Big Game Hunting: Abundant Food, Warm Weather, and Ice Storm Damage Affecting Elk and Bear Harvests

The Michigan DNR shares their insights thus far in the 2025 fall hunting season

By Victor Skinner | Nov. 1, 2025

As roughly 600,000 deer hunters head into the woods for the 2025 season, thousands more are targeting Michigan’s other big game species after years of applying for limited licenses.

In recent years, a growing number of applications for both Michigan bear and elk licenses have defied a decades-long trend of declining hunter numbers and driven up the time it takes to land a license, with some, for bull elk, limited to once in a lifetime.

Bears Below the Bridge

The situation makes for high-stakes hunts that are influenced in large part by factors hunters can’t control, from weather to natural food production, and 2025 is proving especially challenging for many in northern Michigan.

“It was tough, real tough,” says veteran bear guide Darren Kamphouse, who helped four hunters harvest bears in the Baldwin Bear Management Unit despite warm weather, plentiful natural foods, and strong competition that has made finding them far more difficult than in years past.

“There’s not as many bears, and lots of hunters and a lot of food out there—acorns and corn and lots of natural food,” Kamphouse says, adding he believes the DNR is “giving out too many” tags in the northern Lower Peninsula. “Spots we used to have numerous bears hitting baits … we had baits that didn’t get touched.”

It’s a similar situation elsewhere in the Lower Peninsula, where hunters harvested 295 bears out of a desired harvest of 441 through early October, which constitutes the bulk of the season that ran through Oct. 9 below the bridge.

“Our bear check has been down pretty substantially,” says Mark Boersen, Department of Natural Resources biologist in Roscommon, who oversees the Lower Peninsula harvest.

Boersen says the decline in bears coming in there is likely due in part to new private check stations in the region this year. But even so, “I’ve been hearing from hunters that bear activity is quite low,” he says.

“Warm temperatures and abundant acorns are making things tough for hunters,” Boersen says. “Even one of my co-workers has a tag and has been working hard baiting—running three stations—with little bear activity.”

“There’s just not a whole lot of bears on public land,” says Mike Thorman, legislative liaison for hound hunters who hunts the Red Oak BMU covering the eastern half of the Lower Peninsula.

Others, including Michigan Bear Hunters Association President Keith Shafer, contend those problems were compounded in many counties by damage from ice storms this spring, with some areas “absolutely miserable to get through.”

“The guys I talked to had a rough time finding bears,” he says, “especially in the ice storm areas.”

Bears Above the Bridge

In the Upper Peninsula, home to the majority of Michigan bears, it’s a much different dynamic.

“Overall, on average, we’re looking at a pretty consistent harvest compared to last year,” says Cody Norton, the DNR’s bear specialist, noting 2024 “was a phenomenal year for success rates and harvest” in the U.P.

“Bear weights have been kind of ridiculous this year,” he adds, with numerous bears registered north of 400 pounds, as well as a few eclipsing 500.

Through early October, hunters had harvested 867 bears toward a desired harvest of 1,244, as hunting continued through Oct. 26.

The 2025 season also offered a unique experience for researchers they didn’t expect, Norton says. In the western U.P., a hunter harvested a boar that Norton and others handled as a cub and a yearling. The bear was born in the winter of 2022-23 and was tagged during a den check as a cub. Biologists returned with an ear tag in the winter of 2023-24, and the bear denned by itself as a two-year-old last winter.

This fall, a hunter harvested the three-year-old bear about 20 miles from where it was born. “It was neat to have a full circle on that one, from birth to death,” Norton says.

Evasive Elk

DNR officials in elk country, meanwhile, are reporting the lowest success rate on record following the conclusion of the first of two seasons in 2025.

“There were some high temperatures that certainly impacted participation early in the season,” says Chad Stewart, a DNR deer and elk manager. “Certainly, the ice storm … probably impacted not only access in certain areas for hunters, but probably redistributed elk in a couple locations, as well.”

Just 51 out of 99 hunters who participated harvested elk during the early hunt that ran through the end of September. That season targets elk outside of their core range, while a second season in late December includes the same area, as well as the core range.

The early 2025 elk registrations included 26 bulls, 21 cows, 3 calves, and a bull taken by a Pure Michigan hunt winner, Stewart says.

“It’s the lowest success rate we’ve ever documented,” says Shelby Adams, DNR biologist in Pigeon River Country, who notes the five-year average is 66 percent, which includes some years that eclipsed 80 percent.

The ice storm “really impacted the whole elk range,” Adams says. “Just moving through the woods is challenging” for both hunters and elk.

Hunter success typically increases during the late hunt in December as snowfall makes tracking easier, but Adams suggested “large snowfalls could make it more challenging” in 2025 with many more tripping hazards created by the ice storms.

Other impacts from the ice storms aren’t yet fully evident, though some could be beneficial in the long-run, Adams says. “Some other changes it’s caused is it’s reset some forest stands,” she says, creating “flushes of young aspen.”

“This isn’t going to be a one-year impact—it’s really changing some of the forest types and ages,” Adams adds. “I’d expect to see impacts for years to come.”

Tracking Other Big Game

While other big game species, such as moose and wolves, are not currently hunted in Michigan, DNR biologists are undertaking efforts to better understand their population dynamics and monitor their movements.

This spring, DNR biologists partnered with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and Northern Michigan University to collar nearly two-dozen moose with GPS devices and are collecting locations by the hour.

About half of the collared moose are cows, and the DNR is tracking their pregnancies and confirming births through heat-sensing drones. The state’s moose population declined significantly in the late 1800s, and a reintroduction in the 1980s reestablished a population in the western U.P.

That population grew at a rate of roughly 10 percent for decades, before growth slowed around 2010, and the ongoing research aims to explore possible factors for the slowdown.

“We’ve been somewhere around 2 percent growth or less since that time,” says DNR research specialist Tyler Petroelje. “We’re really trying to understand those factors that feed into population growth.”

Petroelje and others are also working to leverage a network of more than 1,200 trail cameras distributed across 159 hexagonal cells across the entire U.P. in 2023 to better estimate wolf abundance, an effort that will also produce numbers for deer, moose, bobcat, bear, fox, coyote, and turkey.

The first year produced six million images that were sorted using artificial intelligence, and the project is expected to continue through 2026, with a final report in 2027, Petroelje says.

By the Numbers

Michigan does not produce a population estimate for deer, but conducts aerial surveys and other research to estimate numbers for bear, elk, moose, and wolves.

The most recent estimates suggest Michigan is home to 10,218 bears in the Upper Peninsula and 2,008 below the Mackinac Bridge, with indicators showing both populations increasing over the last decade.

The last survey for elk, conducted during the 2024-25 winter, estimated the population at between 884 and 1,408, though the DNR is launching a trail camera survey across about 1,100 square miles of the Lower Peninsula they hope will provide more precision.

Wolves, which remain under federal protections that prevent lethal take, were last estimated at a minimum of 768 in the winter of 2023-24. The DNR acknowledges the population is much higher when wolves are raising young in the spring.

DNR biologists presented the latest moose population estimates to the Michigan Natural Resources Commission in October, pegging the population at about 600, marking a significant decline of several hundred from the prior survey.

“It’s very possible that moose distribution is changing to outside the core,” Stewart told the NRC. “Whether this is a realized decline … or a sort of redistribution of the population on the landscape is something we’re wanting to find out.”

Photo courtesy of the Michigan DNR