APR, QDM, Trophy Hunters, etc....

[DaveT]

I'm no professional writer, but I'm going to do my best to convey my thoughts and beliefs on this topic.

I understand that the northern forests and western plains are not applicable, this post pertains to the rest of the state of MN.

I have deer hunted MN all of my life, a total of 27 years if that counts for anything. I have hunted in a bunch of other states but for the sake of this topic, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri will suffice for comparison purposes.

In all of the above mentioned states I have had better hunting, I will define "better" as , seeing more deer, more bucks, and more mature bucks, than I have ever had in MN. I'm sure there are multiple reasons why this is true, some of those reasons like hunting pressure, private vs. public land, or just plain "tradition" are a few of those reasons.

The main difference I see from these states to ours is age structure. These states have similar populations and percentages of harvest as we do. In fact, Iowa harvests a third of their deer every year compared to MN harvesting 20%. That is a huge difference.

MN estimates it's herd at 1 million and harvests 200,000 deer. Let that sink in.

Iowa estimates it's herd at 300,000 and harvests 100,000.

How is it possible that Iowa puts more deer in the record books every year than we do?

I will explain it to you. Iowa starts every season with a balanced deer herd. Does AND bucks of every age class spread out evenly within it's population. They have a firearms season that starts in December when the rut is all but over, which spreads the harvest out EQUALLY through the herd. Bucks and does of all ages are harvested at the same rate, ensuring that next years herd will have the same age makeup as this year's.

MN has a herd made up of yearlings, does and bucks all lucky enough to have escaped the previous years gauntlet. This is a fact. There are very few bucks that make it to 3 or 4 years of age in MN. This is widely accepted as the minimum age a buck has to reach to start realizing his potential in antler development.

I know that a lot of you don't care about horns, I know you can't eat them. I also know that every one of you that pretends that antlers mean nothing to you will shoot the old ten pointer over the young spike every time. It's OK to covet big antlers, they are amazing, wondrous miracles of nature.

Now to the meat of this post. Something has to be done to improve the age structure of this herd. First and foremost, in my opinion, is to eliminate party hunting. Allowing one hunter to kill 2,3,4, or infinitely more bucks each year is ridiculous, antiquated, and down right selfish and greedy. I don't care how much meat your family needs to survive, and frankly I don't believe you're that destitute.

After that there are a lot of ways we could improve things but each of those would infringe on someone else's hunting. I would suggest laying off the antlerless deer, it has been an all out slaughter on "does" the last 5 years or so, and nobody seems to realize that every 3rd "doe" tag gets put on a buck.

Obviously moving the firearms season out of the rut would help, as well as a lot of other things. But if we may, I'd like to go back to the Iowa stats. 33 percent of their herd dies every year. 20 percent of ours dies every year. That is really the only thing you need to know. It doesn't matter what habitat they have, ag land, private land, swamp, etc. They put more bucks in the "books" than we do, and they harvest half as many as we do. We have 3 times as many deer as they do. Presumably, 3 times as many bucks as they do, yet they still sell every single one of their $600.00 licenses and have a 3 year waiting list.

How is that possible?

It's possible because they have managed, on purpose or not, to set up a system that has opportunity for every hunter, meat or trophy, to shoot the kind of deer they desire.

Our DNR has the ability and the knowledge to construct a deer herd with a balanced age structure. Unfortunately, they don't have the seeds to implement it, because they fear the backlash that may occur. Hopefully, after the experiment in zone 3 proves to be successful, things will change for the rest of us.

TL,DR: deer hunting sucks in MN

[jay83196]

I can't rattle of the statistics you did and I have no idea on the accuracy but frankly I don't care enough to take the time to do the research. I respectfully disagree deer hunting doesn't suck in MN. Sure it could be better but I can show you pictures of multiple big (bodied and racked ) bucks every year where I hunt going back 10 years. I think some things could change but its not as bad as you made out, maybe you hunt in a poor location, or just have bad luck? I hunt two locations and both have great hunting 200mi apart in MN.

The fishing however is another story!

[smnduck]

It's because of the amount of population of people to animal to habitat. I have had great results hunting for deer in this state. Maybe you should move to Ia.

[DaveT]

It's because of the amount of population of people to animal to habitat.

