This year’s deer harvest isn’t likely to reach a record high but “it’s going to be fair to good,” said the state game biologist for the Wrangell-Petersburg area.

“We had a really good dump of snow this past winter,” said Frank Robbins, the longtime state game biologist in Petersburg. “We lost a good portion of last year’s fawns” that were unable to forage for enough food in the deep snow.

“We may have lost some older bucks,” though the overall population looks strong, he said.

The general hunting season for Sitka black-tailed opens Saturday, Aug. 1, and runs through Nov. 30. The bag limit is two bucks. No doe harvest is allowed, to help protect the population.

Hunters must always carry their harvest tags with them.

The past few years have been excellent for deer hunters in the Game Management Unit 3, which includes Wrangell and surrounding islands.

“We’ve had record harvests the last two years,” Robbins said.

The take exceeded 1,100 deer in each of the past two years in Unit 3, surpassing the Department of Fish and Game’s harvest objective of 900 bucks.

The harvest has been climbing in recent years, from 858 deer in 2022, 917 in 2023, then the 1,100-plus in 2024 and 2025.

“I’m not anticipating a record harvest,” Robbins said for this year, but he does anticipate a good year for hunters.

Unit 3 includes Wrangell, Etolin, Zarembo, Woronkofski, Woewodski, Mitkof, Kupreanof and Kuiu islands, and the small islands in the Stikine River Delta.

Game Management Unit 1B, which is the mainland across from Wrangell and Petersburg, has not had as strong a harvest as Unit 3 in recent years.

Heavy snow in December 2021 caused high mortality in the mainland’s deer population. From a five-year average of 104 deer taken each year before the hard winter, the harvest dropped to 57 deer the next season, Robbins said.

The take has recovered somewhat, reaching 83 deer taken in Unit 1B last year, he said.

 In addition to reviewing harvest reports to gauge the population, the Department of Fish and Game has 40 remote cameras scattered around Mitkof Island.

The cameras do not transmit their images — someone has to visit each site, retrieve the memory card and replace the batteries, which is what Robbins was doing last week.

Last winter’s snowfall and cold were a problem for deer throughout Southeast.

Steve Bethune, the state’s wildlife management biologist in Sitka, said the 90 inches of snow in Sitka buried the plants that deer feed on, with a deep cold snap in late December and early January adding to the problem.

This spring, after the snow melted from Sitka-area beaches, Bethune found a record number of deer carcasses in the mortality survey the department conducts each year, he told the Daily Sitka Sentinel last week.

In combing almost 27 miles of shoreline by foot in April and May, he counted 134 deer that died of winter starvation, an average of five deer carcasses per mile. Fawns accounted for about 50% of the winter mortalities; 25% were bucks; and 25% were does (primarily older does).

That is more than 10 times the number of winter deer mortalities in a typical year, he said.

“My guess is we’ve probably lost nearly all of the 2025 fawns,” Bethune said, noting that this won’t have much effect on the 2026 deer harvest, as hunters are not typically interested in harvesting yearlings. 

Despite those numbers, given the strong population base, he is “cautiously optimistic” that hunters will find plenty of deer to harvest in the Sitka area.