Opening Weekend Hot, Cold

HARVEST DOWN FROM LAST YEAR

Black Friday for deer hunters falls on opening-day Saturday morning when they’re up long before dawn in a quest for a buck or doe.

All 280,000 of Arkansas’ deer hunters who hunted on opening weekend of modern gun season got a two-for-one special as far as the weather.

It was warm, in the 70s, with strong wind on Saturday. By Sunday midmorning, a wicked cold front dropped temperatures about 20 degrees and dumped cold, stinging rain the rest of the day.

Saturday’s warmth and wind hampered deer movement. That put fewer animals into the sights of hunters.

Sunday’s chill and rain may have chased a lot of hunters indoors, or back to the campfire at deer camp.

Arkansas Game & Fish Commission harvest numbers for opening weekend prove it.

On Saturday, opening day of the season, hunters checked in 18,061 deer. Only 8,883 were checked on Sunday when it was cold and rainy.

But look at this. Hunters made up for it when the sun came back out on Monday.

The tally climbed to 11,319 for Monday.

Compare that with opening day last year when 19,262 deer were checked.

A little more than a thousand deer isn’t a major diff erence.

It’s easy to get up-to-theminute harvest numbers from the commission. Go to their website, www.agfc.

com. Under hunting, click on “deer hunting.” You’ll see the online harvest data for deer and turkey on theleft. Click on that and you’re there.

Capt. Brian McKinzie with the commission, Northwest Arkansas’ enforcement supervisor, said no hunting accidents were reported on opening weekend.

Hunters in Missouri faced the same bad weather conditions as Arkansans.

A warm Saturday and cold, wet Sunday saw the Missouri deer harvest drop from last year, said Jim Low with the Missouri Department of Conservation.

Hunters checked 69,614 deer in Missouri on Saturday and Sunday. That’s 22 percent fewer than were checked in Missouri on opening weekend last year, Low said.

Since Monday morning, conditions have been nearly perfect for deer hunting in both states, with frosty mornings and little wind.

Chilly mornings are forecast for the rest of the week.

There’s lots of time left to hunt.

Eighteen days remain in the modern gun deer season that will close 30 minutes after sunset on Dec. 2.

Hopefully hunters will get fall weather, not summer and winter in one weekend, the rest of deer season.

FLIP PUTTHOFF IS OUTDOORS EDITOR FOR NWA MEDIA.

FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER AT WWW.TWITTER.COM/NWAFLIP.

Outdoor, Pages 6 on 11/15/2012

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