Michigan Deer Season Outlook

Deer hunting in U.P. will be mixed

http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20101107/SPORTS/11070310/Deer-hunting-in-U-P-will-be-mixed

Gannett News Service • November 7, 2010
MARQUETTE - In the Upper Peninsula, success in the 2010 firearms deer season will depend largely on whether hunters are in the exposed, gnarly finger poking east from Munising or the sheltered "banana belt" of the southwest.

The narrow eastern projection between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, about 60 miles at its widest, was battered by two vicious winters and heavy snowfall in 2007-08 and 2008-09. Biologists figure those winters killed about 50-percent of the fawn crop and large numbers of mature bucks.

The exceptionally mild U.P. winter of 2009-2010 wasn't enough to give deer numbers there time to recover, and the kill in the eastern U.P. is expected to be about the same as last year - very low.

It's a different story in the southwestern counties - Iron, Dickinson, Menominee and Delta - where geography and geology combine to block the worst of the winds and snow squalls that whistle off Lake Superior.

There biologists say that not only should hunters kill more deer than last season (admittedly a slow one), but also they should see more deer and bucks with better antler development.

In the northwestern U.P., in the Lake Superior watershed west of Marquette, expectations are about as low as usual, with few deer and few hunters. But the rare buck often has a good rack because there's little competition for food.
About 96,000 people hunted the regular firearms season in the U.P. last year, 74,000 in the western counties and 22,000 in the east. They killed 19,179 antlered bucks and 5,800 antlerless deer. (This year there will be almost no antlerless permits issued outside of Drummond Island.)

The disparity between the two halves of the peninsula is illustrated by the buck kill - 16,516 in the west (a success rate of 22-percent) and 2,663 in the east (12-percent). And the effect of two brutal winters also is borne out by statistics, which from 2008 to 2009 showed a 24.5-percent drop in the deer kill in the western U.P. and a stunning 55-percent in the east.

For 23 years, Walter Rauch of Redford Township has spent three or four weekends before the firearms season bow hunting on a 60-acre property his family owns near Newberry.

"Last year was so bad I almost didn't come up this year," he said. "Now I wish I hadn't. I've seen one fawn in six days of sitting with a bow. I hate to break the tradition, but instead of coming up here for the first week of the gun season, I'm going to accept an invitation from some friends to hunt in Washtenaw County."

Terry Minzey, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment wildlife supervisor for the eastern U.P., said, "We're missing three-year classes of bucks, the 31/2, 21/2 and 11/2. They really got hurt by those two bad winters. The survival rate was good going into last winter, and the bucks that are out there should have good antler development, but the numbers are down about 50-percent from 2008."
Minzey can sympathize because he hunts at a camp "just north of Ishpeming, and my observation is that there aren't many deer there."

While hunter numbers in the U.P. have dropped about 30-percent in the past 20 years, Minzey said deer camp surveys show no relationship between the number of bucks killed and the number of hunters, but a strong relationship between the number of deer seen and the number of hunters.

"In 1935, 55-percent of the bucks killed in the U.P. were 31/2 or older," he said. "Today, only 5-percent make it to that age. Now we have three times as many hunters, and in the 1930s most people were shooting simpler guns without scopes. They didn't have four-wheelers to get them into every corner of deer country, and they didn't have compound bows and crossbows. All of those things have helped reduce the age structure of the bucks.

"We've become efficient at killing bucks as soon as they are legal. And in areas where deer are sparse, hunters are far less likely to pass on bucks and to kill the first deer they see."

Robert Doepker, Minzey's counterpart in the western U.P., sympathized: "It sounds like it's pretty bleak over there. But we're predicting an improvement over last year.

"What I'm hearing (from archers) is that people are seeing more deer, and a good proportion of them were bucks. Last winter was the mildest in 30 years as far as snowfall. Normally, we lose 50-percent of the fawns in winter. Last year I'd say it was 20-percent, and more mature bucks made it through."

The bottom line seems to be that if you plan to hunt the Upper Peninsula: Go West.