Marathon County hunters are finding out the final whitetail deer harvest numbers for 2009.

A meeting is underway with the Department of Natural Resource leaders to announce how last year's season turned out, and what the plan is for the future.

DNR leaders are announcing that harvest numbers state-wide were down by about 120,000 deer from 2008 to 2009.

We were able to see the numbers before the meeting.

The Marathon County wildlife biologist will show hunters, the buck harvest last season was down by about 8% and doe was down about 53% state-wide.

She says those numbers are down because in most areas, there was no earn-a-buck last year, which meant hunters had to tag an antlerless deer before tagging a buck.

She says she'll explain many reasons why hunters felt they weren't so lucky bagging a buck last season, one of them is because of bad weather.

"There was fog state wide the opening day harvest was way down it was a little warmer than usual and all these factors and basically the 9 day gun deer season was down incredibly which affected everything else," says DNR Wildlife Biologist, Cortney Schaefer.

She will also explain that next season, there will still be a $12 charge on antlerless tags.

She says the herd control numbers are where they hoped they would be in most of Marathon County, so it doesn't look like earn-a-buck will be back next year.