White Tail Deer hunting season has come and gone and hunters are now reflecting on their time in the stand. Manitoba Wildlife Federation`s (MWF) Managing Director said overall this year was a success, but had its ups and downs along the way.

"We are excited about the reports we are hearing from this year's deer season. We've got a lot of positive reports out there, from a lot of different spots of the province. Hunters were seeing more deer in general, maybe not everywhere," said Rob Olson. "There were a few pockets where they maybe haven't rebounded. For the most part hunters saw more deer and quite a few young bucks, which is cool and kind of encouraging. Also a fair number of does, with twins and triplets. Overall the deer numbers sounded pretty encouraging."

Olson is attributing the fact there was generally more deer around to a number of things. Those include the province changing over the harvesting regulations to bucks only, which gives the does a few extra years for a doe to produce offspring and help grow the deer population in the province.

"The other thing is just the better winters. The last number of years, winters have been pretty good. They've been a little bit warmer and we hear reports of deer over wintering a little better the last two years. I think that's a huge factor," continued Olson.

According to Olson, reports have shown that a lot of hunters saw many more younger bucks this year, maybe in the one to two year old range.

Overall it was a successful hunting season said Olson, but as everything it comes with its downsides and challenges along the way. This year Olson, who is a hunter himself, was not given permission to hunt on a lot of land in the area because of the shear amount of trespassers and night hunters.

"We've never gotten the kind of feedback that we've gotten this year in terms of land owners in an unprecedented way reaching out to us at the Federation that the trespassing, specially spotlighting has never been worse," explained Olson. "They are seeing it at an all time high and the number of occurrences seems to be off the charts.

"I think along with that is the anger of the land owners. I faced it personally with where I hunt in the south west corner of the province," added Olson. "Just lots of land owners saying no for the first time in years, with apologies. They are such good people and say 'we would like to let you go, but we just want to shut it down until order is restored'. In many cases these land owners aren't even letting their own family hunt. They just want to know that if someone is out there they can call the cops right away. So, that's where it has kind of gotten to. I've never seen so many 'no-hunting' and 'no trespassing' signs in my life."

Conservation officers have been a great help in preventing trespassing and night hunting stated Olson. Last year officers handed out around fourteen night hunting infractions, compared to roughly forty-one this year.

"What we need now is we need this new government to follow through on its commitments to give those conservation officers more resources so that rural law enforcement can improve. They also need to follow through on the process of reaching out to all of the groups and making sure spotlighting is not something that is allowed where there is people, farms, and farmers," said Olson.