I don' buy this argument. MN has enough habitat to support a million deer but not enough to support a proportionate amount of mature bucks? Try again.

[PurpleFloyd]

I guess I pretty much disagree with everything you said. In order to accomplish what you are saying most of the people I know in this area would not hunt but I guess if solitude is your goal then your post makes sense.

In the end it is the experience of hunting and the coming together of friends and family once a year that really make hunting what it is. Yes, we get nice deer and some go an the wall but that is a bonus and not a requirement in order for us to have a great hunt.

And moving the deer hunt later has a lot od consequences that never seem to get addressed in posts like this so i will pose the following questions-

In the Ag areas the only quality cover the deer get is when the corn is in the field. By moving the season later you basically guarantee that in a large area of the state the deer will have very little cover and the population will take a much bigger hit than it will where it is at. Wouldn't it make more sense to move the season UP 2 weeks instead?Then they would be pre-rut and they would have much more cover and the harvest would be greatly reduced. How will you account for all of the extra deer harvested due to the ability to track them and for the reduction in cover?

Moving the season back would also impact the Pheasant season and have deer hunters taking up the landscape during what is usually the best time of the year to get birds. I enjoy Pheasant season as much as deer season and your idea would be a big problem for me and my guess is PF would lobby hard against it. What is your plan for addressing this conflict?

Lastly. I will just close by saying if the people in my area want to adapt whatever moniker they want to produce bigger deer they can do it without regulation. The fact that they don't tells me it is not a priority to the vast majority of them and the last thing we need is more people telling them how to hunt and forcing alternative ethics on them.

[DaveT]

I have had great results hunting for deer in this state.

So have I, years ago. Especially when I had no out of state experience to compare it to. Go hunt any of the states I mentioned in my post and then come back here and tell me how good we have it.

[DaveT]

Purple

I'm assuming you're out west, if that's the case I excluded your area and the northern part of the state at the top of my post. I wouldn't know how to keep a deer alive out west, the farmers have bull dozed, drain tiled and tilled every inch of ground out there. But that's a rant for another post...

[goblueM]

TL,DR: deer hunting sucks in MN

hahah are you serious? Most states would KILL for the deer hunting in Minnesota. You compared Minnesota to pretty much the 5 best hunting states in the union.

Could hunting in Minnesota be better? Sure. But lets not kid ourselves, it is fantastic right now.

Go hunt in some other states outside the several you named and you will quickly realize that

[B. Amish]

if you're only talking about a portion of the state then why use stats from the entire state?

[john skarie]

To be frank the biggest reason so many deer are shot in Iowa is they have no cover and are easily accessible. How many hunters are willing to go a mile into the woods to hunt in MN?? We have vast areas in MN where the mature bucks you seek live.

You are talking about states that have different habitat, different geography and different weather during the fall (obviously Dec. is warmer in Iowa then MN).

Kind of hard to compare apples to oranges and come up with the idea that emulating Iowa will change MN.

JS

[Surface Tension]

I'm not sure what your numbers are saying because you can't compare MN to Iowa.

1/5 th of the deer in MN are harvested. That leaves 4/5 the the herd. Success rate in MN is around 39%.

That would leave the state of MN with approximately 800,000 deer.

50% of those deer harvested were bucks of all ages. That would mean to shoot any buck in MN your success rate is around 20%. So two hunters out of ten shoot a buck. Should we knock that down to one hunter out of ten? How about one hunter out of 20?

If our harvest ratio is 50/50 buck to doe that would leave us with 400,000 bucks. The DNR could bump that doe harvest even higher if they wanted to.

How many more bucks would you like?

Seems to me there is a big hole in this gauntlet and a lot of bucks are getting through it.

Does are comfortable being seen and use sight to keep distance. Bucks on the other hand are not comfortable being seen therefore far less likely to see them in daylight out in the open. Unless a trail cam is set in the heart of a bucks haunt most of them captured on film is when? At night.

Here is my situation and I'll bet closely matches a lot of hunters.

I have 80 acres of private property to hunt on that is surrounded by private property.

The chances of taking a big mature buck there is slim. Not because smaller bucks have been taken, it is because they do not use that land during daylight hours. Come night and there they are. So I'm not going to say we need more mature bucks because I know they are there. All that would mean is there are more there at night.

