Outdoors: Busy week ahead for Ohio deer hunters

Nov. 27—On Monday morning, before the first customer comes through the door at Wixey Bakery, before the first flight of the day departs from Eugene F. Kranz Toledo Express Airport, and well before the sun peeks over the eastern horizon, there will be thousands of individuals awake, alert, and attentive as they anxiously count down to the official start of Ohio's gun season for deer.

Statewide, there will be close to 300,000 hunters out in the woodlots, fields, creek bottoms, forests, and hill country, poised to take part in the biggest hunting event of the year in the Buckeye State — Opening Day.

The gun season phase of the overall white-tailed deer hunting period in Ohio opens at 7:09 a.m., 30 minutes before sunrise as dictated by the hunting rules and regulations in Ohio. Legal hunting hours extend until 30 minutes after sundown, which takes place at 5:04 p.m. on Monday. The Ohio gun season for white-tailed deer runs through Sunday, with a bonus weekend of gun hunting taking place Dec. 18-19.

"Deer are far and away Ohio's most important game animal," said Kendra Wecker, chief of the Ohio Division of Wildlife. "Ohio is a deer-rich state that has built a national reputation for quality deer hunting based on sound long-term wildlife management of this important resource."

Ohio's deer herd is estimated at around 700,000 animals. If the preliminary results from the archery season are any indication of what gun hunters should expect, then the outlook is very positive. Since the Ohio archery season opened in late September, there have been 75,513 deer harvested by archery hunters, including 43,109 bucks.

Last season, hunters in the Buckeye State harvested 92,310 whitetails during the two phases of the gun season. There were 71,651 deer taken during the week-long portion of the gun season, and an additional 14,864 during the bonus weekend of gun hunting, and 5,795 taken during the 2020 two-day youth gun weekend. The pandemic got much of the credit for the fact the 2020 harvest was about 10 percent higher than the average of the three previous seasons.

The are county-specific bag limits in Ohio, with most of the state's 88 counties carrying a three-deer limit, but hunters may harvest only one antlered deer, regardless of where the deer is taken. "The deer harvest produces approximately 10 million pounds of venison each year for people to enjoy," Wecker said of the high-protein, low-fat meat of whitetails.

Five counties that are home to some of the state's largest metropolitan areas — Lucas, Cuyahoga, Summit, Franklin, and Hamilton — all have four-deer county limits, in an effort to help reduce the detrimental impact of large deer populations in urban and suburban areas.

A new aspect of this year's gun season is the Division of Wildlife establishing a Chronic Wasting Disease surveillance area in Wyandot, Hardin, and Marion counties in an effort to closely monitor this deadly malady that affects white-tailed deer, along with other deer species, elk, and moose. Animals with this neurological disorder display weight loss, excessive salivating, appetite loss, and abnormal behavior, including the loss of fear of man.

CWD was first identified in Ohio in a captive herd at a hunting preserve in Holmes County in 2014, and more than two dozen cases of CWD have been found in captive deer since then. The first CWD case in the wild deer herd in Ohio was found in a mature buck that was harvested in late October of 2020 in Wyandot County. A doe taken in December in the Killdeer Plains Refuge, located in Wyandot and Marion counties, was also confirmed with the disease.

The CWD surveillance zone encompasses all of Wyandot and parts of Hardin and Marion counties. Consult pages 12-13 of the Ohio Hunting and Trapping Regulations booklet for details on the CWD surveillance zone and special rules in place in that area.

Hunting is big business in Ohio, with deer hunting accounting for the bulk of the more than $850 million per year hunters spend in the state. "That's real money," said Melinda Huntley, executive director of the Ohio Travel Association, and a co-chair of Hunting Works for Ohio, a consortium of organizations focused on highlighting the connection between Ohio's hunting community and the state's economy.

Youth gun weekend: Hunters age 17 years old or younger harvested 7,634 deer during the two-day youth gun season, which took place Nov. 20-21. This special hunting opportunity is open to young hunters who are accompanied by a non-hunting adult. During the 2021 youth gun weekend, 4,053 of the deer harvested were bucks, 2,625 were does, and 956 were button bucks.

Next generation: In the first week of November, 8-year-old Gunnar Sullivan took a four-point white-tailed buck at about 20 yards while hunting from a tree stand with his father Steve on the family farm in Michigan's Jackson County. Gunnar, who is in the second grade in Toledo Public Schools, is the great-grandson of family patriarch Bill Turanski, of Toledo.

Oak Openings: Archery hunters have harvested 29 deer so far this season in the controlled hunt taking place on Metroparks Toledo properties in the Oak Openings area in western Lucas County. There have been 19 does taken, seven antlered bucks, and three button bucks. Last hunting season there were 50 deer harvested in this controlled hunt that is a component of the Metroparks' overall wildlife management program which was put in place to "sustain a healthy number of deer in balance with other plant and animal species." Like many areas in Ohio with ideal white-tailed deer habitat, numerous Metroparks properties have experienced issues related to the explosive growth of the deer herd.

Ottawa Hills: There are 16 hunters participating in the controlled archery hunt on village property and there have been 16 deer harvested so far, with three bucks and 13 does making up the take. The archery hunt is part of the village's ongoing effort to control excessive browse and traffic hazards created by a burgeoning herd that has found sanctuary inside the municipal limits. The controlled hunt is being conducted with volunteer archers who have met strict screening criteria.