Duluth bowhunters take a record 592 deer

[Lee Borgersen]

Published January 16 2011

 
 
Duluth bowhunters take a record 592 deer
According to preliminary figures for the 2010 Duluth city deer hunt, bowhunters took 592 deer, topping the 2009 record of 586 deer. Of the deer taken in 2010, 508 (84 percent) were antlerless and 84 (16 percent) were bucks.
By: Sam Cook, Duluth News Tribune


 
Bowhunt numbers
  According to preliminary figures for the 2010 Duluth city deer hunt, bowhunters took 592 deer, topping the 2009 record of 586 deer. Of the deer taken in 2010, 508 (84 percent) were antlerless and 84 (16 percent) were bucks.

This was the sixth year of the hunt, which is held to control the deer population within the city. It is held from mid-September to Dec. 31 each year, at the same time as statewide bowhunting season.

The 2010 figures are not final, said Brian Borkholder, who keeps hunt statistics for the Arrowhead Bowhunters Alliance, the group that conducts the hunt for the city. Borkholder wasn’t sure when final figures would be available.

In the past six years, Duluth bow hunters have taken a total of 3,173 deer in the city hunt, according to ABA figures. The percentage of antlerless deer has ranged from 80 to 86 over those years. Hunters must shoot at least one doe before shooting a buck in the hunt, and many hunters shoot more than one doe.

Phillip Lockett, president of the ABA, said the 2010 hunt went smoothly. Hunters were especially effective in so-called “hotspot” areas, where selected hunters take deer in small areas of populated neighborhoods.

The ABA plans to hold the hunt at about 340 hunters, Lockett said. Fifteen hunters were turned away last year.

Kevin Scharnberg is coordinator of the hunt for the city of Duluth.

“I’ve been doing this three years,” Scharnberg said. “This was the smoothest year that I know of.”

As successful as the hunt has been, deer are still plentiful in the city.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like if those deer hadn’t been eliminated,” Scharnberg said.

Rich Staffon, area wildlife manager at Cloquet for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, is pleased with the harvest and thinks the hunt is being conducted well.

“The only thing bugging me is, it seems like we should be seeing a decline in the deer population — and the harvest,” Staffon said. “We’re maybe right at the cusp of that.”

He cited three possibilities for increasing the harvest.

“One, do we need to put more hunters in the hunt?” he said. “Two, do we need more of these hotspot hunts because that’s where they’re getting at the most problematic deer? And three, do we need to force them (hunters) to take more antlerless deer? But we’re already at 84 percent. How can you do much better than that?”

Mike Tusken, deputy chief of the patrol division for the Duluth Police Department, said the department has only recently begun to track car-deer crashes separately from other traffic accidents. But he thinks the hunt has helped reduce the deer population.

“A lot of our hunts are targeted to places we have neighborhood complaints and traffic issues,” Tusken said. “As an example, the 8500 block of Grand Avenue, below Spirit Mountain. We used to hit deer there just about daily, and now we’re very rarely seeing car-deer collisions.”



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[Bobby Bass]

And still more around  not uncommon at all to see deer in the middle of the day and my wife has to stop every night and let them cross before she can come up our drive.