Hunting during the rut is what ups the chance of seeing that buck but isn't a given that is for sure.

Its pretty tough to pattern a buck in rut when your not hunting his safe place. Its a matter of rolling the dice and hope he shows up.

I hunt this land because it is close to home. If I was concerned about taking a trophy I know where to go to better my odds.

[picksbigwagon]

I leave Friday after school to head to Iowa for my deer season. I am from one of the greatest counties in Iowa for deer hunting, Allamakee, but I am hunting with friends in Dubuque county. Party hunting is legal in Iowa, in fact we will be party hunting and doing drives all weekend. I will ask the patriarchs of the hunting camp and I am sure I will get a very quizical look back from them, but since I don't have the Iowa hunting regs in front of me right now, what plan does Iowa implement that MN doesn't? Granted Iowa doesn't have intensive harvest zones, but they have do liberal doe tags for residents.

What specifically of the IA DNR management plan balances their herd?

Should MN move the season out of the rut? Probably, I concede that point, thanks to the discussions here on HSO I have realized that we should probably not be firearm hunting in the rut, I get it, but what do these other states do to "balance the age structure of the deer herd"?

When I first started deer hunting in Iowa 5 years ago, we never had to register our deer at a registration station, now we just log in and register the tag. 5 years ago, the state of Iowa had no idea how many deer were taken, How long has MN been requiring registration of the deer? I never had to age my deer in MN, just determine the sex. From the gender only, how can one assess the age structure of 1 million deer?

[B. Amish]

you could argue that the regulations in other states help get older bucks, but go to some of those other states and ask around to find the dead 1.5 year olds. i bet you can't find many. many hunters would be embarrassed to admit to shooting one.

a big part of the equation is the hunter pulling the trigger.

the point is the hunters mindset in other states is different than here. they don't shoot young bucks by choice, not directly because of the regulations in place.

[Getanet]

We get a similar thread every few weeks/months/years on this site. People saying how great the deer hunting is in every other state they've ever visited compared to MN and then suggesting a multitude of changes.

While I certainly think hunting regulations shouldn't be written in stone, I've grown a little tired of everyone slamming MN's hunting. I used to try to engage them in civil conversations, but each year I grow a little less patient.

So, for the guys that say how great their hunting experiences are in every other state in the union, here's a suggestion - keep hunting there and quit hunting in MN. Perhaps with the less pressure MN could someday compete with all the others states it currently is inferior to.

I swear, there are 500K hunters in MN but it seems like there is 1 million guys that like to complain about MN's big buck problem.

[nofishfisherman]

You've excluded the northern forest and western plains, that's got to be at least 75% of the state. That alone destroys any sort of plausible agrument that you can make.

[Jameson]

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Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri

None of these states have our winters. Bad comparison.

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I'm sure there are multiple reasons why this is true,

So, you can't pinpoint one reason either.

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The main difference I see from these states to ours is age structure

Than the question is how do we get more old deer.

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How is it possible that Iowa puts more deer in the record books every year than we do?

Very few of their bucks die from the winter conditions.

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I will explain it to you. Iowa starts every season with a balanced deer herd. Does AND bucks of every age class spread out evenly within it's population. They have a firearms season that starts in December when the rut is all but over, which spreads the harvest out EQUALLY through the herd. Bucks and does of all ages are harvested at the same rate, ensuring that next years herd will have the same age makeup as this year's

Explain how we are to get the same thing when we give everybody a buck tag, and only so many doe tags.

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Something has to be done to improve the age structure of this herd. First and foremost, in my opinion, is to eliminate party hunting.

I didn't copy your reasoning as it only stokes the fire, but I'm now down with eliminating party hunting. I've done plenty of it, including this year, and don't see a need for it.

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I would suggest laying off the antlerless deer, it has been an all out slaughter on "does" the last 5 years or so, and nobody seems to realize that every 3rd "doe" tag gets put on a buck.

Let's look at the conditions of the habitat to make that determination.

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Obviously moving the firearms season out of the rut would help

If it did help it wouldn't be enough to notice the difference, and it could hurt, obviously.

