HOT SPRINGS – The City of Hot Springs’ first attempt at a special Archery Deer Access Permit Program during this past hunting season (Sept. 1, 2023 – Jan. 1, 2024) saw some success in terms of hunter success rates, but overall very few deer were harvested in town during the four-month period.
According to Hot Springs Police Chief Ross Norton – despite the city planning to grant a total of 75 in-town access permits – there were only a total of 12 permits issued to interested hunters. Of those 12 hunters, eight reported harvesting a deer, all of which were bucks.
Chief Norton said he did not hear from the other four hunters if they were successful or not, so the hunters’ success could be higher. Neither the city nor the state require hunters to report success.
“I believe the Municipal Archery Deer permit program was successful overall,” stated Chief Norton. “I think the fact that we had to kind of throw it together as quickly as we did ultimately limited people’s ability to apply and prepare for it.”
The city’s archery access permit program last year was not an additional archery tag for hunters to harvest deer, but simply, as the name implies, an additional means of access in which hunters could fill their state-issued archery tag. Once a hunter successfully applied and passed an archery proficiency test, they were assigned a sevenday period to hunt in one of five city-owned properties. Those properties included: 1) the city brush pile along Hwy. 18 on the southwest side of town; 2) the School Street Park in the northern part of town; and, 3) Southern Hills Golf Course. The golf course was then divided into three different sub-zones spread out over the full 18 holes, which made for a total of five different areas for people to hunt.
Of the eight bucks harvested during the program last year, seven of them were killed at the landfill in the “brush pile” zone with only one deer taken on the golf course.
Looking ahead to the 2024 hunting season, Chief Norton said the city was hoping to partner more closely with the South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks and have the state manage the draw process and issue the archery tags. Currently, the SD GF&P manages municipal hunts in three communities including Custer, Rapid City and Sioux Falls. With those programs, hunters apply for additional antlerless tags with the intent to harvest does in order to reach a desired management number.
Last week, a representative with GFP attended the city’s Public Safety meeting to discuss that possibility. He however said that it would most likely be 2025 before GFP would be able to add Hot Springs to its municipal antlerless archery deer program. In the meantime, Hot Springs would be allowed to administer its own access permit program again in 2024, similar to what took place in 2023.
While the GFP official said the harvesting of the eight bucks during Hot Springs’ access permit program last year had a short-term result of a few less deer in town, in order for a management program to have better long-term results, the harvesting of does should also be part of the equation as well.
Chief Norton agreed that since the current access permit program utilizes a hunter’s existing stateissued archery tag, most hunters often intend to fill that tag with a buck.
“I don’t think anyone disagrees that we have a deer problem in town,” said Chief Norton. “When we met with the state last year, city officials asked them about doing a depredation hunt where a certain amount of deer are harvested to limit the population. The representative from the state advised that they don’t like to do that with mule deer because their populations have a difficult time with sustainability. Therefore, they recommended the municipal tags.”
With Custer and Sioux Falls, and to a lesser degree in Rapid City, the majority of the deer harvested in town with those municipal antlerless archery tags are whitetail. The majority of the municipal deer in Hot Springs however are mule deer, which are having a more difficult time maintaining higher populations in the state.
“I think moving forward, if we were to continue to do it, it would gain popularity. With the gained knowledge and popularity, I think the desired effect of thinning our deer herd would eventually improve,” added Norton.
To make the city’s archery deer access permit more popular with hunters, and more successful overall, Chief Norton said that the city would like to expand the number of locations in which to hunt. In addition to the five aforementioned city-owned zones utilized this past year, the city is considering opening up hunting on privately-owned property as well, if a citizen, or group of citizens, would come together and agree to allow that activity to take place.
Norton said one of the discussion points for this possibility is that the property, or groups of properties conjoined, must be large enough and have a radius of at least 100 yards in any direction.