One challenge we face as deer hunters is visualizing the incredible number of whitetails harvested each fall during individual states’ archery and firearms seasons.
It’s hard to see that big picture, given that most of us hunt relatively small parcels with a few friends or family members. Our close-knit groups typically shoot three to 10 deer, depending on the group’s size. Given those limited perspectives, it’s difficult to grasp the size of statewide deer kills that often number in the hundreds of thousands.
Texas, for example, almost always leads the nation in whitetail harvests. According to records compiled by the National Deer Association, Texas hunters killed 852,448 whitetails in 2020, or roughly 0.85 million deer.
To picture that, consider this: To pack that many whitetails into the 80,000-capacity Jerry World Stadium (AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas), you’d need to squeeze 10.65 deer into each of the stadium’s bright blue folding seats.
Wouldn’t that be a sight?
A Deer Per Second
Wisconsin, another top whitetail state, makes it possible to look at its harvest totals another way. Guess how many deer get shot per minute — on average — during Wisconsin’s annual nine-day gun season, the state’s largest and oldest participatory outdoors event?
Such calculations aren’t difficult. Wisconsin sets its daily hunting hours to the minute, which ends up being roughly 10 hours of legal hunting per day, or 90 hours per gun season each November. Therefore, Wisconsin’s gun-deer season is open for 5,400 minutes, or 324,000 seconds. That means hunters shot nearly 33 deer per minute during Wisconsin’s 2021 season, or a little more than one deer every two seconds (0.55), for a total of 177,667 deer. (Archers and crossbow hunters added another 97,329 deer to those totals during their nearly four-month season in 2021.)
Those totals are impressive, but Wisconsin’s November 2021 gun season wasn’t close to a state record. During Wisconsin’s record-setting gun-deer season in November 2000, hunters shot 1.36 deer per second, and nearly 82 deer per minute, for a total of 442,581 deer.
Remember those figures the next time you hear someone complaining that Wisconsin doesn’t have enough deer. Just imagine how many more car-deer collisions Wisconsinites would endure if hunters weren’t shooting a deer every two seconds during gun season.
Just for fun, let’s run the totals for Wisconsin’s peak gun-deer seasons, roughly 1999 through 2003. Hunters during those five years shot/registered 1.07 deer per second during the November gun season, or 64.26 deer per minute, for 1.735 million deer, an annual average of 347,023 deer per season.
For those keeping score, those totals don’t include bowhunting kills, special antlerless hunts, special CWD hunts, muzzleloading seasons, Native American tribal hunts, or crop-damage culls. Those harvests were left out because they can’t be broken into convenient time slots.
How Many Shots Fired?
Here’s another interesting question: How many shots did hunters fire to bag all those deer? After assessing studies of small, tightly regulated deer hunts reviewed by researchers in Wisconsin, Illinois, South Carolina and Ontario, I calculated that hunters fired an average of 3.45 shots for each deer bagged. Using that average, Wisconsin hunters fired more than 5.99 million rounds during the 1999-2003 gun seasons, or roughly 1.2 million shots per season.
With all that lead and copper flying around, you would think rural Wisconsin would be a dangerous place during the nine-day season. Not so. Highways remain far more dangerous over any nine-day period. Of those 5.99 million shots fired during Wisconsin’s 1999 through 2003 deer seasons, 104 bullets hit people, including 12 that caused fatalities. Even so, most of those wounding shots were self-inflicted, or fired by members of the same hunting party.
That’s still too many, but let’s get further perspective. With 12 shooting fatalities those five seasons, that’s 2.4 deaths per year among an average of 668,183 licensed hunters afield.
Venison Poundage
On a happier note, deer provide countless meals of nutritious venison for hunters, their families, friends and charity groups. According to calculations by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the average whitetail weighs 107.56 pounds when field dressed, and renders 52.19 pounds of venison. For the record, antlered bucks averaged 129.7 pounds field dressed, and rendered 62.51 pounds of venison. Antlerless deer averaged 92.27 pounds field dressed and rendered 45.05 pounds of venison.
Using those averages, Pennsylvania hunters packed away 22.71 million pounds of venison after its 2020 deer seasons, which produced 435,180 deer, including 174,780 bucks. Likewise, Michigan hunters in 2020 packaged up 21.43 million pounds of venison; Wisconsin, 17.74 million pounds; and Missouri, 15.51 million ponds. Texas, however, led the way with 44.49 million pounds of processed venison.
No matter if it’s steaks, roasts, or ground meat, that’s a lot of venison.
And no matter how we try to picture mass quantities of deer, we know only one thing with certainty: We can’t put a monetary value on our annual deer hunts. Those efforts will always be priceless.
Top 5 Whitetail Harvests of 2020
State Total Bucks Antlerless
Texas 852,448 449,933 402,515
Pennsylvania 435,180 174,780 260,400
Michigan 410,639 219,387 191,252
Wisconsin 339,901 158,236 181,665
Missouri 297,214 140,855 156,359
For a closer look at the numbers, check out the National Deer Association’s 2021 Deer Report, a comprehensive update on the status of deer populations and deer hunting.
