How Many Deer Live In Minnesota?

My young son was talking about deer hunting the other day and, as a small kid, he's trying to wrap his head around the concept of hunting and shooting a deer.

Hunting runs in my family. My grandpa and dad, along with my brother, all hunt extensively.  I just never caught the bug for whatever reason, probably because I can't sit still for long.

When he has questions about hunting I generally have the answers just from being around it so much in my life. As far as why we hunt, I tried to explain that people eat venison and how the deer's population would get too high without hunting.

Then he asked me a great question that I had never thought to ask myself.

"How many deer are in Minnesota?"

I tried to guesstimate an answer but it was hard to put my finger on and I had never bothered to look it up myself. I think I might have said 150,000? But I had zero confidence in my response.

So, when we got home we looked it up and not only was I way off, but I was kind of surprised to see that there are roughly one million deer at any given time in Minnesota! In 2019, the DNR reported that there were 1.5 million deer.

As far as my guess of 150,000, there were 170,000 deer harvested last year alone.

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that there are more than a million deer in several other states, with Texas topping the list at over five million deer according to World Population Review.