According to Outdoor News, deer harvests are at an all time low this year. Down 8% from 2012, the 2013 harvest shows the lowest numbers Minnesota has seen since the 1990’s! Minnesotans are blaming many factors on this sudden drop in harvest numbers such as: the 4 point restriction in southeastern Minnesota, the weather and environment, and the amount and types of firearm licences sold.

The APR restrictions, or the antler point rule, is a rule only known to southeastern Minnesotans down to the Minnesota Iowa border. This rule states that if you are older than 18, the antlers must be checked to see if the buck has 4 points on one side of his antlers before killing it. Put in effect in 2010, the APR restriction was added to leave smaller bucks alive, so that in the up and coming years, they’d grow more points on their antlers. As shown in the KSTP article on farmers and deer hunting, a year before this was put in effect, in 2009, the killing for southeastern Minnesota was 23,043. When the law was placed in 2010, the harvest dropped all the way to 19,444, while in 2011: 17,869. Southeastern Minnesotans are seeing this number continuously drop over the past several years. Hunters aren’t sure if they like this rule yet or not. They get bigger deer, but less of a chance of a kill. With all the extra small deer, crops have had millions of dollars of damage because of the deer feeding off of them. APR restrictions, along with other issues, have definitely caused multiple problems in this area of Minnesota.

Weather, along with environmental factors, could be another main cause in the drop of deer harvesting. The DNR article on firearm hunting states that the 2012 opening weekend weather was what hunters would describe as perfect: little wind and the perfect amounts of sunlight. Along with the perfect weather, practically all the corn crops were picked. Having no corn causes deer to walk around woods more and not look in the fields for food. As expected with these great conditions, the state of Minnesota harvested over 90,000 deer in the 2012 opening firearm weekend. Now in 2013, hunters expected this same kind of luck, sadly, this year wasn’t the case. 2013’s opening firearm weekend had terrible conditions. Winds were gusting up to thirty miles per hour and it was cloudy with barely any sun peaking through. Deer have been known to not come run around woods when it’s windy, they prefer to lay down in valleys in conditions like this. On the Friday, before opening weekend, southeastern Minnesota was awoken with rain showers and muddy woods. From what I saw, almost half of all corn crops were still standing! With these terrible hunting conditions, Minnesotans only harvested 77,008 deer; down a mere 8% from 2012. Because most hunters only hunt through opening weekend, this harvest practically determines the rest of the season’s outcome. Weather and environmental factors have caused a stir in deer hunters hunting experiences in the last year.

Along with weather being a problem, the amount and type of firearm licences could be pushing the harvest numbers down. Dave Orrick, of The Twin Cities's website claims that in 2013, 445,385 firearm deer licenses were sold to Minnesotans. While in 2012, almost 522,000 were sold. This sudden drop has certainly caused less deer to be killed over the past season. Stores have also noticed that more doe tags are being sold to hunters around the state. More does being killed means that in the next year, there will be less fawns. Maybe less hunters are purchasing licenses because of bad luck they've had in past years. Licenses are a big factor in the slow drop of harvest numbers.

The APR four point restriction, weather and environmental factors, and the amount and type of deer licenses sold have definitely played a role in the sudden drop in deer harvesting in the past year. As Outdoor News shows, the 2013 killings have dropped 8% since 2012. This has caused a problem in many hunters lives. As far as we know, there isn't much we can do to increase these numbers.