Minnesota's muzzleloader deer season surpassed low expectations with a harvest of nearly 6,000 deer through Wednesday, up 11.5 percent from the same period last year.
The specialty hunt, ending Sunday, has provided a turnaround of fortunes compared to an overall down year in the state. With some archery hunting left to go and two special firearms hunts arranged for later this month in southeastern Minnesota to combat chronic wasting disease, the combined 2018 whitetail harvest stood Wednesday at 181,100. That's 5.3 percent lower than the statewide total from the same period in 2017 when more than 191,000 deer were shot.
Erik Thorson, area wildlife supervisor for the Department of Natural Resources in Park Rapids, said the 2018 deer harvest was disappointing, but it improved as time went on. Hunters just couldn't overcome a patently slow start to the traditional firearms season, when most Minnesota deer are killed. Harvest for the opening four days of the nine-day firearms season totaled 84,000 deer, down 10 percent to 25 percent depending on where you were hunting.
"It's hard to recover from something like that,'' Thorson said. "The first four days are very important to the final harvest number.''
DNR's big-game managers were expecting the opposite for the opener based on universal signs of greater deer abundance in the state. Preseason reports showed stable populations and early-season archers bolstered the projections by exceeding 2017 harvest levels by double-digit margins.
The year-over-year harvest improvement posted by muzzleloader hunters was the type of experience that had been projected for all whitetail hunters in the state.
"It's encouraging and more with what we were expecting,'' Thorson said.
Across the board in Minnesota this year, including the youth hunt, 92,239 bucks were taken through Wednesday. The buck harvest was 7 percent less than a year ago for the same period.
