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By Cathy Wurzer and Gracie Stockton, Minnesota Public Radio News

It’s deer hunting season in Minnesota, but hunters are lagging behind last year’s numbers.

That’s according to Barb Keller, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resource’s big game program leader. She says 47,370 deer were taken by hunters over opening weekend, about 13 percent fewer than during the same period in 2022. Keller believes that’s partially due to lower deer numbers up north. Central Minnesota numbers are on par with last year.

At least two people were hurt over the weekend — one in an accidental shooting and the other from falling out of a tree stand.

“Make sure you’re practicing good firearm safety when you’re in the field, have the firearm unloaded as you’re traveling to and from your stand and make sure you’re wearing your blaze orange,” Keller said.

New this year: Expanded eligibility for crossbow hunting. Keller says it’s popular with roughly 40 percent of archery season attributed to crossbow harvest. She said that hunters over the age of 50 and under the age of 13 were more likely to bag a deer with a crossbow than a vertical bow.

The weekend opener also marked the start of expanded chronic wasting disease testing in the state’s wild white-tailed deer herd. Keller spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday out in the field performing CWD monitoring in Rochester.

“We’ve been talking to a lot of hunters that are coming in to get their deer tested; everyone seemed pretty happy with the process,” Keller told MPR News. “We didn’t have long lines and hunters just seemed overall appreciative of what we were doing there.”

That testing entails taking lymph nodes from a deer’s neck and then sending them off to a lab in Wisconsin for CWD testing. The turnaround time is between one and two weeks.

Keller says the highest concentration of CWD is in southeastern Minnesota, near Preston and Winona. But the prevalence of the disease remains at about 1 percent of the deer population.

“Although it’s unfortunate that we continue to detect it in new areas of the state, where it is has been in the state the longest, we’ve been able to hold that prevalence rate low.”