Feast or famine is a prevailing theme among hunters when they provide their annual post-deer season accounts to friends, family, and anyone else who will listen. The stories from proud hunters who happily supply their neighbors with venison steaks, summer sausage, and jerky are quickly countered by the perplexed glares of less-than-lucky hunters whose empty game freezers speak volumes.
Rational deer hunters realize deer hunting success is never guaranteed, and most hunters take the “better luck next year” approach when they don’t harvest a deer. What’s harder for hunters to accept, however, is how they can do their preseason homework, spend hours upon hours in the field, and not even see a deer — all season.
Many Delaware deer hunters can’t relate to the concept of seeing no deer all season, but trust me, more than one hunter told me the same deerless story.
Surprisingly, although some Delaware hunters reported that the 2012-2013 deer season was one of the worst in recent memory, actual harvest statistics tell a different story. Last month the DNREC Division of Fish and Wildlife released their harvest totals for the 2012-2013 deer season, and the numbers show the eighth highest Delaware deer harvest on record.
Hunters harvested 13,302 deer during the 2012-2013 season, slightly less than last year’s total (13,559), but near the last five year’s average of 13,551. Joe Rogerson, deer and furbearer biologist of the Division of Fish and Wildlife, attributes the slight drop in the deer harvest total to two factors: the Division’s ongoing deer management program and the occurrence of epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD), a viral infection that can be lethal to deer.
Rogerson expected the 2012-2013 harvest to be lower than previous years because of the Division’s efforts to reduce Delaware’s overall deer herd. “Delaware’s highest deer harvest occurred during the 2004-05 season, followed by a gradual but steady drop in numbers that mirrored the declining deer population. As a result we expected hunters to harvest fewer animals because they would be encountering fewer deer while afield,” Rogerson said in DNREC-issued press release.
Sussex County deer hunters provided me the reports in which they saw few or no deer, and the harvest statistics support their reports. Sussex County deer harvest totals for 2012-2013 were down 8.4 percent from last year (7,041 in 2011-2102 to 6,448 in 2012-2013), which may be attributed to concentrated outbreaks of EHD near Georgetown and Milton. Near these areas, deer harvest totals were down 22 percent and 26 percent, respectively, so it is likely that hunters in highly affected areas saw significantly fewer deer.
Although the harvest totals were affected by EHD, Division of Fish and Wildlife Wildlife Species Program Manager Rob Hossler expects the deer population to rebound quickly. “The summer and fall of 2007 was another bad year for EHD in Delaware, and we saw similar declines in the deer harvest during the first hunting season following the outbreak,” Hossler said. “The deer population rebounded, and two years later the harvest returned to levels seen before the outbreak.”
The 2012-2013 deer harvested statistics also show 52 percent of the total deer harvested in Delaware were female, and 72 percent of the harvested total were classified as antlerless deer (does, button bucks, or bucks with antlers less than three inches long).
With only about a quarter of the deer harvested during the 2012-2013 season having antlers measuring more than three inches, some hunters are asking if the Division is considering implementing any additional antler size restrictions so more bucks can reach maturity or trophy size. According to Rogerson, the Division currently does not see a need to impose mandatory antler restrictions. “From biological data we collected several years ago, the percentage of antlered bucks harvested by Delaware hunters that are yearlings is around 50%, so approximately half of the bucks that hunters harvest are 2.5 or older,” Rogerson said. “We prefer to educate hunters about the benefits of not harvesting yearling bucks rather than regulate it.”