October 19, 2018 at 4:41 p.m.
Forestry committee approves CWD surveillance tags on county forest land
Forestry committee approves CWD surveillance tags on county forest land
It was decided to issue CWD-surveillance permits to private landowners in the focus area, at a rate of five permits per land owner holding at least five contiguous acres of land in the area. However, a fair amount of the land in the focus area is county forest land.
To that end, DNR biologist Jeremy Holtz and Oneida County's County Deer Advisory Committee (CDAC) chairman Ed Choinski approached the Oneida County Forestry Committee to ask for approval to issue CWD-surveillance tags on county forest land.
The plan would be to obtain one sample for every square mile of county forest land. Given the average success rate over the past few years, it was believed 150 CWD-surveillance tags would give the sample size for which the DNR was looking. The hope, Holtz and Choinski said, was hunters would provide the DNR with lymph node samples from deer harvested with a regular hunting license as well, but they felt, in order to ensure a proper sample size, 150 either sex tags for adult deer only would be the best mark for which to shoot.
"The long and short of it is Chronic Wasting Disease is in the county," Holtz told the committee. "And it's going to impact our deer herd. It's 100 percent fatal. It's irreversible. It's almost impossible to kill. It persists in the soil and can be taken up by plants. And it can be passed from doe to fawn. It's extremely hard to get rid of once it's established in a population. We were hoping this day was never going to come. We were hoping we were never going to get it up here."
Holtz explained the only way to sample deer in the wild, at this time, is to kill them. He said any chance the department has to sample a deer, whether it be a car-killed deer or one someone found dead or sick in their yard, they sample those deer. Deer harvested under an agricultural damage permit are also subject to sampling as a condition of the permit. CWD-surveillance permits, too, would require, as a condition of issuing the permit, any deer harvested would be sampled.
In a perfect world, Holtz said, all hunters in the county would want to help the DNR determine the scope of CWD in the Northwoods and everyone would have his or her deer tested. In that scenario, the DNR would receive enough samples that no CWD-surveillance tags would need to be issued. However, it is unlikely for that to be the case. At best, he said, with mandatory and voluntary sampling, the DNR is receiving about 130 samples, which is not enough to provide the confidence level needed to determine the extent to which CWD is on the landscape.
The two positives, he said, could be isolated incidents. They could be the "bull'seye," or center of the CWD in the county, or they may be out on the edge, with a bigger problem nearby. At this point, it is unknown, and that is what the department is looking to determine.
Without in-person registration, it has become harder to get hunters to come in with samples, Holtz said. While he could not make sampling mandatory this year, by next year, the option will exist to make sampling of all harvested deer mandatory in CWD-surveillance areas. Right now, though, the only tool he has available is to issue CWD-surveillance tags. Choinski said the CDAC would also be getting together with the media to put forth an educational campaign to let hunters know the importance of having deer sampled. If the scope of the disease can be determined, he said, there could be some hope of containing it.
The two areas of county forest that would be subject to these CWD-surveillance tags, Holtz said, would be an area near the positive test at a game farm in Three Lakes as well as the area around the Wisconsin River where the two positives were found in the wild herd last winter. It would be the eastern block and the central block of county forest land, land in Enterprise, Woodboro and Washburn, that would have tags issued for harvest.
Lincoln and Langlade County committees have already approved tags for their county forests, it was noted. The committee agreed to allow the issuance of these permits, with the DNR being the issuing body, and send it through whatever administrative review process deemed necessary.
It was added that the issuance of these tags would be reviewable on an annual basis and the process of approval was set in motion.
Beckie Gaskill may be reached via email at [email protected].
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