Hunters Hopeful Wetter Summer Means More Wildlife In Oklahoma’s Woods

• Logan Layden
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  Logan Layden is a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma. He is a native of McAlester, Oklahoma and graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Logan spent three years as a state capitol reporter and local host of All Things Considered for NPR member station KGOU in Norman and six years as a reporter with StateImpact from 2011 to 2017. Most recently, he was news director for McAlester Radio before returning to public radio in 2020.

Joe Wertz / StateImpact Oklahoma

Jack Barrett, owner of the BDC Gun Room in Shawnee, Okla., shows off a new shotgun model popular with hunters.

Nearly a quarter of a million hunters are set to grab their guns and stalk through Oklahoma’s woods when deer gun season opens the week before Thanksgiving.

But years of drought have taken a toll on wildlife populations in Oklahoma, and the men and women who hunt and fish for them.

Popular Sport

“There’s more deer hunters out in the woods on opening day of deer gun season than there is at Lewis Field, at the OU football stadium, and at the Tulsa football stadium combined,” says Micah Holmes with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.

Hunting and fishing pump hundreds of millions of dollars into Oklahoma’s economy each year, Holmes says. But last season, the number of deer harvested declined nearly 25 percent compared to 2011, to only about 88,000 — Oklahoma’s worst deer-hunting season since the 1990s.

Less vegetation means less reproduction, fewer fawns, hungrier prey, and withering water holes that harbor disease.

Western Oklahoma didn’t get a lot of rain this summer, but Holmes says wildlife officials and hunters around the state are optimistic about deer season, not because of the amount of rainfall, but the timing of it.

“We expect this to be a good deer season,” Holmes says. “Right now there’s already been about 18,000 deer harvested, and we expect to get up near 100,000. That’s been kind of the historical average for the last several years.”

Duck Call

Jack Barrett owns BDC Gun Room in Shawnee, a small gun shop that uses military-style trucks as roadside billboards. He says deer hunters have been doing fine in central Oklahoma. It’s ducks he’s worried about.

“The part of the drought that’s had the biggest effect is on the duck hunters, especially down in the Little River bottoms on these slues down there,” Barrett says. “What these guys call their little hidden honey holes are just bone, bone dry.”

But he says fall rains will mean a good duck season this year, and a cooler summer has already helped dove hunters hit hard by the drought.

“The first day of dove season is September 1^st, and if it’s still hot and dry, particularly to the north of us, there’s no reason for them to come south,” Barrett says.

Trees, Birds

Holmes with the wildlife department says the outlook is better for quail and turkey, too.

“The one thing we have started to notice is that turkeys in western Oklahoma use roost trees at night. They sleep up in the trees,” he says. “Those trees are often cottonwood trees along a creek, and in some areas it’s gotten so dry that those cottonwoods have died, and so it’ll be a number of years before those young cottonwoods get big enough for turkeys to roost in them.”

Despite the drought, wildlife officials haven’t shortened any hunting seasons or limited the number of animals Oklahomans are allowed to hunt. But Holmes says stricter restrictions could be considered if the drought worsens.