Kentucky hunters have taken more than 100,000 deer so far this year, with a majority of the harvest occurring during the recently completed modern gun season. The number of deer taken by hunters during the opening weekend of modern gun season was down about 400 animals from the average of the previous three seasons. Harvest for the month of November, most of which comes from hunters during the modern gun season, was down about 5,000 deer from the state’s three-year average.

The decline, however, is a normal fluctuation that deer managers have seen for years.

“We would have to see more than one year of lower harvest before we’d be alarmed,” said Tina Brunjes, big game program coordinator for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources. “One reason I think this year’s harvest may be down, from my own hunting and from what I’ve heard from other hunters out there, is the warm weather during gun season.”

Brunjes said that some hunters reported seeing deer on trail cameras at night, but not during shooting hours. She suspects the warm weather caused more deer to move at night rather than during the warmer daylight hours.

This year’s hunter harvest, while down slightly, still appears to follow a pattern biologists have been seeing for years.

“Season harvest seems to go up, down, up, down, each year in recent years,” said David Yancy, deer biologist for Kentucky Fish and Wildlife. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see it down a bit this year, and we end up with a total around 113,000 or 115,000 deer, and next year we’re back up to 120,000.”

Deer managers aren’t sure exactly why the season harvest total is stair-stepping, but Yancy has a few possible theories. The first is that the pattern is hunter-driven.

“It could be that we kill a lot of deer one year, and the next year there just aren’t as many deer on the ground during hunting season,” Yancy said. “With a smaller herd, the deer are in better condition, with more food to go around. The herd rebounds when female deer have twins more often and a greater number of fawns survive. This leads to another up year for hunters, because there are more deer in the population.”