Utah’s most popular hunt is on in full, but local wildlife officials say warm fall weather is hindering hunters’ success.

According to the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, more than 72,000 hunters are expected to participate in this year’s general rifle buck deer hunt, which began last Saturday and ends Oct. 26 in the central region of the state — a region that includes Tooele County.

“It’s been going slow,” said Tom Becker, a wildlife biologist with the DWR. “The deer are a lot higher than most of the hunters are going, so the success has been a little lower than expected.”

That can be attributed to “bluebird weather,” he said.

“There haven’t been enough storms to get them to move off the mountain, down from the high elevations,” Becker said.

Ideal weather for hunters is for a few storms to roll through, dropping snow in the mountains to push the deer down to lower elevations, he said. In addition, less foliage make deer more visible.

“Right now, we’ve still got a lot of leaves on trees this year,” Becker said. “Usually during the deer hunt we have less leaves so it’s easier to see the deer.”

But while there aren’t as many deer being harvested, a higher percentage of those being harvested this year are older — 2 1/2 years old or older. Usually, he said, yearlings are the bulk of the harvest. But some places throughout the region are experiencing lower deer numbers because of winter kill.

“Not enough yearling bucks available could be part of the lower success right now,” he added. “Most guys will shoot the first deer they see — a two-point, a yearling. But there are fewer of them this year.”

Early estimates of buck-to-doe ratios were 12 bucks per 100 does for the western part of the central region.

Becker said projections were 25 to 35 percent of hunters would harvest a deer.

“That just seems to be a pretty consistent overall percentage from year to year,” he said. “It might actually be a little lower this year because some hunters are having a hard time finding the deer because they’re up high. It might be 24, 25 percent instead. But we don’t know what that is yet.”

Several check stations are being conducted throughout the state during the hunt. According to Becker, objectives of checkpoints are twofold: helping wildlife officials predict winter die off and anticipate deer population management issues for next year; and to look for chronic wasting disease.

“What we do is we look at the fat content in the animal to give us an idea of what range they’re going on, whether they’ll be fat or thin going into the winter. Then we can judge after winter hits what our probability is of deer dying off in the winter,” he said. “If they’re going in thin and we have a big winter, we can predict the die off, and that gives us an idea of what we need to worry about next year.”

He added the age of the harvest is also a factor.

“This year we predicted we’d probably see older deer in the harvest because a lot of areas had winter kill, which usually consists of younger deer,” Becker said.

Another reason for the checkpoints is to look for chronic wasting disease — a disease that affects the nervous systems of deer and elk. The disease causes the animal to develop brain lesions, become emaciated, salivate excessively, and eventually die.

Sampling as many animals as possible in areas where the disease has been detected, as well as in surrounding areas, gives the DWR an idea if the disease is spreading.

Tooele County does not border any of the areas where animals have been found to be infected with the disease, so there are currently no checkpoints here.

“It’s a low probability there is any CWD around the west desert or Tooele County, so it’s not a high priority as far as looking for CWD,” Becker said. “We’re not too worried about Tooele County just yet. Now if we find it in other units that surround us, we’ll definitely start sampling. But right now there is no indication that any animals out there have any CWD.”

According to Tooele County dispatch, there have been no incidents or hunter-related accidents reported so far.

Sarah Miley: swest@tooeletranscript.com