By: Sam Cook, Duluth News Tribune
The smallest of Minnesota’s three wolf-hunting zones was closed to further hunting Monday evening after hunters neared the zone’s harvest quota.
Minnesota’s first managed wolf hunting season opened Saturday in zones open to rifle deer hunting. Hunters in the East-Central Zone had taken eight wolves by Monday, and the early-season harvest quota for the zone is nine. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources officials announced early Monday that the zone would close at the end of shooting hours that day.
Across the entire three zones open to wolf hunting, hunters had taken 50 wolves by Sunday evening and 64 wolves by Monday evening. The total harvest quota for the three zones together is 200.
By late Monday, three days into the season, harvest totals were 26 in the Northeast Zone and 30 in the larger Northwest Zone.
Wildlife officials said the wolf harvest did not surprise them. But they also said nobody knew what to expect from the state’s first wolf hunt in nearly 40 years. The early wolf hunting season is running concurrently with Minnesota’s firearms deer hunt.
“I don’t know what to think,” said John Erb, a furbearer research biologist with the DNR at Grand Rapids. “Fifty on the first weekend sounds like a pretty large number. But I ask myself why I should be surprised. We didn’t have a clue how this would pan out.”
A total of 3,600 licenses were available to hunters for this early wolf hunting season. The hunters were selected by lottery from about 24,000 applications.
“As it stands now, after the first weekend, 1 percent or so of hunters have been successful,” Erb said. “A 1 percent success rate is not real high.”
In western states, where wolves have been hunted for the past couple of years, hunting success rates have been less than 1 percent, said Dan Stark, DNR large carnivore specialist at Grand Rapids.
Minnesota’s wolf population is estimated at 3,000 animals, but that’s a February population figure. Pups are born in May, and the population might swell to 6,000 wolves, according to L. David Mech, a senior scientist with the Biological Resources Division, U.S. Geological Survey, and an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota. The population drops again by February as wolves are killed by other wolves, by state or federal trappers working at depredation sites or in collisions with vehicles.
“There’s probably 5,000 wolves in the woods right now,” said Mark Johnson, executive director of the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association.
Johnson was somewhat surprised at the total of 36 wolves taken the first day of the hunt, he said.
“I guess I had not been that optimistic,” he said. “That’s good. The take has to be big that first couple of days because after that, the hunters leave the woods.”
Although Minnesota’s deer and early wolf season continues through Nov. 18 in Northeastern Minnesota, most hunters hunt only the first few days of the season. About half the deer harvest occurs during the first two days of the season.
The DNR’s Stark thinks the early wolf harvest “pretty much tracks with our expectations,” he said.
But it’s still early in the season.
“It’s difficult to analyze (the season) at this point,” Stark said. “We like to look at everything throughout the season and get as much information as we can before we draw a lot of conclusions.”
A second wolf hunting season, along with a trapping season, opens Nov. 24 and continues through Jan. 31. The total harvest for those seasons together is 200, for an overall maximum harvest of 400 wolves.
To track the daily wolf harvest in Minnesota, go to the DNR’s website at www.mndnr.gov.