Natural Resources Board hears 2023-24 deer season recap

At the February Natural Resources Board (NRB) meeting, several Department of Natural Resources (DNR) staff members presented information regarding the 2023-2024 deer season.

Jamie Adams began the presentation with information about license sales. Through January 7, 2024, there were been 114,926 archery licenses, 121,619 crossbow licenses and 555,243 gun licenses sold, she said. Each of these categories was down from the year end totals for 2022. In all, in 2023, 791,788 licenses were sold as compared to 797,856 in 2022. Of those, 740,219 were resident sales, with the remainder being non-resident sales. She reported sales came from all 50 states as well as 27 different countries. The top five states were Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Florida and Iowa.

In the area of demographics, approximately 23% of new hunters this year were female. There were a total of 39,844 new license sales for this past deer season, Adams said. In total sales, of the 791,788, there were 87,633 female hunters.

In the area of mentored hunt license sales, 13,677 of those licenses were purchased for the gun season. For the archery and crossbow season, 4,579 licenses were sold. Approximately 25% of those hunters were female.

Hunter Education

Casey Krueger, the chief warden for the DNR, began his presentation with statistics on incidents during this past deer season. He said there were only three non-fatal incidents through the nine-day gun deer season and no fatalities. In six of the last 10 years, there have been no fatalities during the deer hunting season, he noted. The average rate of incidents over the last ten years was 5.9. The average age of hunters was 50 years old. He said this points to the need to find a way to reconnect with hunters and remind them about safety rules. Experienced hunters can get lax with safety as things become possibly too familiar, he said.

“If you got back to 1984, we had 55 non-fatal incidents and we had 5 fatals,” he said. 

He said the Department feels the recreational safety bureau, the wildlife program and the volunteers in the hunter education program have improved safety in the woods during hunting season.

Krueger said the Department was able to bring in 458 new hunter safety volunteer instructors this year. Preliminary data is showing approximately 20,300 people were certified through hunter safety courses across the state. 

There were 690 courses offered statewide in the past year, he said.

As time goes on, the DNR would continue to monitor safety to see if virtual hunter safety classes were having any effect on safety in the field. If a trend would happen to appear, he said, the department would react to it very quickly.

Law enforcement contacts

Krueger said there were 12,961 patrol contacts in 2023 versus over 13,000 in 2022. There were also 1,428 calls for service, which was up approximately 12% from the previous year. Just over 530 hotline tips came in this year as well, which is down only slightly from last year. 

The top reported problem, he said, is excess baiting in places where two gallons of bait are allowed and baiting in areas where baiting is not allowed. 

The biggest safety violations were loaded firearms in vehicles or discharging firearms from vehicles. Failure to register or failure to have a license were some of other issues wardens found in the field. He said DNR law enforcement relies heavily on the public when it comes to reporting violations, especially now with the changes in hunting regulations such as in-person registration stations, back tags and other visual clues such as the need to display a harvested animal with, for instance, the tailgate of a truck down.

Deer season overall recap

Jeff Pritzl, the DNR deer program specialist, provided the board with a recap of the season in general. In 2023, he said, there was only one “bucks only” county, which was Iron County. Overall, harvest totals statewide were down 11.5%. The nine-day gun deer hunt saw 14.6% fewer deer registered than in 2022. Archery season totals were down 4%. Crossbow harvest totals were also down by 7.7% Muzzle loader season also saw a slight drop of 3.9%. In all, 299,289 deer were harvested in 2023 versus 338,171 in 2022. The nine-day gun deer season was the biggest influencer on the overall drop in harvest, he said.

The Northern Forest Zone showed the biggest decline in harvest numbers, Pritzl said. Antlered harvests were down 18.1% from the five year average. Antlerless numbers fell too, by 28.4% over the five year average. The only zone to see an increase in harvest was the Southern Farmland Zone and that was only up 4.4% in antlered seer with the antlerless harvest showing no deviation from the five year average. Harvests are compared to the five year average rather than only the previous year. This, Pritzl said, evened things out rather than comparing only to 2022, which showed a strong harvest.

There has also been a long-term trend in the type of hunting preferred in the state. While gun harvests have seen a downward trend, archery and crossbow harvests continue to increase. This showed more hunters were taking advantage of archery and crossbow hunting, he said. The trend started decades ago and continues today.

He also spoke about the Northern Forest Zone and tracking deer observed per hour by hunters. Deer sightings were down this past year, he added. 

When a hunter harvests a deer, he said, that hunter is asked how many deer they saw and how many hours they put into hunting. This is only a subset of the hunting community, of course, but it is a standardized metric that can be tracked over time.

