have not put a deer harvest report in the local paper right after the deer season.
Why not?
The truth of the matter is that I cannot very accurately compare this year to previous years, because of two changes that happened this year.
The first change is that we modified the boundaries of every deer permit area within my work area. Hunters noticed that when they applied for antlerless permits. This means I cannot compare the number of deer harvested in each permit area to last year. Next year we will have one year’s data to compare with, so we can track how the harvest has changed.
On top of that change, we allowed hunters to register deer by phone or on the internet and not just at local registration stations. This means that I cannot use the local stations to compare to last year either. As it turns out, in deer permit areas 110,103, 108 and 119 only 53 percent of the deer were registered at regular stations while 22 percent were on the internet and 25 percent were by phone. It is a great service to hunters, but it messed up our data comparison from previous years.
The only way I can come up with to compare this deer season to past years is to look at the deer harvest per square mile. It is not totally accurate, because when we changed some of our permit areas, we took out some of the best deer habitat and moved it to different permit areas. But combined with other observations, it does give us enough data to show a trend.
So here is the best I can do. The deer harvest across all of the permit areas mentioned above is up slightly from last year. The western part of the county in permit area 103 and 110 combined was up from last year while the eastern part in permit areas 108 and 119 combined was about the same as last year. We had more permits in the west, so this was not unexpected.
Also, there were lots of nice bucks shot this year which relates to the extremely early spring and low winter stress which helps with antler growth.
