After a dozen days or so of futile hunting, and only one day before the Minnesota firearms deer season ended, Deidre Kettunen finally got her deer, a doe weighing about 180 pounds. Deidre was hunting in the Lutsen area in a secret spot known only to a few hundred hunters. Photo courtesy of Hal Kettunen
Preliminary deer harvest numbers for the 2018 firearms season indicate that hunters took fewer deer this year than in 2017.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) reported that at the Nov. 18 close of the 2018 firearms season 148,019 deer were harvested, with 78,886 of those being bucks.
All told, that was an 8 percent drop overall, and an 8 percent drop in the buck harvest.
In 2017 hunters took 160,962 deer, of those 86,078 were bucks.
The biggest drop off in numbers occurred in zones 100 and 200.
Last year 57,363 deer were harvested in Zone 1 compared to 49,303 this year. Zone 1 takes up the entire Arrowhead Region and stretches to International Falls and extends almost to the Twin Cities.
Zone 200 reported a harvest of 86,995 deer in 2018 versus 92,099 taken in 2017. Zone 200 extends to the western border of the state and takes up an area even larger than Zone 100.
The other smaller zones (300, 603 and 601) are in the southeastern corner of the state near Rushford and Winona. Zones 300 and 603, and zone 601 had a comparable number of deer harvested between the two years.
After the first nine days hunters had taken 9.5 percent less deer in 2018 than in 2017.
Rain on opening weekend in southeast Minnesota marred the firearms deer-hunting season, which may have caused fewer deer to be taken.
Overall the harvest was down 14.1 percent.
The nine-day season in the 200- and 300-series permit areas ended Sunday, Nov. 11 while the 100-series permit areas of northeast Minnesota continued though Sunday, Nov. 18.
The state held a late season in the 300-series permit area of southeast Minnesota that will run Nov. 17 to Sunday, Nov. 25.
Meanwhile archery hunters have shot 15,688 deer, an increase of 7.1pecent from 2017 over the same year to date time period.
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