Deer numbers in Southern Michigan

Today is the last day for Michigan's 2024/25 deer season.

I got out last night and sat for 90 minutes. I saw three but did not have a shot.

Official deer harvest numbers as-of Friday. The antlerless numbers should go up as the numbers for the late "doe" season come tricking in. Eaton County and the counties next to us.

Deer numbers are a squirrelly thing to estimate.

If you go with the estimate of 20 deer per square-mile in Eaton County, then we have roughly 11,000 deer on the hoof at the start of hunting season. If half of them are female, then we are looking at 5500 does. At two-fawns per doe, we only need 2700 does to survive the winter to get us back to that 11,000 deer.

If 20 per square-mile is too many (and it is), then leaving 1500 does would mean that roughly 60% of the harvest would have to be antlerless  and would take us to a more manageable 12 deer per square-mile.

Two years in-a-row of 60% doe harvest leads to some funny dynamics. The number of 1-1/2 year and older does is overwhelmed by the current year's fawns (none of which have antlers). It is a hard-push to get the 60% harvest because it is not economical to pay to have the carcass processed into meat due to the low yield. Hunters do not want to drop-the-hammer on a deer the weight of a slightly obese Airedale.

Things are even more complicated in the field than they are in concept. In reality, many of the antlerless deer are button-bucks. 60% antlerless deer harvested is not identical to 60% doe harvested.

Undocumented harvesters of deer are another factor. Ironically, many of the "hunters" who are undocumented are bucks-only hunters.

All deer that get processed by commercial processors get reported and the regulations say that deer hunters are supposed to report the location of every deer they harvest. In spite of that, there are some deer that don't get reported and the estimates for the unreported numbers are all over the map...say from 2% to 30%.

Also, farmers cull deer outside of hunting season and those numbers are not readily available because it is a PR disaster. Killing does with young fawns leaves the young deer to early, brutal death. Failure to harvest enough does during the hunting season (after the fawns are weaned) means that farmers will have to do it in June and July before the corn gets too tall...when the fawns' age can be measured in weeks.

Finally, nobody really knows how many deer are in-the-field so it is a fool's-exercise to pull an arbitrary number out of the air for a target doe harvest.

Traffic accident rates are an economically germane and well documented proxy for deer population density

If you are managing a property in Southern Michigan, requiring your "guests" to harvest two antlerless deer for every buck that they harvest is not a bad rule-of-thumb until Eaton County's deer population density hits five-per-square mile or drops below 200 deer-vehicle accidents per year.