Three species — elk, white-tailed deer and moose — across ten hunting seasons. Modelling hunter pressure, species distribution, sex-selection bias, disease surveillance, and the gap between where animals are abundant and where hunters actually succeed.
Six results that are not obvious from reading the harvest tables directly.
Male deer harvest sat between 22,000 and 30,000 every year for a decade with no trend. Meanwhile the antlerless share swung from 37% to 57% and back to 31%. Total harvest fell 40% from its 2023 peak almost entirely through that one lever.
Across units holding both, harvest totals correlate weakly. WMU 350 produced 1,284 deer and 4 elk. WMU 522 produced 760 elk and 270 deer. Very few units are genuinely productive for both, so a unit's reputation for one species says little about the other.
Dividing harvest by success rate estimates hunter numbers. The highest-harvest units near Calgary are also the most crowded, and post below-median success. Volume measures crowds as much as animals.
WMU 402 offers a 75-day general rifle season for bull elk and returns 7% success. WMU 312 offers 37 days and returns 26%. Access difficulty and terrain dominate opportunity length.
Moose harvest fell 33% from its 2020 peak — but with both sexes down about 31% and a flat antlerless share all decade. Deer and elk fell because antlerless tags were cut; moose fell across the board. Sex composition is what tells the two apart.
WMU 732 — CFB Suffield — posted 98% elk success on 320 animals, and WMU 728/730 — CFB Wainwright — posted 73% deer success. Both are controlled military-base draws: statistical artifacts of restricted access, not habitat quality.
What the source data contains, what it does not, and how each derived figure is calculated.
Each report gives, per Wildlife Management Unit: male, female and young counts, a total, and an estimated hunter success percentage. These are survey estimates, so small counts carry wide error bars.
Some rows are licence groupings rather than single units — 124/128/142/144/148/150,
for example, where one special licence spans several WMUs. They count toward provincial totals but are
excluded from per-unit joins, since they cannot be attributed to one geography.
hunters ≈ harvest ÷ (success% ÷ 100)
A first-order estimate that understates participation wherever one licence carries multiple tags.
Elk share of combined harvest, elk ÷ (elk + deer), expressed as a percentage. Values
above 50% indicate an elk-dominant unit; below 50%, deer-dominant. Computed only for units where both
species recorded harvest.
Adult females plus young of either sex, not females alone. Alberta's antlerless licence authorises any animal without antlers of legal length, so a male calf qualifies. Since the young column is not split by sex, female-plus-young is the closest match to what the tag permits. Use the Female class for females alone.
Males per 100 females, (male ÷ female) × 100. A harvest ratio, not a population
ratio — it reflects tag policy as much as herd composition. Units with zero females are undefined and
excluded.
Correlations are Pearson coefficients over units with non-zero harvest in both species. Medians use a stated harvest floor so near-empty units do not dominate. Everything is computed live in the browser from the embedded data.
Per unit: three species × three seasons (2023–2025), ~210,000 animals. Drives the dashboard, maps and every per-WMU figure. Provincial totals: three species × ten seasons (2016–2025), ~650,000 animals. Drives the trend section only — the older reports were parsed for totals, not per unit.
Every report shares one row shape (WMU, male, female, young, total, success%), so adding a
season means dropping in one array; the controls, columns and charts rebuild from whatever is loaded. Prose
figures outside the trends section are 2025. All nine datasets are reconciled against their published
totals in the data integrity check.
The published rate blends general-licence and special-licence (draw) hunting. In units where cow elk draws are generous, overall elk success is pulled upward well above what a hunter carrying only a general antlered licence should expect. Comparisons in this analysis flag that distortion wherever the male share of harvest indicates it.
Three species, three entirely different harvest structures — and the sex composition is what separates them.
The composition gap is the single most informative feature of these datasets. Elk harvest arrives at a near-even sex split because wildlife managers engineer it that way: antlerless elk almost always requires a draw, and those draws are issued in the volumes needed to hit population targets. Deer harvest in 2025 was left far more to hunter preference, and hunter preference is overwhelmingly antlered. Moose sits in between, at roughly one antlerless animal in three, because antlerless moose has been tightly drawn for the entire decade.
