The 2015 big game general season wrapped up Sunday, and preliminary results from check stations in Northwest Montana show both hunter participation and animals taken have increased compared with recent years.

While the numbers are encouraging, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ Regional Wildlife Manager Neil Anderson noted the totals are just a sampling of those hunters who stopped at game checks on the weekends.

“It’s just a subset of what’s going on out there,” Anderson said Monday. “It’s tracked relatively close [to the actual numbers] but the hunter surveys are a better estimate.”

Later this winter, the agency will call a random sample of hunters and potential hunters to ask whether they went hunting, where they went and what they harvested.

The region’s six check stations reported the highest level of hunters participating since the 2011 general season, with 18,411 stops at game checks. It was also the most white-tailed deer and bucks harvested in the past five years — of 1,294 white-tails harvested, 1,067 were bucks.

Total elk harvested was also at its highest level since 2011, with 86 reported this year.

Mule deer remained elusive, and were the only big game animal down from 2014. Just 125 were harvested in the region, the lowest total since 2011.

The U.S. 2 check station west of Kalispell posted the biggest numbers, responsible for more than one third of all reported deer and elk harvest. Hunter success was 8 percent, down slightly from the rate of 8.7 percent last year.

The highest success rates came from the Olney and Thompson Falls game checks, at 11.6 and 10.7 percent, respectively.

After posting paltry results early in the season, the North Fork check station closed with a 6.5 percent success rate, up from 4.5 percent in 2014. The Canoe Gulch and Swan game checks were the lowest, with respective rates of 5.4 percent and 6.3 percent of hunters bringing home an animal.

This general season was also the first to employ Montana’s new “hunter apprentice” program, which allows youth ages 10 and 11 to hunt, so long as they’re accompanied by a mentor who meets the law’s qualifications. They can also now forgo the state’s hunter education program for up to two years.

Anderson said he wasn’t yet sure what impact the new rules had this year, but it seemed that participation had increased for the region’s newest generation of game hunters.

“One of the things that really struck me was how many youth hunters we had,” he said. “There were a lot of smiles on kids’ faces, which I think is always great.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.