February 10, 2017 at 3:34 p.m.
The statistics from the northern forest zone were outliers, we showed - compared to the rest of the state, compared to historical averages, compared to the DNR's hunting forecast, and compared to the 2015 harvest.
The statistics were so incongruous that they raised the same questions hunters in the field were asking: How could so many bucks be killed proportional to the overall population than have been in the past?
Durkin never worried about comparing harvest numbers to changing population numbers, and that invalidated his analysis. His was fake news.
Rather than investigate to see if there was any evidence on the ground, Durkin simply declared the whole exercise illogical on its face. Why would so many people, he wondered, risk fines to make false or illegal deer registrations over a nine-deer period?
He couldn't think of a single reason, and, because the thought did not enter into this genius's head, it didn't happen.
But there were any number of reasons, and likely all of them were in play. In combination, the false numbers can add up quickly. For example, many people just want meat in the freezer, and one way they can do that quickly and easily is to kill does and register them as bucks.
As Lakeland Times outdoors write Becky Gaskill has surmised, this is especially likely with online registration of deer, especially for hunters hunting on their own land.
Then there is the politics of it all, and Durkin played the wolf card, after slapping Sen. Tom Tiffany for asking his constituents if they were happy with the DNR's reported numbers. At least Tiffany was asking people in the North, which Durkin notably failed to do for his piece.
"Tiffany's trolling landed the standard irrelevant, emotional claims we expect in deer-hunting circles," Ostrich Durkin wrote. "There's no deer left, wolves ate them all, we must kill more bears and coyotes, the DNR's chief idiot must go, it's time to cancel deer season for two years, we should eliminate all doe tags, and antlerless quotas were too high during earlier generations of deer."
Once again Durkin fell victim to the Ostrich Effect in an attempt to avoid any negative information about wolves. But even radical Democrat and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin recognizes there are too many wolves, more than nine times the number originally planned, and that they are a danger: "This large population is leading to increased conflicts between humans and wolves. Families are worried about their ability to stay safe, farmers report livestock losses and declines in dairy productivity from stressed cows, and pets have been killed by wolves that are straying closer to yards, farms, and towns. In addition, sportsmen and wildlife enthusiasts report declines in the population of deer, elk, and other wildlife."
But rather than realize wolves are one reason the deer population has declined -and that the real buck harvest was probably less than the DNR estimate - Durkin resorts to emotional libel, implying that those who question the deer population and the deer kill are irrational about wolves, not to mention bears and coyotes.
But it is the irrational claims of those who want to see the wolves remain on the endangered species list that likely led to another result - many pro-wolf activists likely called in fake deer kills, made easy by online and phone-in registration, courtesy of the DNR.
After all, if the harvest is up, the deer population is up, and there would be no reason to delist the wolf, because they aren't killing deer.
Is it irrational to think that pro-wolf activists would resort to such a tactic? Well, they've been known to take over public meetings, they have been known to try and intimidate hunters by posting their names on websites, and, in 2010, when the Swedish government decided to conduct a wolf hunt to eliminate just 27 wolves, pro-wolf activists posted images designed to look like the bloody corpses of hunters. Swedish police had to protect the wolf hunt.
If pro-wolf activists will do those things, a fake phone call is not hard to imagine. In fact, it's hard to imagine it not happening.
OK, so Durkin's wolf card turns out to be a Joker, but he had another card he wanted to play: the race card. The only difference between concerns about the deer harvest now and concerns in the 1990s, Durkin wrote, is that the Chippewa got the blame then: "Then the wolf population rebounded, relieving tribal hunters of that particular prejudice."
So Northwoods TinFoil Hatters hate wolves, bears, coyotes, the DNR, and - should that not be enough - they hate Native Americans, too. Of course, no one is accusing Native Americans of anything, and so Durkin is simply guilty of using a broad brush to distract people from the reality of the situation.
That reality is that an easy-to-fake registration system is a sitting target for political activists wanting desperately to keep a huge deer predator on the endangered species list.
So there is motive and there is opportunity and there are the statistical aberrations. But none of that is proof. Is there any actual evidence that the system was gamed? Is all the hearsay just that, hearsay?
The answer is no. A lot of anecdotal evidence exists, to be sure. Residents near hunting areas reported hearing fewer shots. People driving around did not see the normal amount of deer on cars. Hunters reported seeing fewer gut piles.
But there are numbers, too. The Northwoods Youth Deer Hunt Challenge was down 78 percent with nearly the same number of entrants, indeed, one more. Most of the entrants in the Northwoods Youth Deer Hunt Challenge can harvest does and the challenge has been going for 13 years.
A normally popular buck pool in Stella had only two entries this year, The Times has previously reported, while Northcountry Taxidermy was down 35 percent on local bucks and processing at Northwoods Foods was about even year over year. One deer hide buyer who also takes hides on donation saw his take fall from 300 hides in 2014 to 240 hides in 2015 to 163 hides in 2026 - a 32-percent drop, not a 30-percent increase.
Over at Outdoor News, Dean Bortz ran lengthy comments from Steve Oestreicher of Harshaw, a former chairman of the Conservation Congress who, as Bortz reported, has a long history of involvement in the DNR's deer management program.
Oestreicher was skeptical, too.
"Oestreicher lives near the Alpine Resort on Oneida Lake," Bortz reported. "The Alpine had 86 hunters sign-up for its buck pool. Of that number, only five bucks were registered."
The article said Oestreicher talked to three hunting groups, two of which never killed a deer.
And on and on it went. At Kurt's Island Sport Shop in Minocqua, Kurt Justice said he saw his buck pool entrants fall from 170-190 entrants to 150 in 2015 to 105 in 2016, Bortz reported, with only 13 bucks brought in, while Justice sold 33 percent fewer licenses on the Friday before the opener.
The same tale was told across the region, from southern Ashland County to Patti Helsing's place in Winter, where the pool dropped from more than 200 hunters to 32, with four registered bucks.
An anecdote here or there might mean nothing, but the accumulation of reports from the field tells a strong story. Something is wrong, and it doesn't take a genius, or a tinfoil hatter, to know it.
The statistics tell us so. The hearsay tells us so. The taxidermists and businesspeople tell us so. The buck pools tell us so. The only one telling us it isn't so is the guy who never, by his own admission, made any effort to find out the truth, other than to cook a book of statistics.
That would be the guy with his derriere high in the air, the so-called journalist: Patrick "Ostrich" Durkin. You can probably reach him at headinthesand.com.
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