By Elizabeth Baier
Minnesota Public Radio News

A late firearm deer hunting season ends Sunday in southeastern Minnesota. Statewide, the deer harvest is down 7 percent this year, but there are still plenty of hunting opportunities: Muzzleloader season begins Saturday and runs through December 15, and bow hunting runs through the end of the year.

Officials with the Department of Natural Resources say hunters registered 143,000 deer during the regular firearms season.

They expect hunters to take an additional 4,500 deer by the end of the late firearms season, which ends this weekend in part of southeastern Minnesota.

The DNR’s big game program leader, Leslie McInenly, said overall, that’s still down compared to the same period last year.

She said the weekend weather for the deer gun season likely limited deer movement and how much time hunters spent outdoors.

“Last year we had a real ideal opener and nice weather,” she said. “It seems like each weekend this year has been challenging for their own reasons. Opening weekend was really windy and we’ve had wind and rain and last weekend was really cold.”

McInenly said the deer numbers are still preliminary and may change as hunters head outdoors for muzzleloader and the rest of the bow season in December.

“We won’t see huge increases, but I expect looking at our numbers so far, we’ve been down fairly consistently 5 to 7, 5 to 8 percent for the harvest as we’ve been tracking it, and that’s probably where we’ll end up at the end of the year,” she said.

Deer harvest numbers were especially down in northeast Minnesota this year.

Twenty-five percent fewer does were killed compared to last year. But McInenly says the DNR set a conservative harvest there because severe winter weather last year likely put a dent in the deer population.