Minnesota’s deer kill is up from 2023 as hunt winds down

St. Paul — As the firearms deer-hunting season drew to a close across much of Minnesota on Sunday, Nov. 17, firearms hunters had killed around 111,791 deer, a 5% increase from last year’s harvest, according to preliminary Minnesota DNR reports.

“(It’s) good news compared to last year. So harvest is up everywhere, so that’s good,” said Todd Froberg, the DNR’s big-game coordinator.

Froberg said he expects that when all deer-hunting seasons are over this year, total harvest will see about a 5% increase over last year’s take of 158,678 deer.

For firearms, the northeastern portion of the state saw the largest harvest increase by 10%, or 20,353 total, from last year’s regional harvest. But this season’s overall harvest is relative to last year’s dismal hunting season across the board.

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For example, the northeast region’s harvest rates are still below the five-year mean by 11%, the northwest is below the mean by 7%, the southwest is below the mean by 2%, with only the central region staying flat.

Regardless of the five-year mean, the northwestern, northeastern, central, and southwestern regions’ harvest numbers almost doubled from what was taken during the first weekend – a total of 55,108.

“We’ve had, especially in kind of the central and southern parts of the state, some pretty strong buck harvest. So, pointing to … hunter selectivity in some of those areas, where they have the ability to shoot antlerless deer,” Froberg said.

By the time the firearms season kicked off in the state, many farmers had harvested their crops, tipping the scale into hunters’ favor in the central and southern parts of the state. Central region firearms harvest preliminarily total was 38,684, and the southwestern region seeing about a 17,835 deer kill.

“We had an exceptional year for early harvest, so there’s not much for crops standing anywhere, so that always helps obviously with hunters and the ability to harvest deer,” Froberg said.

CWD update

The chronic wasting disease zones in southeastern Minnesota offered hunters ample opportunity to take their pick and not feel pressure to shoot at the first deer they saw, according to Froberg. He added that even though many test results are still pending for CWD results around the state, no new cases in non-CWD zones have sparked cause for concern yet.

“Most of positives are in our areas where it looks like we would expect,” Froberg said.

According to Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, around 4% of CWD testing kits that were mailed in via UPS were not delivered to the DNR due to expired labels. As a response, the DNR encourages hunters to request new shipping labels, and to freeze extracted lymph nodes while they wait for the labels to arrive.

Harvest through all seasons

So far, through all hunting seasons, the statewide harvest is around 143,100 deer, a 7% increase from last year’s harvest at this time. Although, harvest totals still remain 3% below the five-year mean statewide.

Froberg primarily credits that years-long, declining trend to the severe winters in 2021-22, and 2022-23 – but changing habitat and predation haven’t done the deer any favors.

“Leading up into that … we just had a lot more snow recently,” Froberg said.

License sales

Despite the bump in harvest this year, participation remains lower than pre-2023 when license sales surpassed 400,000 after the second firearms weekend.

Following the second weekend of firearms opener, license sales were just under 400,000 at 397,422 – relatively flat compared to last year’s sales at 395,982 as of Monday, Nov. 18.

With hunting still open in the 100 series, plus the 3B and blackpowder seasons, there is still opportunity for license sales to top out just over 400,000, as they did in 2023 when sales hit 445,815 – a number that isn’t too far off from 2022 or 2021.

Froberg added that there are still opportunities for hunters to get out and take home a deer with muzzleloader season Nov. 30 to Dec. 15, firearms 300 series from Nov. 23 to Dec. 1, and the late CWD season, Dec. 20-22.