The young-animal share reinforces this. Calves make up a meaningfully larger fraction of elk harvest than fawns do of deer harvest, which is what you expect when whole family groups are being culled under antlerless authorizations rather than individual animals being selected for antlers.
One caution on reading this section: it is a snapshot of 2025 alone. The ten-season view above shows that deer's antlered bias was far weaker two seasons earlier, so treat the deer bar as the current state of tag policy rather than a fixed characteristic of the species.
Provincial totals for all three species from 2016 to 2025, extracted from ten years of annual reports. Long enough to separate a policy cycle from a one-off — and it reframes what a single season appears to say.
From 2025 alone you would conclude hunters ignore antlerless deer: bucks were 69% of the harvest. Ten seasons say otherwise. The antlerless share ran 37–45% through 2016–19, was loosened to 49% in 2020, peaked at 57% in 2022–23, then collapsed to 31% in 2025, the lowest in the decade. Meanwhile male harvest sat between 22,000 and 30,000 every single year with no trend. Buck harvest is a constant; doe harvest is a policy dial, and the 40% drop from the 2023 peak came almost entirely through it.
The species then separate cleanly. Elk follows the same pattern — antlerless share 43% in 2019, 63% in 2024, 53% now. Moose does not: flat at 34–38% all decade, because antlerless moose has always been tightly drawn. Yet moose still fell 33% from its 2020 peak, with both sexes down 31% in lockstep. Same headline decline, opposite cause — one is allocation, the other is the herd or the effort. No single season can tell those apart.
This matters for anyone reading a single year's report as a measure of animal abundance. A unit whose harvest halved between 2024 and 2025 most likely lost its cow or doe draws, not its animals. The dashboard below lets you check any unit across all three seasons at once — click any row or bar to open its multi-season history.
A prediction model for the coming season, built to be checked by hand rather than trusted.
No 2026 harvest data exists yet — the season opens in September 2026 and the survey publishes around March 2027 — so this is a forecast, built on three seasons of per-unit data:
1 − volatility. Stable units keep their trend; noisy
units get pulled back toward what actually happened.Step four earns its place. WMU 357 elk ran 636 → 1,375 → 625; trend alone projected 871, above every year but the spike. Shrinkage brings it to 663. The reported range is the projection ± half the volatility, so unstable units carry visibly wide intervals rather than a falsely precise number.
Projected success is the recency-weighted average success rate, which assumes licence structure holds. That assumption is the model's biggest weakness — a single change to a unit's antlerless draw can move its harvest by more than this projection ever would.
The ten-season record shows antlerless allocation moving 20 percentage points inside three years. That single lever swamps everything in this model, so the draw booklet tells you more about 2026 than any trend line does. Trust the high-confidence rows — large, stable harvests on unchanged licence structure — and treat the rest as a starting point.
Testing whether a good elk unit is also a good deer unit. Mostly, it is not.
The Peace region and the Grande Prairie units form a contiguous block of elk-dominant country. The Rocky Mountain House belt is the mirror image — enormous deer harvests with almost no elk taken at all, despite sharing similar latitude and forest cover.
The practical implication for anyone planning a hunt: a unit's reputation for one species carries almost no information about the other. Units that are genuinely strong for both are rare enough to be identified individually rather than assumed.
Males harvested per 100 females — a direct readout of tag policy and hunter selection.
Where elk ratios fall below 100, cow draws are doing heavy lifting to suppress growth. Where they climb into the hundreds, the unit is effectively antlered-only and the herd is being allowed to grow. Read the ratio and you can usually infer the tag structure without opening the draw booklet.
Deer ratios swing just as widely — 36 to 2,600 across the province in 2025 — but for a different reason. Elk spread reflects where cow draws exist; deer spread reflects how many antlerless tags were issued that year, a number the ten-season view shows moving sharply. Both are policy signals, but elk's is structural and deer's is a dial being turned.
