What numbers say about deer hunting Minnesota
Category: hunting
Feb 27th, 2019 by Keith Worrall 531
Modified Feb 27th, 2019 at 1:00 PM
What numbers say about deer hunting Minnesota
Each year, the Quality Deer Management Association gathers deer numbers from state agencies all over the country to put together an annual whitetail report.
The numbers help us take a deep dive into a lot of harvest data. We are able to get numbers on does taken, bucks taken, and in many states, the age class of those bucks. Minnesota does not track ages of the deer harvested in the registration process, but there are a lot of numbers in the state that I enjoy looking at to get an idea of any trends in both harvest and hunting tendencies.
The most recent QDMA report that came out a few weeks ago looks at final numbers from the 2017-18 season. The breakdown of 2018-19 has not yet been released in Minnesota and many other states, but as of Dec. 9, 2018, hunters in Minnesota shot approximately 185,000 deer through all seasons. That was down about 5.2 percent from the 195,114 taken in 2017. Of the 184,963 deer killed in 2018, 93,531 of those were bucks.
Minnesota hunters frequently kill more bucks than does, and it looks like that will again be the case when the final 2018-19 numbers are released. Of the 197,768 total harvest in 2017, 101,242 of those were bucks. That’s despite the Department of Natural Resources handing out multiple anterless tags in many permit areas across the state.
The doe tags are used as a management strategy, but the numbers show that hunters are often reluctant to shoot does over anything with horns.
Here is a quick look at some findings from the most recent QDMA report that I found interesting:
Read More: Morken: What numbers say about deer hunting Minnesota
