At this point I'm steering towards weather as being the main culprit for the lower harvest numbers. 2013 had terrible weather for the firearm opener and pretty much the whole first firearm season weekend. A lot of guys just stayed home not wanting to deal with weather and mud (what could be more fun?), stayed in camp or just packed it up. Hey, got to be prepared.

So there the numbers dropped to 140,000ish from where they had been 180,000ish.

The first firearm season is always the big deer harvest period. For the 2014 first firearm season I believe that regardless of how many permits were issued, a lot of people just didn't get into the field.

Now if there were some way to determine how many people did not try to fill their issued permits there would be much more accurate harvest statistics.