Deer hunters and supporters who want to see more whitetails in the Upper Peninsula for the future can increase the chances of that happening by asking the Michigan Natural Resources Commission to increase the number of bear licenses to be issued by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources starting this year. What does the number of bear licenses issued by the state have to do with the number of deer present? Plenty.

Black bears are important predators on whitetail fawns. A fawn survival study that is being conducted by Mississippi State University in cooperation with the DNR and that is completing its third and final year in Iron County, has confirmed that.

Other studies have come to the same conclusion.

As part of the fawn survival study, researchers catch as many fawns as possible in the study area soon after they are born and fit them with expandable radio collars.

If and when collared fawns are killed, the collar goes into a “morality mode” and researchers go to the scene to try to determine what killed the young deer.

In those cases where researchers were able to determine what killed the fawns, bears killed almost as many as coyotes. Bears accounted for 19 percent of fawn deaths compared to 21 percent for coyotes.

Not included in that total is an uncollared fawn that was killed by an uncollared bear. On June 21, 2013, graduate research assistant Tyler Petroelje was in the field working on the project when he heard a fawn bleat.

When the fawn cried out a second time, he ran toward the sound and eventually saw a bruin feeding on a fawn it had just killed.

It’s also interesting to note that researchers were not able to determine exactly which predator killed 21 percent of the dead fawns. If bears were also responsible for some of those fawn deaths, bruins could have easily killed as many fawns as coyotes.

Studies in the U.P. and Minnesota during which researchers actually walked with radio-collared bears confirmed black bears that are at least a year old kill an average of two fawns each, but older, more experienced bears can and usually do kill more fawns.

So it’s clear that bears are important predators on fawns. Bruins also kill adult deer. A bear killed one of the adult does that was radio-collared for the fawn survival study.

The issue of bear predation on deer is more important now than ever before because deer numbers are low in response to severe winters and the bear population is increasing.

In fact, there are now more bear than deer in parts of the U.P. because the number of bear licenses issued by the state since 2012 have been dramatically reduced.

In 2012, the DNR thought the U.P. bear population was declining, based upon information that was available at the time, so the number of bear licenses issued that year was reduced by 32 percent.

The number of bear licenses available to hunters since then have been reduced even further.

Only 6,951 bear licenses were issued by the DNR during 2015, 880 fewer than the 7,834 available during 2014. Bear license totals for 2013 were 7,906 and 7,991 for 2012, a reduction of 3,751 from the 11,742 bear tags available for sale to hunters in 2011.

Based on recent information, the DNR now knows the U.P. bear population was not declining during 2012 and, in fact, was stable.

They also know that there was no need to reduce bear license numbers since 2012 because the information that was used then has been shown to be inaccurate.

Nonetheless, the DNR Wildlife Division is recommending that even fewer bear licenses be issued this year than 2015.

It’s time to go back to 2011 bear license quotas to help stabilize the growing bear population and reduce bear predation on deer.

This is a positive step the DNR can take to help the U.P. deer population recover without having a negative impact on the bear population.

More bear licenses benefit hunters by providing more recreational opportunity and the DNR by generating more revenue through license sales.

The NRC will make a decision on bear license quotas at its April 14 meeting in Lansing. Comments can be emailed to Commission secretary Cheryl Nelson at nelsonc@michigan.gov.

She will forward comments to the commission members. Telephone numbers of commissioners are also available on the DNR website.

Editor’s note: Richard Smith of Marquette is a noted outdoorsman and writer.