Nearly a quarter of a million hunters are set to grab their guns and stalk through Oklahoma’s woods when deer gun season opens the week before Thanksgiving, according to Micah Holmes with the state Department of Wildlife Conservation.
“There’s more deer hunters out in the woods on opening day of deer gun season than there is at Lewis Field, at the OU football stadium, and at the Tulsa football stadium combined,” Holmes says.
But last season, the number of deer harvested was down nearly 25 percentcomparedto 2011, to only about 88,000. It was the worst deer season since the 1990s.
Years of drought have taken a toll on wildlife populations in Oklahoma, and the people who hunt and fish for them. Less vegetation means less reproduction, fewer fawns, hungrier prey, and withering water holes that harbor disease. Western Oklahoma didn’t get a lot of rain this summer, but Holmes says he’s optimistic about deer season, not because of the amount of rainfall, but the timing of it.
“We expect this to be a good deer season,” Holmes says. “Right now there’s already been about 18,000 deer harvested, and we expect to get up near 100,000. That’s been kind of the historical average for the last several years.”
Jack Barrett owns BDC Gun Room in Shawnee, a small gun shop that has military trucks out front emblazoned with the company logo to make sure you know it’s there. He says deer hunters have been doing fine in central Oklahoma. It’s ducks he’s worried about.
“The part of the drought that’s had the biggest effect is on the duck hunters, especially down in the Little River bottoms on these slues down there,” Barrett says. “What these guys call their little hidden honey holes are just bone, bone dry.”
But he says fall rains will mean a good duck season this year, and a cooler summer has already helped dove hunters hit hard by the drought.
“The first day of dove season is September 1st, and if it’s still hot and dry, particularly to the north of us, there’s no reason for them to come south,” Barrett says.
Back at the wildlife department, Holmes says the outlook is better for quail and turkey, too.
“The one thing we have started to notice is that turkeys in western Oklahoma use roost trees at night. They sleep up in the trees,” Holmes says. “Those trees are often cottonwood trees along a creek, and in some areas it’s gotten so dry that those cottonwoods have died, and so it’ll be a number of years before those young cottonwoods get big enough for turkeys to roost in them.”
Despite the drought, wildlife officials haven’t shortened any hunting seasons or limited the number of animals Oklahomans are allowed to hunt. But Holmes says stricter restrictions could be considered if the drought worsens.
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