The just-concluded 2021-2022 Ohio deer-hunting season produced a kill that exceeds the three-year average and also finished as the second best since the 2013-2014 season.
Preliminary data from the Ohio Division of Wildlife says that for the just-concluded combined deer-hunting season, 196,988 animals were taken for a 6.6 percent increase over the three-year average of 184,746 deer.
The deer kill for the 2020-2021 combined deer-hunting season saw 197,721 deer taken, the most since the 2012-2013 season when 218,910 animals were killed. Going back to 1900, the most-ever number of deer taken in Ohio was during the 2009-2010 combined all-methods season when 261,260 deer were reported as being taken.
“If I remember correctly, back before the season started when I was asked about expectations, I commented that while we felt like the herd was growing, it was going to be very difficult to exceed the 2020-21 harvest because of the near perfect gun season weather and the ‘COVID bump’ in hunter participation we saw last year,” Clint McCoy, the Wildlife Division’s lead deer biologist, said to “Ohio Outdoor News.”
Given those factors, McCoy said also, “we expected a harvest to get close but not quite reach the same level as the 2020-21 total.”
“Well, we got awfully close – actually a bit closer than I expected as the harvest difference from last year is less than 1,000 deer,” McCoy said.
Even the final two days of the 2021-2022 archery deer-hunting season – February 5th and 6th – saw an eye-popping, rounded-off 2,200 deer being taken by archery hunters. That final two-day figure is only about 187 animals shy of the total number of all deer taken during the entire 1970 deer season.
In dissecting the 2021-2022 statistics a little further, McCoy notes that the state’s archery hunters killed 96,209 deer compared to the firearms season take of 79,805 animals.
Another 12,141 deer were shot by participants during the statewide muzzle-loading season. Meanwhile, youths added another 7,634 deer during their exclusive two-day November hunt.
“The big news is where the increases are occurring. I’m not talking about where geographically; rather I’m speaking to the segment of the deer population that is showing up - or not showing up - in the harvest. The buck harvest (88,969) is up 12 percent over the three-year average,” McCoy says as well.
McCoy told “Ohio Outdoor News” that the annual buck kill is “one of our better indicators of what the population on the whole is doing, that it’s we’re growing. Which “by itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing” since the goals for many counties were set for “ moderate herd growth,” McCoy said.
Even so, McCoy does say, questions remain as to where Ohio’s deer herd – and thus the annual deer kill – is going.
“What has me concerned is the fact that the antlerless harvest is not keeping pace, as it is only up about 2.5 percent over the three-year average,” McCoy says.
In fact, says McCoy, the proportion of the deer kill that is antlerless - a major factor predicting population growth- is “at levels we haven’t seen since the late 1990s.”
“Which gave rise to the significant population increases we saw in the early- to mid-2000s,” McCoy says.
Boil it all down, and McCoy says the buck kill indicates the herd is growing while the “antlerless harvest indicates there’s more growth to come.”
“The part that concerns me is that while I feel like we’re sitting in a pretty good spot with the size of the herd in most areas of the state right now, additional growth in some areas (which is likely given the proportionally low levels of antlerless harvest) could get us beyond where we want to be,” McCoy said in conclusion to “Ohio Outdoor News.”
Also, in all, hunters bought 396,370 permits during the 2021-2022 season. That figure is less than the 2020-2021 season number of 409,808 permits sold and well under the 624,908 deer permits sold during the record-setting 2009-2010 combined deer-hunting season.
- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@ameritech.net
JFrischk4@gmail.com
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