Inverting success rate to estimate participation, then testing whether crowded units perform.
Alberta's WMU numbering encodes ecoregion: 100s prairie, 200s parkland, 300s foothills, 400s mountain, 500s boreal.
Applying the analysis to a practical question — which units within roughly two and a half hours of a major city actually reward the drive.
A foothills unit, a mountain unit and an urban-fringe unit — chosen because they fail and succeed for completely different reasons.
| Elk harvest | 292 @ 26% |
| Deer harvest | 648 @ 40% |
| Moose harvest | 21 @ 33% |
| Elk male share | 60% |
| General rifle, elk | 37 days |
| Land tenure | lease + private |
| Limiting factor | access permission |
| Elk harvest | 56 @ 7% |
| Deer harvest | 94 @ 16% |
| Moose harvest | 5 @ 50% |
| Elk male share | 95% |
| General rifle, elk | 75 days |
| Land tenure | public |
| Limiting factor | terrain, elevation |
| Elk harvest | 135 @ 20% |
| Deer harvest | 107 @ 22% |
| Moose harvest | 57 @ 20% |
| Elk male share | 49% |
| General rifle, elk | none |
| Land tenure | private |
| Limiting factor | permission density |
WMU 402's 7% is not comparable to WMU 312's 26%. Ninety-five percent of the elk taken in 402 were bulls, because antlerless there is draw-restricted — so that figure approximates a pure bull-hunting success rate. In 312, bulls were only 60% of harvest, meaning cow draws inflate the headline number. Adjusting roughly for that composition narrows the gap from nearly four-fold to closer to two-fold.
WMU 212 is the structural outlier. It is archery-only, which suppresses participation, yet returns 20% elk success — high for bowhunting. Its 49% male share confirms that antlerless elk are being taken freely on general licences rather than draws. The constraint is not animals or regulation but land: it is the ring of private property around a million-person city.
Season length is a weak predictor of outcome. 402 offers double the general rifle window of 312 and produces a fifth of the elk. Terrain, elevation and animal dispersion outweigh calendar access, which is a useful corrective to the common assumption that a longer season means a better hunt.
Harvest data cannot be interpreted without knowing which tags were available. Selected 2026 season structure for the units discussed above.
| WMU | Species / class | Archery | General | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 302–314 | Elk, antlered 3-point+ | Sep 1 – Oct 24 | Oct 25 – Nov 30 | General |
| 312, 314 | Elk, antlerless | Sep 1 – Oct 24 | Oct 25 – Feb 28 | Draw |
| 310–348 | White-tailed deer, antlered + antlerless | Sep 1 – Oct 31 | Nov 1 – Nov 30 | General |
| 400, 402 | Elk, antlered 3-point+ | Sep 1 – Sep 16 | Sep 17 – Nov 30 | General |
| 400, 402 | Elk, antlerless | Sep 1 – Sep 16 | Sep 17 – Nov 30 | Draw |
| 400, 402 | White-tailed deer, antlerless | Sep 1 – Sep 23 | Nov 1 – Nov 15 | General |
| 212 | Elk, antlered + antlerless | Sep 1 – Nov 30 | — | General |
| 212 | White-tailed deer, antlered + antlerless | Sep 1 – Nov 30 | — | General |
| 214 | Elk, antlered 3-point+ | Sep 1 – Oct 24 | Oct 25 – Nov 30 | General |
| 216, 221, 224 | Elk, antlered 3-point+ | Sep 1 – Oct 31 | Nov 1 – Nov 30 | General |
| 404–408 | Elk, antlered 6-point+ | Sep 9 – Sep 16 | Sep 17 – Nov 30 | Draw |
Mountain units immediately west of the foothills require a six-point minimum on bull elk rather than three. That single regulatory difference explains a large share of the success-rate collapse between adjacent 300-series and 400-series units — the animals are present, but far fewer of them are legal.
