February 23, 2023 at 12:48 p.m.
Northwoods hunters urge change in deer management
Hunters call for management units based on habitat, not county lines
The hunters - Gregg Walker, publisher of the The Lakeland Times; Scott Cisney of Arbor Vitae; Kurt Justice, owner of Kurt's Island Sport Shop; and Dean Bortz, editor of Wisconsin Outdoor News - also said the state should return to setting population goals within the units based on specific deer population counts. Right now, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) does not conduct actual counts but makes estimates based on harvests and does not set population goals in the county units.
Walker said the need for changing the management strategy was urgent.
"North of Hwys. 8 and 64, most of the areas of northern Wisconsin, we are in a crisis in our deer herd," Walker told members of the Assembly Committee on Sporting Heritage. "I've been hunting for 45 years and I've never see anything like it. Anything in nature cycles. There are deer cycles, partridge cycles. We have natural cycles. What we don't have in our deer herd is a cycle."
Put simply, that means deer populations aren't recovering as they normally would after suffering losses for whatever reason, not only from hunting but from predation and winter mortality, among others.
"Bad winters back to back and heavy predation took a toll on the deer herd," Walker said. "The problem is, it's not coming back. And it's not a habitat or food issue."
The problem under the county system is, the hunters told lawmakers, counties often have different types of habitat, both forest and farmland, for instance, with differing deer populations. In farmland, there may be more deer; in residential areas, there may be clusters and pockets of deer, pushed there by predators; in forested areas, there may be few deer or no deer at all.
Yet, Cisney told the lawmakers, the varying populations in that county are all under one set of harvest rules set by the agency, based on input and recommendations from the local CDAC, or County Deer Advisory Council, which is made up of local members of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress and other stakeholder citizens.
"When the CDAC is managing the county, and you have disparate populations within the county, an agricultural area versus a forest area, what ends up happening is, you get a lot of debate in CDAC, but there are legitimately different points of view and Oneida County is the greatest example of that," Cisney said. "You have potato farms in the east and forests in the west, and there are two different populations of deer and you're trying to make one law apply to both."
Conflicting harvest needs between groups of hunters are one of the outcomes, which the DNR acknowledges. At the hearing, Jeff Pritzl, deer program specialist with the DNR, said the agency was aware of disparate densities within counties as deer migrate closer to food and to sanctuary while the rest of the county suffers lower deer populations.
Without hard numbers and population goals, Pritzl said hunters in low-density areas may want fewer antlerless tags issued to allow the herd to recover, while in the high density area hunters may seek more antlerless tags, all in the same county.
Still, Pritzl said, the macro approach was worth it.
"Our abilities to manage that resource at a landscape scale - it works but you will always be contending with the fact that these micro-landscape things are not necessarily going to line up with what we are looking at at the unit level," he said. "To a certain extent we have to be comfortable that that is just reality. Any attempt to micromanage it to account for what we are hearing over here or here, we'll just be chasing our tail."
Still, Pritzl said, it might be time for a review.
"We hear from those who want it better," Pritzl said, including from stakeholders in the CDACs.
"It is going to be a challenge in a county that has really disparate densities to try and treat them differently, but we have long-standing public input processes in the agency to weigh that out, and I think that's where we are at right now. Every decade we take a step back and look."
The unit-based concept was ditched for the county management system based on a 2014 Deer Trustee Report led by Dr. James Kroll, a deer management expert from Texas.
Dire deer situation in the North
Walker described the situation as a crisis, and other hunters testifying at the hearing did not disagree.
"The [deer] population in the Northwoods isn't what we think it is," Cisney said. "Our count mechanism isn't accurately registering what it is. We're missing something in the count but we've made it easier to harvest. We're still using harvest data for the count, and we have less hunters in part because we have less population to hunt."
Justice said his customers sang the same lamenting refrain.
"We have areas that have a lot of town deer and then we've got places in the northern part of the county that have very few deer," Justice said. "I hear anecdotal stories from customers coming in who are out in what I call the real woods, the Chequamegon-Nicolet. They see a lot more wolf tracks than they see deer tracks."
Bortz said predation was a real thing.
"I call it predation load," he said. "It's not just wolves. It's not just bears. It's everything we got running around out there."
There are more predators than ever, Bortz said.
