BY DALE BOWMAN For Sun-Times Media December 13, 2013
Points on deer should be on their racks, not racked up in statistics.
But the historic drop in harvest by Illinois firearm hunters in 2013 makes a point all its own — a sharp one.
In retrospect, I wonder whether the deer skull and skeleton found while upland hunting this fall was symptomatic more than symbolic, as firearm deer harvest in Illinois saw a historic decline. Hunters looked at wintry, often-deerless, landscapes. | Dale B
It only took the low harvest of 74,191 deer during the two firearm seasons Nov. 22-24 and Dec. 5-8 to go from the anecdotal evidence of hunters’ field reports to the reality of a 25 percent drop in harvest from last fall, when 99,546 deer were taken by firearm hunters.
Illinois’ deer herd is out of whack, and so is management.
Yes, weather was tough. I hunted all seven days, and all seven — the first time I remember that happening — had tough weather (rain/snow, high winds, bitter cold, snow/sleet/freezing rain or all of that).
Weather affects the time hunters spend in the field and how hard they hunt. But while hunters might reduce their total hours of effort, they are in the field during the prime evening or morning hours, even in miserable weather.
More than weather and more than seemingly unlimited doe permits in some counties and overharvest is affecting Illinois’ deer herd. My guess is that outbreaks of epizootic hemorrhagic disease the last two years were worse than calculated by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and that coyotes have an ongoing and growing impact with predation on fawns.
But I don’t know for certain, nor do other hunters or wildlife professionals, what caused the historic drop in harvest. But we damm sure need to find out.
The first step in finding out should have been to make an emergency closure of late-winter seasons for antlerless deer and to shorten the archery season — say, to Jan. 1. It was too close to the season to close muzzleloader season, but the other seasons could have been handled in plenty of time in the age of social media.
But after several days of mulling the historic drop in firearm harvest (figures were released late Thursday), IDNR director Marc Miller made a misstep. He continued the muzzleloader season, which ends Sunday; the bow season, which runs through mid-January; and the split winter antlerless seasons Dec. 26-29 and Jan. 17-19.
Miller’s formal assessment was this: ‘‘Once all deer seasons are complete, our biologists will evaluate deer-management goals on a county-by-county basis to achieve stability in our deer herd.’’
See Rest of article at http://www.suntimes.com/sports/outdoors/24345467-452/historic-drop-in-harvest-in-firearm-deer-seasons-indicates-need-for-change.html
