Michigan’s 2022 deer hunting season ended Jan. 31 highlighting a year of firsts, including a requirement for hunters to report their deer harvest within 72 hours.
Because of declining response rates with the traditional deer hunter survey, Michigan required reporting deer harvests to improve harvest estimates and timeliness of deer season reports in the future. Supporting the new harvest reporting process was the launch of the DNR Hunt Fish app.
For 2022, 586,595 hunters purchased a deer license, about 1% less than in 2021. The first year of electronic harvest reporting resulted in a reported harvest total of 303,087 deer.
Sanilac County led the state with a reported 8,150 deer harvested, followed by Montcalm (8,103), Newaygo (7,422), Jackson (7,141) and Lapeer (6,976) counties.
There were 182,586 deer reported harvested in the southern Lower Peninsula, 97,714 reported from the northern Lower Peninsula and 22,787 reported from the Upper Peninsula.
A full harvest report summary dashboard available online.
Most harvest reports came during the firearm season, with 154,598 deer reported taken Nov. 15-30, of which 45,834 deer were reported taken on opening day nearly 30% of the firearm season harvest and over 15% of the overall deer season harvest.
The total reported for archery season was 95,125 deer. The combined total of harvest reports in firearm and archery seasons, 250,083 deer, made up 82.5% of the total harvest.
A majority, 56.76%, of the harvest reports that came through were for antlered deer, with 172,044 legal bucks and 131,043 antlerless deer reported. There were 23,123 hunters who reported harvesting more than one buck.
The online harvest reporting system discerns types of antlerless deer reported. Of the harvested deer reported as antlerless, 83% were reported as does, 6.2% as doe fawns, 8.9% as buck fawns, 1.4% as bucks with antlers less than 3 inches and 0.5% as bucks with shed antlers.
Supporting the new harvest reporting process was the launch of the Michigan DNR Hunt Fish app to purchase licenses, manage hunt drawings, get DNR updates and more. Reports also came in through the DNR website, in-person at customer service centers and by phone.
Nearly 83% of hunters reporting a deer harvest completed their report in under five minutes. The DNR website proved to be the most common way for reports to be submitted, with over 86% of reports received through the website, while the app accounted for 13% of reports. In total, 208,408 individual hunters submitted a harvest report.