Success rate for Ohio deer hunters at all-time high
For hunters, the 2022-23 deer season numbers come as pleasant tidings. The 210,977 whitetails checked from Sept. 10 through last Sunday were the highest total in a decade.
The hunter success rate was an alltime high of more than 40%.
The numbers suggest a lot of deer roam the Ohio landscape. And therein lies the rub.
“While having lots of deer can be a benefit to the hunter, it can be a cost to the motorist, gardener, farmer and even the habitat,” wrote Ohio Division of Wildlife deer specialist Clint Mccoy last week in an email offering a management take on the season.
Kendra Wecker, chief of the division, also described the season.
“Ohio is consistently one of the nation's best states for deer hunting, and this season reaffirmed that status,” she said.
Both assessments can be true, of course.
Consider: A numerically successful deer season has to be encouraging to hunters whose continued purchasing of hunting licenses and deer permits are the main driver of revenue on which the wildlife division depends for its existence.
Such seasons, therefore, deserve to be touted in a marketplace where a government agency competes with a myriad of profit-driven entertainments for dollars. However, a pressing concern is that the nearly 211,000 deer amassed was accomplished with about 20% fewer hunters than the last time the 200,000 threshold was surpassed.
In that lies the potential management concern alluded to by Mccoy, because when deer numbers took off in the early 2000s the Ohio Farm Bureau, among other agricultural interests, began insisting that enough herd growth was enough. The division responded with several years of loosened regulations to bring deer numbers down.
At this point, public and institutional complaints about too many deer aren't resounding, though should they arise, they will be heard. Then the possible snag becomes whether enough hunters can be enlisted to knock down numbers that can get high quite quickly.
One of the mechanisms known to curb herd growth is culling does. While Ohio holds to a one-buck annual take even in multiple deer counties, the numbers show that hunters remain focused by and large on bucks.
“In order to begin to curb some of this herd growth, historical data suggests we need to be north of 60% antlerless” among the deer taken, Mccoy wrote. However, “we ended the season this year with 57.3% of the harvest being antlerless deer. While a bit stronger than the three-year average (56.4%), we've got to find ways to encourage more antlerless harvest moving forward.”
The 2023-24 season deer proposals suggest next season will not be different from the one just past.
Season dates, if accepted by the Ohio Wildlife Council, will correspond to those of last season, and a handful of counties will have season limits increased from two to three.
The final 2022-23 take, meanwhile, bested the previous year's numbers of 196,988 by 13,989 for a harvest increase of about 7.1%. Coshocton led all counties with 7,144 deer checked, followed by Tuscarawas with 7,028, Muskingum 5,982, Ashtabula 5,592, Knox 5,477 and Licking 5,467.
Trailing Licking among central Ohio counties was Fairfield with 2,223, followed by Delaware with 1,743, Union 1,114, Pickaway 910, Franklin 818 and Madison 644.
For details on proposed 2023-24 hunting season dates, see the Web site, wildohio.gov.
outdoors@dispatch.com