LE DEER
| RESIDENT | NON-RESIDENT | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unit | Archery | Any Weapon | Muzzle loader | Multi-Season | Archery | Any Weapon | Muzzle loader | Multi-Season |
| Antelope Island | NA | |||||||
| Henry Mountains | 17.4 (18) | 19.3 (19) | 19.0 (19) | 20.0 (20) | NA | 21.6 (22) | NA | |
| Paunsaugunt | 12.7 (13) | 14.8 (15) | 12.8 (15) | 16.0 (18) | 20.1 (22) | 20.1 (19) | 18.2 (19) | |
| Book Cliffs | 8.7 (8) | 9.6 (10) | 11.0 (12) | 12.9 (13) | 12.8 (14) | NA | ||
| Book Cliffs, North | 10.7 (10) | 13.9 (14) | ||||||
| Book Cliffs, South | 10.7 (11) | 15.0 (16) | ||||||
| Fillmore, Oak Creek | 6.8 (11) | 14.6 (15) | 11.7 (14) | NA | NA | 21.6 (21) | NA | |
| La Sal, Dolores Triangle | 8.6 (8) | 13.3 (14) | 13.7 (13) | NA | ||||
| San Juan, Elk Ridge | 14.1 (13) | 13.3 (14) | 13.9 (14) | 13.0 (16) | NA | 18.5 (18) | NA | |
| South Slope, Diamond Mountain | 10.0 (9) | 11.7 (11) | 10.1 (10) | 12.0 (17) | 9.4 (12) | 13.6 (13) | 12.8 (13) | |
| West Desert, Vernon | 7.5 (8) | 12.8 (12) | 10.1 (10) | 13.0 (14) | 8.5 (8) | 12.8 (12) | 11.2 (10) | NA |
| North Slope, Summit | 0 (1) | 0 | NA | |||||
| Cache, Crawford Mountain | 12.7 (13) | 14.9 (16) | ||||||
| Chalk Creek/East Canyon/Morgan-South Rich | 9.0 (9) | NA (9) | ||||||
| Fillmore | New (10) | NA | ||||||
| Kamas | 6.0 (3) | NA | ||||||
| Monroe | New (10) | NA | ||||||
| Nine Mile | 6.0 (4) | NA | ||||||
| Pine Valley | 11.0 (15) | NA | ||||||
| Plateau, Boulder/Kaiparowitz | New (13) | NA | ||||||
| Plateau, Fishlake/Thousand Lakes | New (9) | NA | ||||||
| South Slope, Yellowstone | New (8) | NA | ||||||
| Southwest Desert | 14.0 (12) | NA | ||||||
| Wasatch Mountains, East | New (8) | New (7) | ||||||
| Zion | 9.0 (12) | NA | ||||||
This is quite a bit to digest… so let me point out a couple of highlights.
First, let’s take a look at the units where my predictions were way off!
Both the resident archery and muzzleloader hunts for the Fillmore, Oak Creek showed a spike. The spike for archery was pretty significant, my prediction was 6.8 points but it ended up being 11! I predicted the muzzleloader hunt at 11.7 points and it came in at 14, not as dramatic a change as the archery hunt but still enough to probably hurt a couple applicants. Interestingly enough the number of applicants greatly increased for both archery and muzzleloader compared to 2015. Archery jumped from 75 to 120 applicants (+60%) and muzzleloader jumped from 129 to 179 applicants (+40%). The rifle hunt did not show nearly as dramatic an increase from 820 to 863 (+5%). I wonder why the archery and muzzleloader application pool would jump so dramatically when the rifle remained largely unchanged. Something to keep an eye on for sure.
The San Juan, Elk Ridge and South Slope, Diamond Mountain multi-season hunts showed a significant spike. The San Juan was projected at 13.0 points but actually took 16 points and the South Slope was projected at 12.0 but actually took 17. I chalk much of this up to this only being the second year of these tags existence so popularity is catching on. We also run into the issue of few tags being offered for these hunts so just one or two applicants moving their applications around can have a pretty dramatic impact on the overall applicant pools here. Remember for the hunt units that have been around for a long time I have many years worth of data to base my predictions on… with these multi-season deer hunts which started last year I only have one years worth of data to make a prediction. Over the next couple years my predictions will become more and more accurate, but for right now they are pretty rough on all the multi-season hunts.
The same can be said for the new late season muzzleloader hunts on the Pine Valley and Zion units. My predictions for both these hunts were low. I predicted 11.0 points for Pine Valley but it actually was 15 and I predicted 9.0 for Zion but it was actually 12. I’m honestly very happy seeing the numbers from many of these new late season muzzleloader hunts. I’m seeing many of these late season muzzleloader hunts that take nearly the same number of bonus points as some of our long standing limited entry deer hunts and that leads me to believe that there are a good number of applicants that see these hunts as viable alternatives to the more traditional limited entry hunts. Additionally, I don’t think that we can discount the fact that these muzzleloader season dates are the absolute latest that they could ever be, so this is as close to hunting mule deer bucks in the rut that you can get here in Utah.
The only non-resident unit with a prediction that was way off was South Slope Diamond Mountain archery. I had predicted 9.4 points for this hunt but it was actually 12. Honestly, I’m not sure what an explanation could be for this dramatic increase. The number of non-resident applicants increased from 44 to 59 (+34%) but the number of resident applicants was stable (241 in 2015 compared to 246 in 2016). It makes me wonder if one of the application services (Easton’s, Huntin’ Fool, etc.) had this unit listed in its pre-application publication… I don’t subscribe to any such publications so it’s purely speculation on my part.
Now let’s take a look at units where my prediction was entirely too high and my predictions were more than two full points higher than what actually happened.
The only two units where my predictions were too high were the Kamas and Southwest Desert late muzzleloader hunts. I would largely attribute this to the hunts only being around for one year and the lack of data to calculate a reasonable prediction. As I mentioned above, as the next couple years pass and more annual data is available the predictions will become more accurate.
Overall, I think the predictions that I had made going into the 2016 drawing were pretty good… as always when attempting to predict what a large numbers of individuals will do when faced with so many different options there are outliers, but the distribution graph presented below which shows the difference between my prediction and the actual result shows a clear “bell shaped curve” with the height of the bell being at the center (or very near zero). There are fancy descriptive statistics that a trained statistician could use to provide further proof but I am neither fancy nor trained.
Stay tuned for the recaps of the elk and pronghorn drawings!