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33 percent of their herd dies every year. 20 percent of ours dies every year

...from hunting. Not many deer are killed by wolves in Iowa. Pretty sure we have a higher winter mortality rate, too.

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Our DNR has the ability and the knowledge to construct a deer herd with a balanced age structure. Unfortunately, they don't have the seeds to implement it, because they fear the backlash that may occur

Actually, I'm not sure if they legally can do a buck-lottery at this time. It would probably take some legislative action.

.....

I don't think deer hunting in all of MN sucks. We have pockets of good hunting. Those pockets are usually where the buck harvest is limited due to lack of access, yet those that are allowed to access choose to take the proper amount of does each year while their buck harvest, and thus the areas buck harvest, is limited.

[harvey lee]

I am with you on this one DaveT 100%.

The outstate areas I hunt ypically are much better than anything Mn has to offer. Yes, in Mn I can shoot a doe or a basket rack or a forkhorn but the odds if you choose to hunt one as far better in other states.

Thats why I choose to do 99% of my hunting elsehwre other than Mn.

yes, every state has cycles with thier deer population but in the end, it is better out there depending of course on what one is looking to harvest.

If I wanted to simple shoot a deer for tablefare, then I would more than likely stay in Mn. But, I do like the odds for a nicer bucks elsewhere.

Nothing much will ever change much here in Mn for larger bucks as the people have to want it and the DNR may lose license sales and they in no way want that to happen. Too much lost revenue.

[Gordie]

Only one question:

Why does it always have to be about putting the buck in the books?

To me thats the problem with the deer hunting in any state its not the deer its the certain few deer hunters.

Its legal to party hunt in Iowa page 22 of Iowa regs

[harvey lee]

I guess my question might be, what's wrong with some wanting to harvest a larger buck?

Just maybe, we could do a better job of managing our deer herd so all could hunt what they choose to. Nothing wrong with shooting a doe or whatever but I see nothing wrong with sometimes wanting to go after a larger variety. It should in no way hurt anyones chances at any deer by allowing a few bucks to grow to thier potential.

It can be done as many states do this.

[student]

Don't expect to see a big buck every time you enter the woods.

Stop comparing reality to what you are seeing on TV.

In whatever you do, you get out what you put in.

[Harmonica Bear]

Is not the basic premise of deer management in Minnesota to reduce the herd size to the carrying capicity of the habitat, thus avoiding major winter kill? The other states mentioned I beleive do not have as severe winter kill as Minnesota. That being the case, even with a management plan in place for older bucks, if the herd is beyond it's habitats carrying capacity those deer will perish anyway? So isn't that the general consensus, if they are going to die in the winter, lets shoot them in the fall and get meat on the table?

I go back and forth on the issue, so I am not arguing for or against, just making a statement.

[nonteepical]

[Please Read Forum Policy Before Posting Again, Thank You]

I do disagree on two points, minnesota hunting is mediocre not quite to the sucking point and i really have a hard time believing we have a million deer as they tell us.

The bottom line is stop killing the yearling buck and stop cross tagging of bucks, shoot your own, if your buddy dosen't get his buck console him, and explain to him it's hunting, and it's no guarantee you will shoot a deer just because he paid for a liscence and that you'll share yours with him, then take your hanky back.

[Gordie]

I guess my question might be, what's wrong with some wanting to harvest a larger buck?

Just maybe, we could do a better job of managing our deer herd so all could hunt what they choose to. Nothing wrong with shooting a doe or whatever but I see nothing wrong with sometimes wanting to go after a larger variety. It should in no way hurt anyones chances at any deer by allowing a few bucks to grow to thier potential.

It can be done as many states do this.

Yes I belive that Minnesota is trying to do this in certain areas and the way the hunting laws work now we all do have that choice.

I just get tried of guys saying how bad deer hunting is in Minnesota when they dont see a record book buck or are not able to harvest a deer.

[candiru]

When you really think about it MN does not have that much area that is capable of producing large bucks on a consistant basis. Too far north, not enough cover, not enough good food, wolves, winters, 500,000 hunters and the metro area all limiting factors.

[Harmonica Bear]

Not to mention when you do go out of state (as I have), you most likely are going to the best deer hunting area that state has to offer. Where I hunt Lake of the Woods County (there are worse areas) certainly isn't Houston County.