REGIONAL— Hunters throughout most of northeastern Minnesota will be looking for antlers this fall when the regular firearms deer season gets underway on Saturday, Nov. 8.
The DNR released the regulations for the 2025 deer hunt last week and antlerless permits will be even harder to come by than last year.
Across the northeastern region, most deer permit areas, or DPAs, will be limited to bucks only. That includes DPAs 117, 118, 119, 130, and 176. Similar to last year, just 25 antlerless permits will be issued in DPAs 109 and 178, while the number of antlerless tags is being cut in DPA 177, from 100 last year to just 25 this season.
Meanwhile, DPA 107, near International Falls, is the one exception in the region, offering 500 antlerless tags, a slight increase over last year.
The conservative bag limits come despite back-to-back exceptionally mild winters, which should have reduced the usual winter mortality.
But DNR Tower area wildlife manager Jessica Holmes said the signs continue to argue for a limited deer harvest. “We’re still seeing mostly single fawns coming out of the spring,” she said.
While the region has seen two straight mild winters, Holmes said adult female deer took a major hit over the two previous winters, which saw exceptional snow depths in much of the area. Deep snow considerably impacts deer mobility in winter, limiting their ability to forage as well as escape predators. Holmes said the region’s deer population had hit rock bottom as of the spring of 2023 and she said it was always going to take time to recover. “One and even two mild winters is not going to pull us out of the hole,” she said. “Three to five mild ones in a row would get us on an upward trajectory,” she said.
Holmes said she relies on hunter reports, deer registrations from prior years, and field observations to help make her bag limit recommendations for those DPAs she manages. She also relies on modeling normally conducted by the DNR, although the agency’s previous modeler has since taken a job elsewhere and Holmes said she’s not aware if he’s been replaced.
“At this point, we’re definitely hearing from hunters that they aren’t seeing deer,” she said.
Holmes said she has been most perplexed by the sharp drop in hunter success in DPA 177, which has long been the most reliable permit area in the Tower work area. “That was always the golden ticket for us,” said Holmes, who sees a combination of factors that may be at play, but acknowledges she’s not certain about the effects of any of them.
“Is it that folks are choosing to hunt somewhere else? Is it fewer hunters across the board? Is it something habitat-wise? It’s a giant question mark to me what’s going on.”
Holmes agreed that wolf predation is certainly a factor, at least in pockets. “But it’s not the only factor,” she said.
DPA 177, which encompasses the Lake Vermilion area and the agricultural areas near Cook, has seen reported harvests fall by roughly two-thirds over the past eight years.
“There’s definitely something going on there,” Holmes said.
While statewide deer harvests have held fairly steady in recent years, at about 170,000 deer, hunter success in Zone 1, which encompasses northeastern Minnesota, has declined from 35 percent as recently as 2017 to just 21.2 percent last year. Not surprisingly, the number of hunters has declined as well, from 161,512 in 2017 to 125,473 last season. The total Zone 1 harvest, at the same time, has fallen from 57,909 to 26,949.
The drop in the number of antlerless permits accounted for much of that harvest decline. Hunters took 25,779 antlerless deer in 2017, compared to just 5,783 last year. The buck harvest has also declined, but much less dramatically. A total of 19.8 percent of hunters bagged a buck in Zone 1 in 2017, compared to 16.8 percent of hunters in 2024.