The annual gun deer hunting season
in Wisconsin begins tomorrow.
The long tradition of a regulated
hunt in the state dates back to
1851.
The modern season brings with it
new challenges and opportunities
for the thousands of hunters
descending into the outdoors with
high hopes for the harvest.
Jeff Pritzel is long-time deer
program specialist with the
Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources, and he joins us now, and
Jeff, thanks a lot for being here.
Happy to be here.
It's the day of anticipation.
Correct.
So with the gun deer season starting
tomorrow, how many licenses have
been sold as a measure of interest
this year and how does that
compare historically?
Yeah, well interest we're right on
about the same pace as we've been
the past couple of years or within
a half a percent.
So we'll be somewhere just shy of
600,000 deer
hunters out on Saturday morning.
Um, historically we Wisconsin
peaked at seven
hundred at the turn
of the century, 25 years ago.
So we've seen a decline.
It's really driven just by the
demographics of our, of our hunting
population, but it's, it's
kind of stabilized the last couple
of years, which is a good thing.
Yeah, those numbers don't sound
bad.
The estimate is that there are two
million deer walking around
out there.
What do conditions this year look
like for hunters to be able to
harvest them?
Well, the things that are in hunters
favor this year are we're
going to have relatively cool and
calm conditions.
We'd love to know. We're not going
to have that at least at the
beginning of the season.
Agricultural harvest, especially
corn harvest is at or ahead
of schedule.
Um, and so that's good in the farm
land. And we're coming
off of too mild winter, so
that means the deer population in
the northern forest is trending up a
little bit.
The things that are stacked against
us are that it's relatively late
opener on the calendar,
so the later we get into November
with the opener, we do see a little
reduct in daytime deer movement,
and so that could work against us
this weekend, but that's just
part of the nature of hunting.
What are the regions in Wisconsin
that look more favorable for
hunters?
Well, I always think that's in the
eye of the beholder because not all
hunters are looking for
the best chance to see
deer and harvest deer.
You know, the counties in the state
that perennially have the highest
harvest densities are counties
like Wapaka, Marquette, Green Lake,
that East Central part of the state.
We saw 13 counties mostly
in East Central Wisconsin have a
record buck kill last year and
they're probably gonna be in that
same area this year.
But if hunters that are looking for
a different kind of experience maybe
a little more solitude and a lot of
country to explore you know the
northern forest you know offers
that in spades with big big
chunks of state and federal
properties that's where i'll be this
weekend looking forward
to that kind of an experience i may
not see as many deer but that's
not everyone's primary objective
So how do recent
harvests of between 3,000
and 350,000
across all deer seasons compare?
We've actually been in a pretty
stable pattern
really over the past decade
in that, yeah, like you said, 300,
350,000 and it kind of
undulates up and down driven
mostly by antlerless deer harvest
on the buck harvest has been pretty
stable.
And considering we've been seeing
a slight decline in hunter numbers.
That stability of
harvest means that more hunters
are being successful.
But it's certainly hunters that
remember 20 years ago where we were
in kind of a bubble of really
high deer numbers and high hunter
numbers. I remember those harvests
where we were getting between
400,000 deer and then that
peak we got as many as 600,000
dear. But that was driven by really
high antlerless harvets which we're
not seeing these days.
And so it's, we've had
quite a bit of actual pretty stable
conditions other than that minor.
Fluctuations with weather and stuff
in recent years.
What would be the optimal
harvest to manage the deer
population?
Wisconsin, yeah, there's two
different stories going on always
with that northern forest versus
the farmland.
And the northern forest is kind of
driven by by by weather and
things that we don't necessarily
have control over.
And we may turn the antlerless
harvest down, you know,
after severe winters and up after
mild winters this year.
But in the in the agricultural part
of the state, that's where the real
challenge lies.
Because optimally, we should
be harvesting about two antler less
deer for every buck.
And that It just doesn't happen.
Voluntarily.
We've accomplished that in the past
with mandatory antlerless harvest,
but we tend without some type of
incentive or mandatory we tend to
get them harvested at about one to
one ratio.
We really need to have that antler
less harvest at about 1.5
to 2 per buck in those farmland
counties.
You speak about hunters considering
being a hunter for the community,
not just for themselves or
individually.
Well, what do you mean by that?
Back to what we were just talking
about in that those hunters
that find themselves fortunate in
the positions where they have access
to deer.
The challenge that we have is once
a Wisconsin deer hunter gets
a deer has been the freezer, their
incentive to take another deer goes
way down.
So even though we provide that
opportunity, they're not
necessarily incentivized to harvest
an adequate number of deer in
the places where we really have the
opportunity to do so.
So those hunters hopefully would
be able to say I can take an extra
deer and there's
says that it can be put to use
through our formal deer donation
program but there's a lot of
other side benefits to
managing the deer population both
ecologically and within the
tolerances of human social
tolerances it relates to car
accidents and crop damage and
all those types of things and so
this you know Thank you very much.
For eons, actually, we're
a subset of the population that
hunted for their community as a
whole. We've kind of moved
culturally towards a hunting
being wolves.
And it's, I think, behoove us
to recapture that notion that
we're hunters for the
community so that the greater
community sees us as an asset
to them.
What do you want hunters to be on
the lookout for in terms
of chronic wasting disease?
Well, it's important for us to keep
a good tab on
how that disease is evolving
in the state, both in terms of
its rate on the landscape
and the prevalence within the areas.
We're gathering really good
information that not only helps us
make better decisions in the future
within Wisconsin, but other states
are really learning from what we're
capturing here in Wisconsin because
the disease is not going away.
But there are steps we can
take to mitigate its spread
and work within having it on
the landscape.
So really our focus is on that
leading edge where the disease is
spreading in the state, really kind
of across the middle of
the state. We encourage hunters
statewide to get their
deer sampled and we've developed
a good cohort of what I would call
citizen science hunters that
do participate every year
and contribute to that database
better decision making.
How difficult is deer management
in the state with waning numbers of
hunters and changing conditions
out there?
It is a real challenge
in as much as we're talking about,
you know, numbers, but
part of the challenge is that a lot
of these deer exist in areas that
are not accessible to the
deer hunters. And the hunters would
say, we'd love to help out with
managing the deer population.
We just don't have access to deer.
So for landowners that recognize,
hey, there's probably too many deer
in this landscape.
They have a role to play with maybe
providing that access.
And the other thing to be aware of
is this is not unique to Wisconsin.
Most of the Midwest states are
seeing the same challenge in the
Eastern states.
And so at having a
discussion about a paradigm shift
towards enhancing
harvest as it relates
to, again, making the hunting
community an asset to the total
community.
We leave it there, Jeff Pritzel,
thanks very much for joining us.
You bet. Good luck to all the
hunters.
For more on this and other issues
facing Wisconsin, visit our website
at pbswisconsin.org
and then click on the news tab.
That's our program for tonight.
I'm Frederica Freiburg.
Have a good weekend.