Urban bowhunt nets fewer deer in sixth year

CEDAR RAPIDS - Significantly fewer deer were killed during the city's annual urban bowhunt, which ended Sunday, than in each of the previous five years.

Bowhunters took 207 deer in the just-completed hunt, compared with 312 deer in last year's hunt and 314, 349, 333 and 298 deer in the years before that.

Bert Carmer, an active participant in the hunt over its six-year history, on Wednesday theorized that bow hunters took fewer deer in the city this season simply because fewer deer are in the city. Past hunts have accomplished what they were intended to accomplish, which is to reduce the surplus number of deer in Cedar Rapids, Carmer said.

Greg Buelow, a spokesman for the Cedar Rapids Fire Department, which manages the urban bowhunt, said that in 2010, Cedar Rapids continued to see a reduction in the number of deer-vehicle crashes. Concerns over the number of such crashes was a central reason the city instituted the bowhunt in 2005.

The number of deer-vehicle crashes totaled 193 in 2010, down from 237 in 2009, according to a tally that is calculated using roadkill data from the Iowa Department of Transportation and the city of Cedar Rapids.

Since the start of the bowhunt program, deer-vehicle crashes, which had numbered more than 500 a year in the city, have dropped some 60 percent, Buelow said.

Tim Thompson, a wildlife biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said deer numbers are down generally in the state. He said past bowhunts in Cedar Rapids likely contributed to fewer deer being taken by participants in the most recent local hunt, which started Sept. 11.

At the same time, Thompson said, deer inside Cedar Rapids may have migrated to areas in the city on which hunters have not focused. Hunters, for instance, cannot hunt on public land inside the city limits, he said.

A total of 107 hunters qualified to take part in this year's Cedar Rapids bowhunt. Sixty-four of the hunters killed at least one deer, while one hunter killed 12.

The meat from 50 of the deer was donated to the DNR's Help Us Stop Hunger program.