Delaware hunters harvested a record number of deer this past season.
In the 2015-2016 season, hunters harvested 14,681 deer, about 400 more than last year.
Joe Rogerson from the Division of Fish and Wildlife says the recent harvest is part of a growing trend.
“[In] the last five years in Delaware, three of those seasons, including this one, have been in the top five harvests, all time," Rogerson said. "It’s not like this was an anomaly.”
It topped the previous record set in 2004-2005 by only 12 deer.
The bulk of this past harvest this past season consisted of females and antlerless deer. Also, most of it came from Sussex County. Hunters there collected close to 8,000 deer, which was a record for the county.
Rogerson says that fair weather can lead to abundant harvests. Even though the overall deer hunting season is five months long, almost 50 percent of the harvest occurs during an eight-day period in early November.
“When you have a bad weather event during one of those firearm opportunity seasons, if it occurs during that November one, you really do see the overall harvest reduced as far as the total season goes," said Rogerson.
Delaware tends to see larger harvests than states up north, due to milder winters. The high density of farmland also offers the deer plenty of crops to forage from.
Record-keeping of deer harvests began with the first modern-day deer hunting season in 1954, when local deer populations became high enough to support a harvest. Hunters typically use shotguns to kill deer.
