Mahoning Valley - Hunting season is officially over and Mill Creek MetroParks has the final numbers of its deer population thinning program.

Culling hunting with professional sharpshooters removed 38 deer. Controlled hunting with amateur bow and arrow and firearm hunters removed 166 deer. 

“Successful first year for sure,” Nick Derico, the Natural Resources Manager at Mill Creek MetroParks said. “We estimated between 66 deer and 133 deer .. . so yeah we actually exceeded expectations by a fair margin.”

The park will reevaluate the deer numbers through an aerial survey. Back in January, a small plane circled the park at night at a low altitude. The crew was using an infrared camera to count the deer in certain areas. Mike Holthouse with Above All Aerials said the survey is 85% accurate. 

The park will also reevaluate the vegetation numbers. The idea of the hunts was first brought up because the deer were eating too much of the vegetation and plant life was at risk.

“It’s all about our forest ecosystem,” Derico said. “High deer densities can severely damage our forest and it’s our responsibility to protect those forests for future generations.”

Workers will collect vegetation data from sample plots around the parks and compare what they find to their baseline data taken before the removals took place. 

“Vegetation type, vegetation height, documented brows damage … and through time we’ll be able to track changes,” Derico said. 

Results for both of the survey’s are expected at the end of the summer. 

But, even before the park gets those numbers, it’s already been decided that there will be another hunt this fall with both the sharpshooters and amateur hunters. 

“It's not a one year solution, these programs are long term, it's just a factor of what those removals look like,” Derico said.

Each year the park can change the amount of hunters, how many deer they can take and the locations of the hunts - which will all be based on what the surveys find. 

Derico said they are probably looking at a total of 5 to 10 years of these hunts to thin the deer population. 

The Save Our Mill Creek Deer group still has a lawsuit pending in Mahoning County Court to stop any future hunts. One of the biggest issues the group had with the hunts was safety. Several homeowners that live near the park were worried about being injured by a hunter, but Derico said they didn’t have any safety issues this year. 

A judge's ruling whether to stop the hunt is expected in the next few weeks.