188,000 deer harvested! That is insane. It looks like a fairly significant drop in harvest but that is still a very substantial take. I can not imagine taking that many animals in a season like that. That is a lot of meat being put on the ground. Good for those Missouri hunters. Hopefully they will be able to get the dip in harvest figured out but it could just possibly be a glitch in the trend. When you harvest that many animals, a drop in harvest of 4000 does not seem like that big of a deal.

I think it might be cyclical and dependent on the amount of acorns in the woods.  If there is a shortagage of acorns then I suspect the numbers will go back up.  Couple of points of interest (at least to me) on this.

They said the acorns kept the deer deep in the woods.  This tells me that the hunters are not pursuing the deer very hard.  Probably not pushing very far to get them.

The other thing is if hunters are not successful, will they give up and not come back the next year to hunt?

Yeah, the sheer number of deer taken is mind boggling.

That's pretty funny.  Vermont's entire deer herd is estimated at around 120,000 total, give or take. 

That goes to show the animal rights nuts as to how good we are now at conserving our species.  The whitetail #'s are incredible across the country.

That's an interesting article and shows what things are like in another part of the country.

Here in Michigan, the stated goal of our DNR is to maintain a herd size of just over 1 million deer.

Last year (2009) 685,000 hunters went afield chasing the "Wiley Whitetail" as I like to call him.

The 2009 harvest was 215,000 deer, which was down from 250,000 in 2008.

I just checked the latest figures and the check stations (voluntary stop) are reporting slightly lower numbers than 2009 - anywhere from 5-20% lower.