Behind the Numbers: A deep dive into stats to determine which states are the best for whitetail hunting. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)
October 07, 2024
By Darron McDougal
Which state has the best whitetail hunting? That’s a great question, and I suppose it depends on who you ask. Ten different deer hunters might have ten different opinions as to what makes a deer hunt successful—or at least enjoyable.
While the deer-hunting community at large recognizes the Midwest as the “promised land,” where most of the nation’s largest bucks are taken annually, not every deer hunter measures a hunt’s quality by antler inches. In other words, it’s a disservice to automatically declare traditional big-buck producers like Iowa, Kansas and Illinois as the best whitetail states based solely on trophy potential. There is far more to consider.
The Game & Fish editorial team conceived of the idea to create a ranking of the top whitetail states in America , and I had the honor of serving as researcher for this project. My assignment: Compile data in several different categories across 37 states.
[Editor’s note: Western states, even those with huntable whitetail populations, are better known for elk, pronghorns and mule deer, so we stuck to Midwestern, Southern and Eastern states, where whitetails are the primary focus of big-game hunters.]
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The whole idea of this project was to research beyond the record books. Therefore, I collected data in the following categories for every state from the Great Plains and eastward:
Total whitetail tag sales (5-year average) Whitetail population (5-year average) Harvest total (5-year average) Trophy potential (total number of Boone and Crockett entries from the past 10 years) Public accessibility (total public-land acreage) Season length (number of days) As you can imagine, compiling all this info for 37 states was a massive undertaking that took more than a month to complete. More than 90 percent of the data I compiled came directly from each state’s wildlife agency. Some states provided very specific values for all categories, while others supplied me with reports and spreadsheets, which required extensive calculator time.
[Editor’s note: Several states provided no data at all in some categories (see Deer Population below). Some states provided numbers in certain categories that could not be fairly compared to the rest of the states (see Total Whitetail Tag Sales). In the end, for the sake of an apples-to-apples comparison, we used only categories that had consistent data across all 37 states to determine the ranking of the best whitetail states.]
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Over the course of researching this project, I learned some things. What follows are some of the nuggets of information I found most interesting.
Total Whitetail Tag Sales Which state sells the most whitetail tags? If you guessed my home state of Wisconsin, you are correct. The 5-year average is 2,542,684. Pennsylvania comes in second at 1,755,871. The only other state that even comes close is Texas, where the 5-year average of tags sold is 1,198,504.
Not surprisingly, Rhode Island came in last with 19,911 tags sold, while Florida and Connecticut reported 39,590 and 43,439, respectively. Massachusetts had the fourth fewest tag sales at 66,834. Interestingly, Alabama and Mississippi don’t sell deer tags. Instead, they sell All Game Hunting Licenses to deer hunters.
Deer Population Which states contain the highest deer populations? Well, that’s tough to say since 10 of the 37 states I examined didn’t supply numbers. They either don’t estimate their deer populations or don’t have reliable numbers to be published. Of the states that supplied population estimates, Texas is the king with an estimated 5,234,168 whitetails within its borders. Missouri came in second with 1.7 million. Third place is a little cloudy because Tennessee last estimated its whitetail population in 2019 at roughly 1.6 million animals. Wisconsin provided a more solid 5-year average of 1,554,820 deer. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Delaware’s whitetail population is just 38,000.
Harvest Total Perhaps the most eye-popping revelation in terms of harvest totals is that the combined 5-year average for the Great Plains States—North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas—was less than the 5-year harvest averages of nine individual states. Several factors play a role in this, including non-resident tag draws in Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota, and a relatively low number of hunters compared to states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Trophy Potential While trophy potential isn’t everything to everyone, it is an important topic in the whitetail world. That being said, let’s discuss the states with the most Boone and Crockett entries in the past 10 years. A lot of people would assume that Iowa, Illinois and Kansas would lead the category hands down, but none of those states even made the podium. Wisconsin placed first with 483 entries. Ohio was next with 464, and third place goes to Indiana, which has 431 entries over the last decade. Kentucky wasn’t too far behind with 365 entries. Of course, many states had few to no entries, including New Jersey (4), Massachusetts (3), South Carolina (2), Vermont (1), Rhode Island (0) and Florida (0).
Public Accessibility To the DIY whitetail hunter, public land access is a huge part of the equation. Which state has the most public land acres? It’s Michigan. There, deer hunters can access more than 10 million acres of public land. In Minnesota, somewhere around 9.5 million acres of public land are available to hunters.
Wisconsin boasts more than 7 million acres of public land. The fact that the Badger State has so many Boone and Crockett entries and so much public land is initially attractive, but let’s not forget that Wisconsin also sells the most deer tags. In other words, you can expect heavy hunting pressure on just about every public parcel, especially during the firearms season. Keep in mind, too, that most of Wisconsin’s Boone and Crockett bucks were taken on private land in just a few counties, including well-known Buffalo County.
The state with the most public land after Wisconsin may come as a surprise: Florida, where deer hunters have access to 5,483,500 acres. Maine has plenty of DIY opportunities, too. The Pine Tree State’s public acreage totals 4.9 million, though any private land that isn’t posted can also be hunted.
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