In the southeastern part of the zone, he said, hunters who harvested deer said they saw similar numbers of deer as in previous years. Toward the northwestern part of the state, the change was more drastic as far as hunter reports. Pritzl attributed this to the Winter Severity Index, which is the measure of snowfall and below zero days. Although hunters in the north, especially in the northwestern part of the zone, have said there are many places where they see more wolf tracks than deer tracks, Pritzl did not mention predation as playing a role in why hunters were seeing so many fewer deer in that region of the state during his presentation. NRB chair Bill Smith, who attended several listening sessions in the north regarding deer as well as wolves, also failed to make the solid point that hunters in the north were facing higher predator numbers than ever before and attributed much of their lack of success to predators in general and wolves in particular. He mentioned being at those meetings, and mentioned he was in areas where the “winter severity index” was high in 2022.

Board member Paul Buhr did bring up predation, however. He spoke about the “uprising” of hunters in the north.

“The anecdote is that predation by wolves has contributed to this downward trend,” he said. “What is your evaluation and what is your solution?”

“I’ll start by saying I think we do owe the hunters of the north more of an investment in outreach and communication and sharing of information,” Pritzl said. “We feel like we’ve been doing it forever and for decades with maybe little to no effect, and so maybe we need to re-examine how we go about doing that in a way that is consumable.” He said perceptions of customers need to be taken in to consideration.

“What’s interesting about this reaction to the harvest we had in 2023 is that is really isn’t any different than the harvest we had in 2019,” Pritzl continued. He said the buck harvest was actually a bit higher than in 2019. “If we go back to the 1980s, we were killing about the same number of bucks up north with tens of thousands more people up there. So, it’s about perspective.” He said it was not just about 2023, but it was symptomatic of what has been happening over the last couple of decades. He suggested people were looking for a simple answer to that question, hence the focus on wolves. 

“What I want for the Northern Forest hunter is to have a realistic expectation for the future so they can enjoy and look forward to their experience,” he said, adding that it would require some degree of a “reset.”

“I’m not sure that we would want it to be said the we don’t think there’s predators having an impact on the population,” said board member Marcy West. “The predators play a role. As does the aging forest, the winter severity, all of those things come together.”

“Indeed, that is again, I made that comparison of how things are now versus the 1980s, and that’s a huge difference from where we were in the 1980s in terms of their role and the contribution they have,” Pritzl said. 

He likened it to pieces of a pie, where predators now are consuming a larger piece of the deer herd pie, meaning that portion is no longer available to hunters, and that piece of the pie has certainly grown. He still focused on what expectations should be, however, saying that would be important to take into account when attempting to set realistic expectations for hunters in the north. He said there were many different things at play that were changing the hunting experience in the north, with predation being just one of those things.

“One of the things we’re hearing in the narrative is that there’s this chicken and egg argument,” Pritzl said. “Is the hunting experience declining because the opportunity is declining or is the effort declining and then driving harvest numbers independent of what the deer numbers are?” He showed the results of a mailed survey that was sent out to hunters. When the data is pooled by the zone, he said, is that days of effort started declining in the 1990s and have declined steadily. He said this suggests a cultural shift.

“This would suggest that there are different drivers there, and we just need to be aware of that in regards to our expectations,” Pritzl said. He said there was a shift away from hunting with a gun to archery hunting and there was also a shift from hunting in the North to hunting in the Farmland Zones. The trend also shows a loss in hunters, with the Baby Boomer generation starting to age out of hunting. With that group he said, going “up north” meant hunting, and that is not necessarily the case with younger hunters.

When asked by board member Robin Schmidt about people who had bought licenses for two-year-old children, for example, he was not concerned that people would be getting those licenses to have another license available and having an opportunity to harvest another deer in an illegal manner. He said he had heard anecdotally that people were purchasing licenses so a child could “say they have had a license for their whole life.” He said he could understand how it would create those suspicions, but he did not believe that was what was happening. He said it also means a contribution to the pot for fish and wildlife management.

CWD

While the full Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) report will not be presented to the NRB until its April meeting, Pritzl had some preliminary numbers to share with the board. In 2023, he said, almost 17,000 deer were submitted, which held fairly steady from 2022 even with the decline in harvest. CWD positives from those samples increased slightly over last year, with 1,556 positives as of January 19, 2024.

In the interest of ease of access to testing, 237 sampling locations were available across the state with 14 of those being in the Adopt-A-Kiosk Program. Also there were 144 carcass disposal dumpsters available. Of the 131 dumpsters, 78 were in the Adopt-A-Dumpster Program and 69 were made available through the cost share program, Pritzl said. 

Beckie Gaskill may be reached via email at [email protected].