Expect a hot opening to Minnesota’s archery deer hunting season this weekend

Unseasonably warm weather will add some sizzle this weekend to the opening of what has become deer hunting’s hottest season.

Temperatures are forecast to reach 80 degrees on Saturday for the beginning of Minnesota’s 110-day archery run.

While the warmth might deter some of the state’s approximately 110,000 licensed archery deer hunters from heading out to fields and forests, there’s been no stopping the sport’s expansion recently.

With more deer in the state now than the past couple of years, bow hunters are expected to exceed last year’s strong harvest of 27,690 whitetails.

Paul Burr, acting big game program coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, said the broad legalization of crossbows that began two seasons ago has obviously boosted participation in the season. But even before crossbows gave the sport a big boost, archery’s place in the state’s annual harvest of whitetails had been blossoming.

“We saw it last year when bow hunters were responsible for 16 percent of the overall harvest,” Burr said. “In the early 2000s, archery made up about 7 percent of all harvest.”

The contribution is important because the DNR has been falling short of its annual deer management goal of having hunters kill 200,000 deer every fall. The culling is aimed at minimizing conflicts between deer and people, including automobile crashes and crop damage. Last year, hunters in Minnesota killed about 172,000 whitetails, 78% of which were bagged in November’s nine-day firearms season. While the archery harvest has been expanding, the number of deer taken by firearm is creeping downward.

Last year, archery kills grew by 16% from 2023, while the increase in harvest by gun hunters was 6%. Last year’s overall whitetail harvest in the state, including muzzleloader season, the youth hunt and assorted special hunts, was up 7%.

Minnesota structures its archery season to give bow hunters two months of solitude in the woods before the gun season opens in early November. There’s a perception that those early-season hunters bide their time looking only for big bucks. But the truth is they are helping to harvest adult female deer at a time when wildlife biologists want fewer does on the landscape to control population growth. In 2024, bow hunters accounted for 23% of Minnesota’s harvest of does.

As archery hunters prepare for the opening weeks of the season, John Zanmiller, a bow hunter and active member of Bluffland Whitetails Association, said questions remain about the increase in crossbows.

Before the 2023 season, crossbows were limited to hunters 60 and older and hunters with a physical disability. Now, crossbows are broadly legalized for deer hunting through 2026.

Zanmiller said the DNR is close to delivering a report on possible effects of widespread crossbow use on the state’s deer population and on other types of deer hunting. Some traditional bow hunters, as well as gun hunters, are concerned that crossbow users could gradually dominate the harvest of bucks. In some deer camps, the idea has been floated for the Legislature to create a separate crossbow season that is shorter than the traditional archery season.

Mornings will be cool enough to enjoy, but afternoon temps will chase some hunters out of their stands, he said.