LANSING, Mich. — Over the past two years, one in four deer shot in Michigan were taken during the first three days of firearm deer season, according to the Michigan DNR, making the stretch an important one in terms of conservation.
As of Tuesday afternoon, the state reported a harvest of more than 75,000 deer from firearm season, bringing the total harvest to more than 172,000, a number that will continue to climb throughout the remainder of Michigan’s deer seasons, including firearm.
To view the DNR's live deer harvest report, including county-by-county numbers, click here.
Currently, deer license sales and the total deer harvest as of Nov. 19 are up slightly as compared to last year (around 1% and 3%, respectively), according to the DNR.
A warm fall and opening weekend likely contributed to these statistics, says Chad Zimmer, owner of The Outdoorsmen Pro Shop.
“I grew up hunting. Typically, I would hunt in the snow on November 15,” Timmer said. “We're seeing weather where you can almost be out there in a T shirt.”
The hotter, drier weather allowed farmers to harvest their corn earlier in the season, meaning deer had fewer places to hide.
Timmer says his Sparta location was “significantly busier” this fall in terms of foot traffic: more hunters were heading to the fields and woods.
While Montcalm and Newaygo counties currently lead West Michigan in terms of total harvest, many southern counties hit by EHD, a viral disease that affects white-tailed deer, are lagging behind. Relatively speaking, Van Buren, St. Joseph and Kent counties are underperforming. The Michigan DNR confirmed outbreaks of EHD in all of them.
“EHD decimated a lot of those counties, so you just have less deer to harvest right now,” Timmer said. “Unfortunately it’s going to take a few years for that to bounce back. Just nature.”
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Regarding the ratio of antlered to antlerless deer, the former is outpacing the latter at a rate of two to one. If the total deer population in the Lower Peninsula is to be brought down to a more manageable amount, the DNR needs the gap to close. To some extent, they believe it will.
“It's really typical to see hunters focusing on antlered deer early in the firearm season,” said Chad Fedewa, a DNR deer management specialist. “Most years we don't see that shift to focus on antlerless deer until about Thanksgiving weekend.”
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In 2024, state regulators made several tweaks to Michigan’s deer seasons, including adding a new extended late antlerless firearm season. Still, “there’s only so many levers” the state can pull, Fedewa says. Hunter habits will need to change, too.
“If we could get more people to shift and harvest more antlerless deer earlier in the season, I think that would go a long way,” he said.
