Cold, windy conditions on the first weekend of Borderland’s firearms season and a diminishing area deer population coupled to decrease deer harvest more than a local wildlife official expected.
“What I expected was something a little closer to last year,” said Larry Petersen, International Falls area wildlife supervisor with the Department of Natural Resources.
The DNR decreased the number of doe permits in Borderland based on data that showed a lower deer population, likely a result of last winter’s conditions, he said.
“When you have an opening weekend that’s not conducive to hunting, harvest is lower as deer are not as active and hunters are not as persistent,” he said. “The lower harvest may have been independent of how many deer are out there.”
Petersen said generally, two-thirds of the deer harvest occurs on opening weekend. “If there is lower harvest, we just don’t recover the rest of the season because there aren’t as many hunters out,” he said.
The final numbers, he said, were not that surprising given the weather. “Prior to the season, about a 10-percent drop was my best guess with the lower permit numbers,” he said. “You never know how much influence one thing has.”
The 2011 season harvest won’t by itself spur the DNR to consider reducing permits next season, he said. This year’s winter will play a role in the season outlook for next year, he said.
“We don’t make the decision just on harvest, but certainly feel harvest indicates what we felt was true — a lower deer population and mostly because of last winter, is my guess,” he said.
Another factor in the lower harvest is that it appears the number of hunters may be a little lower this year compared to last, said Petersen. He said about 4 percent less people hunted in Borderland this season than last season.
“Four percent is not a big change, but it is a change and it does have an effect,” he said. “Everything adds up and can be used to rationalize how things are different. We don’t know how much one thing contributes to the change (in harvest), that we can only guess on.”
Petersen cautioned hunters from “reading too much into the numbers. That can be problematic.”
He said a two-year comparison isn’t long enough to show trends. And because boundaries were changed in the local permit areas a couple years back, previous years can’t be considered.
He said areas with higher deer density were cut from Permit Areas 108 and 103.
“Each permit area is different, even though they can be right next to one another,” Petersen said. “Hunter density, farm lands, fertile soil conditions all contribute to deer density.”
In addition, he said it’s difficult to guess how many antlerless deer will actually be harvested base on permit numbers.
“The more permits we offer, the lower percentage of those being filled is,” he said. “If we double the permits, it doesn’t mean we double the harvest. There is more to it than just the numbers and the associated harvest. You must look at it historically.”
As an example, he said in Permit Area 119, the antlerless permits allowed were halved in one year and that didn’t result in half the number of antlerless deer killed. “There is not that direct relationship,” said Petersen. “We can saturate with permits, but that doesn’t mean we add those as harvested antlerless deer.”
