REGIONAL—High winds, chilly temperatures, and a bucks-only bag limit combined for a dramatic drop in the pace of harvest during the first four days of the 2014 firearms deer season. “I heard one shot in the course of two days,” said Steve Foss, of Ely, who spent Saturday and Sunday thirty miles up the Echo Trail.

While that’s challenging country for hunters even in a good year, many other hunters reported similar experiences in places that normally sound like a shooting gallery on a more typical opener. “I only heard a few shots all morning,” said Cliff Wagenbach, who hunted with a party of eight just outside of Tower.

It was much the same story across the area as hunters universally reported one of the quietest openers in many years.

While Wagenbach’s party finished the weekend with two bucks, that’s about half their usual tally for opener. Then again, said Wagenbach, their weekend tally should have been three. He’s still kicking himself for missing a nice spike buck Sunday afternoon. “It was an easy shot, about forty yards out, walking right towards me,” he said. “It was the first one I’ve missed in years.”

While Wagenbach and his party usually have plenty of company out in the woods, that wasn’t the case this year. “It was pretty slow,” he said. “But we expected it to be that way with the deer herd way down.”

Phil Hart at the Gateway Store, near Lake Kabetogama, said activity in northwestern St. Louis County was surprisingly limited for a firearms deer opener. “In the seventeen years we’ve had the store, this was the slowest we’ve seen, both for people getting deer and for the number of hunters. I think a lot of hunters are meat hunters and they went elsewhere, where they could shoot a doe. It’s kind of tough from the tourism angle.”

Of the hunters who did venture out in the Kabetogama area, Hart said most reported seeing does and fawns, but relatively few bucks. “We’ve only registered six deer since opener,” Hart said late Monday. “Years ago, we’d register 35-40 a day the first week.”

Hart notes that the falloff certainly isn’t due entirely to lack of hunter success. He said the switch to online or called-in deer registration has been the biggest factor behind the decline in in-person registrations.

While most hunters failed to bag their buck for opener, there were the usual success stories. Billy Griffith, age 15, of Embarrass, shot his first deer ever about 8:30 on Saturday morning near Babbitt. “It was walking across my shooting lane,” recalls Billy. “When I grabbed my gun, it looked up at me, so I stopped moving. When he started walking again, I got the gun up and shot it between two trees.”

Ryan Milton, age 10, of Vermilion Lake Township, bagged his first deer, a six-point buck, while hunting with his grandfather, Vince Vesel, near Tower.

Others relied on interesting encounters to make the weekend memorable. Foss, up on the Echo Trail, said he watched a buck aggressively pursuing a doe through the woods. “Snot and saliva were flying from the buck. Guess he had something on his mind,” he said. Foss never had a shot at the buck, but it’s just another reason for him to head back to the woods.

Hunters registered a total of 1,968 deer from local deer permit areas through the first three days of the hunt. That’s less than half of the 4,329 deer registered during the same period last year. While much of the drop is due to the lack of antlerless harvest this year, even the buck harvest was down over 40 percent in the area.

Tower Area DNR Wildlife Manager Tom Rusch had predicted the numbers would be down sharply and that was borne out in the data. The DNR had already predicted one of the lowest harvests in decades, but Rusch said the high winds kept deer mostly bedded down, particularly on Saturday. “There was not a lot of movement,” he said. “Weather is the ultimate dictator of deer movement and they laid low on account of the wind.”

The winds, combined with high temperatures in the 20s, likely limited the amount of time hunters spent in their stands as well. “It didn’t make for good sitting, that’s for sure.”

Wolf hunt

Wolf hunters made progress towards this year’s quota during the first weekend of the firearms hunt. As of Wednesday, the DNR reported 37 wolves were registered in the northeast zone, with 83 registered in the northwest.