The Michigan Department of Natural Resources is releasing the numbers of deer killed during hunting seasons months earlier.
In the past, a survey in the mail went to a sampling of hunters and harvest numbers estimated from that. This past season, for the first time, the D-N-R required hunters to report deer harvested online within 72 hours.
Chad Stewart is the agency’s deer, elk, and moose management specialist.
Stewart say, “Given that this is the first year doing it and we had over 300 thousand deer successfully reported through the system, we feel that the system performed very successfully.”
The D-N-R will have to correct for those hunters who got a deer, but did not report it.
The harvest for 2022 was 303 thousand deer, down from 395 thousand the year before. But, it’s really not a good comparison because of the different methods used.