2022 Deer Season Recap

This deer season felt and looked very different from those in the past.

Instead of social media feeds filled with the typical “grip-n-grin” photos of bucks with enormous racks under the colorful autumn trees, my feed was oddly quiet. Trail cameras full of photos of target deer in the past were unusually empty.

As the season wore on, the general reaction wavered from “Wow, I’m having terrible luck this year!” to, “Is anyone else struggling this deer season?”

The short answer: yes. Across the board with my online connections around North America, this was an unusually tough year for whitetail deer season. Mature bucks from years past had mysteriously vanished; bucks left to grow up a little from last season didn’t seem to grow at all. Even the does seemed a little less active.

What happened?!

I’m no scientist or biologist, and definitely not a deer expert by any means. But at least in South Texas, we’ve been a little suspicious about the drought this past summer. The drought this summer was one of the worst I’ve ever experienced in my life; here on the coast, we went almost two months with 0 rain. Literally 0 inches of rain.

A lot of plant life in our area was practically roasted by constant unimpeded sunlight, 100% humidity, and no rain over the hottest part of the year. I can only imagine what must have happened to the wildlife that relied on the same rain for food and water.

I’ve decided to blame abominable nutrition and extreme weather conditions for the difficulties of this deer season. It’s a tough pill to swallow sometimes, but even people that are as connected to nature as we hunters/anglers are need to be reminded that Mother Nature doesn’t follow any rules but her own.

I guess the lesson in this situation is that if you have the means to support your deer population with good nutrition and water sources, you should do it! It may mean the difference between a healthy herd and decimation.

There’s another lesson in all of this, too. With our freezer a little emptier than we’d like, I can’t help but feel grateful that we got one deer at all! It’s not that we don’t feel grateful for what we have, we just get used to living a certain way.

Has your electricity ever gone out? Not even during a storm or blizzard, when the implications of no electricity can be truly terrifying; in the middle of an afternoon over a weekend, when you were hoping to catch up on your favorite tv shows or vacuum the house. Suddenly, we don’t know what to do with ourselves; how did we ever survive without electricity?! And when it comes back on, you heave a sigh of relief and enjoy every second of electric lights, your tv, and the ability to easily clean your house with the vacuum.

But after a few hours, you’ll probably forget what it was like to live shortly without electricity.

I feel the same about deer hunting, sometimes. When you’re used to harvesting several deer a season, including a few nice bucks, it’s easy to forget what it was like when you didn’t enjoy so much success. When you were thrilled to even see a deer, much less harvest one. When you were thrilled to have a single deer in the freezer at all. We become a little complacent in our gratitude, and we forget how truly special it is to harvest an animal to feed your family.

Tough seasons like this are the brutal reminder that nothing is guaranteed when it comes to nature. No matter what the guide or ranch promises, there’s just no way to 100% guarantee what will happen when you set out into the woods.

This is the reality check that will make a good year that much sweeter. It’s all relative, and unfortunately, you can’t enjoy the highs without a few lows here and there.

So if you had a tough deer season this year, know that you’re not alone! And I hope that this experience will make next season that much better.

Until then, let’s go get our hearts broken during turkey season!