Every unit, species and loaded season, filterable on every dimension. All figures, charts and the table recalculate live. Click any row or bar for a unit's season-by-season detail. Copy link encodes the entire view — filters, sort, open unit — into a URL you can send to someone; Export CSV downloads exactly what is on screen.
Prototype: a rules-based parser, running entirely in your browser with no server. In production the parser swaps for a language model behind a small serverless endpoint — the data layer stays exactly as it is here.
Hunter counts are derived as harvest ÷ success rate and rounded. Blank cells indicate no recorded harvest or an undefined ratio. Multi-unit licence groupings are hidden by default.
Alberta has no published geospatial layer for Wildlife Management Units on any open CDN, so rather than invent coordinates, the province is rendered here two ways: as a regional tile map covering every unit, and as a hand-built geographic schematic for the Calgary catchment.
Licence structure explains most of the variance in the harvest data. Units where antlerless animals are draw-restricted show male-dominated harvests and lower headline success. Units with liberal antlerless general tags show balanced sex ratios and inflated success. Any comparison of raw success rates that ignores licence type is comparing different games.
A prion disease of deer, elk and moose, always fatal to the animal, spreading westward across Alberta since the first wild case in 2005. It reshapes both the harvest data and the practical decisions a hunter makes with a carcass.
Prevalence fell six points in one year, and that is not the disease receding. Testing more than doubled — 2,963 animals to 6,819 — and the added samples were overwhelmingly white-tailed deer from the western frontier: the species and geography least likely to test positive. The province states that prevalence continues to rise within units. The denominator changed, not the disease.
Seven units recorded first cases in 2025–26: 222, 300, 316, 320, 322, 503 and 504. The previous season added 221, 247, 306, 505 and 508. Together those trace a front moving west and north — 316, 320 and 322 are foothills units, and 320 and 322 border 312 and 314, the best general-licence country in the province.
Alberta's weighted occurrence figures: male mule deer 1.00, female mule deer 0.40, male whitetail 0.30, female whitetail 0.10. A doe whitetail is the lowest-risk animal in the province; a buck mule deer the highest by an order of magnitude.
There are no known human cases of CWD. Health authorities nonetheless recommend not consuming meat from an animal that tests positive, and both Alberta and Health Canada advise waiting for a result before eating an animal taken in a surveillance area.
Suffield is a controlled-access base hunted by draw on fixed dates. In 2025 it produced 320 elk at 98% success, from 18 bulls against 239 cows and 63 calves — a population reduction executed through hunters, not recreational hunting.
The disease trend there is the part that stands out. Alberta describes the elk tested in both of the last two seasons as coming primarily from CFB Suffield, and across that sample elk prevalence went from 3.9% of 232 elk in 2024–25 to 9.7% of 308 elk in 2025–26 — nine positives to thirty. Elk prevalence roughly doubled in a single year while the overall provincial figure was falling, which is the reverse of the headline.
Twenty-two of the thirty positives were cows, matching a harvest that is itself overwhelmingly female, and the same season recorded the first positive elk ever detected at CFB Wainwright. Alberta does not publish those 30 positives broken out by unit, so the exact Suffield figure is not public — but the direction is not ambiguous.
A caution that applies to both bases: WMUs 728 and 730 (west and east CFB Wainwright) require CWD submission on every harvested animal, and Suffield's controlled draw achieves something close to it. So these units are near-censuses while the rest of the province is a voluntary sample. They will always look disproportionately represented in the positives, and that is a sampling property, not necessarily a disease property. What the two-year elk comparison shows is a rate rising within that same near-census — which is harder to explain away.
Bucks were 69% of the 2025 deer harvest, and male whitetails test positive at roughly three times the female rate. So hunter preference happens to remove the highest-risk animals.
The ten-season view complicates it: antlerless deer were 57% of the harvest in 2022–23 before allocation was cut. The buck-heavy 2025 harvest is better targeted for disease control, but 2023 removed far more animals overall. Which effect dominates is not something the public data can settle.
What this analysis cannot support.
Every dataset here was transcribed from a published PDF, so each one is verified in the browser at load time rather than asked to be trusted.