The big bucks of Northern Minnesota

Folks often tell us there are more wolves than deer in our area (and northern Minnesota). Many folks likely say such things as a euphemism—i.e., as a way to indicate there are more wolves than they would like and less deer—but some do appear to really believe wolves outnumber deer.

This video is a compilation of a decent portion of the bucks we captured on camera last fall (and a few from late summer) in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem. The video is a distillation of 269 trail camera videos of bucks, of which there are likely 200 or more unique bucks in the footage given antler characteristics and where cameras were set.

These probably represent about ~60-70% of the bucks we captured on camera last year. We were going to make a video of literally every buck we got on camera but that just became too much (the video is already 18 minutes long as is).

For perspective, this past winter, there were 99 wolves in the GVE (77 pack wolves and an estimated 22 lone wolves), which is a high-density wolf population at 44 wolves/1000 square kilometers.

So this video already has twice as many deer in it than the wolf population in the GVE. And notably, our trail cameras obviously do not detect a large portion of the bucks out there.
We only have one camera, on average, per every 2.5 square miles in the GVE but our cameras are not evenly distributed across the area, meaning there are large areas where we don’t have cameras. Plus, each camera deployed only observes one small area. All this to say, this footage almost certainly did not capture the majority of the bucks in the GVE.

And these videos are just bucks, and does not include adult does and fawns. The sex ratio of the GVE deer population is skewed towards females, which is typical of most deer populations.

We do not know the exact buck:doe ratio in the GVE. But hunters in the forested zone in northern Minnesota in 2023 reported seeing 5 does and fawns for every buck, and in 2021, based on hunter observations, the DNR estimated there was 3.8 does per buck in the forest portion of Minnesota.

Notably, this is not an attempt to change anyone’s mind about wolf management, what you think about wolves, or whether you think there should be more deer than there currently are. We are simply illustrating that even at a time when deer densities are low in northern Minnesota, there are still many more deer than there are wolves.

Lastly, for anyone who hunts in the GVE or northern Minnesota, while there might not be the abundance of deer some might want, there are some very nice bucks out there.

And since we know many hunters use trail cameras to scout for good spots, we thought we would share one insight from our cameras: we often see bucks on camera in the rut (i.e., around deer hunting season) that we had never seen on camera all summer or fall.

So even if you haven’t captured any nice bucks on camera during your pre-season scouting, it doesn’t mean you don’t have a shot at seeing one once November rolls around. Bucks in the area seem to cover a lot of ground come November.

**Note: some timestamps say 2020 instead of 2024 because when batteries die, the camera resets to factory settings. The factory date is Jan 1, 2020. In a few instances, we forgot to fix the timestamp when we swapped batteries.

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Written by Voyageurs Wolf Project