"The bear population is high," he said. "Those things snuffle around in the spring and pick fawns up off the ground like a Hoover vacuum cleaner. You have vast sections of land where you have no deer. Then you get into the housing areas, the predators have pushed them into those areas."
One contributing reason for a declining population besides predation and harsh winters might be the ease with which the DNR has allowed hunters to harvest deer, Walker said. In the past, he said the state passed laws to protect the deer herd but now they have done a "180."
"They passed laws that made sense and protected the deer herd, not the slaughter we have today," he said. "There are so many laws to harvest deer that we are not curbing it to not harvest them."
For example, in the past, the group said, cross-bow hunting was not allowed the week before the gun deer season. In addition, hunting licenses had to be purchased before the hunting season but not anymore.
"You can theoretically shoot a deer out your back yard with a cross bow and go buy a license," Cisney said. "You could choose to register or not register. My point is, for all the right reasons, we are trying to get more hunter involvement out in the field."
The declining hunter population
It's not just the deer herd population that's declining. The number of deer hunters is declining, too.
The DNR chalks a lot of that up to plain old demographics.
"We've lost 15 percent of our deer hunting population since the turn of the century and we're going to lose another 15 percent in the next decade to 12 years," Pritzl testified.
That said, Pritzl doesn't believe the situation is dire.
"We're still going to have hundreds of thousands of deer hunters in Wisconsin," he said. "It's not going to be 600,000, but if we can hang on to 500,000, we're doing good."
But those from the north, like Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander), who has spent four decades in the hospitality industry and who requested last week's hearing, say the real reason the numbers of deer hunters are going down is because "there's no deer."
"Things have changed in tourism and hospitality when it comes to deer hunting," Swearingen said. "Time was when opening weekend was a sea of orange in every tavern and in every supper club in the Northwoods. Something changed over those 40 years that I have been involved. I believe it's directly because there are no deer."
The DNR's management strategies over the past few years just haven't been working the way the agency anticipated, Swearingen said.
Swearingen spoke of the culture surrounding hunting, and the others testified as to the hunting experience, all of which they say are deteriorating because of declining herd numbers.
Cisney said his son sat in a deer stand for seven days straight, only to see one deer. Walker said the only reasons people come North to hunt anymore are heritage or camaraderie.
"They are not going up there to harvest deer," he said.
Walker also spoke of his and others efforts to recruit youth hunters through the Northwoods Youth Deer Hunt Challenge. That program has been extraordinarily successful, despite having to compete with technology and cell phones for the attention of young people, but Walker said it becomes an even tougher situation when young people have a bad experience in the woods.
"If they go in the woods in northern Wisconsin and they don't see a deer for five hours or for a whole weekend, that hunter experience is shot," he said. "It's very hard to get the youth into it. If you have numbers of deer, it's exciting, and they will be there. We don't have that."
Justice said he could see the downturn unfold right before his eyes.
"I've run a deer contest for the 23 years I've had the shop, and the numbers are dropping and dropping, and the quality of the deer has dropped," he said.
Justice said Wisconsin is a lot cheaper place to hunt than in other states, but, even so, he said many people would rather spend more to go somewhere else where the hunting is better.
Solutions
Those testifying at the hearing came armed with solutions, and the first suggestion from all four was to return to numbered management units based on habitat rather than on counties, and to re-establish population goals for those units.
"We can manage the deer population," Walker said. "What I am asking the committee to look at today is, when you go back to the units, those were scientifically carved out for a reason. They were carved out because you had big woods, you had agriculture, you set that apart. By setting that apart, you could manage the deer within those units, with tools. They would take the harvests to certain levels."
When numbers plummeted in a unit, Walker said, hunters might not be able to harvest any does the next year, or hunters might be limited to one buck for a season.
"The units give you a better ability to manage deer," he said. "They would go to a population goal. The population goal was the pride and joy of the DNR for decades, say, 20 per square mile, or whatever the number. But in unit 31 (where Walker hunts) that number is 4 per square mile if we are lucky."
You manage by what is there, Walker said.
"Your seasons are limited, you protect the rut," he said. "One of the great things about deer hunting in Wisconsin is that we always protected our herd. Our rifle season is late, you don't get the rut. If we are going to manage deer and manage it to a population goal by going back to these units, it's more tools for the biologists."
Another recommendation was to implement an actual count of the deer population. With technology and cameras, an actual count is achievable, the group testified.
Justice mentioned reciprocal licensing with other states as a way to stymie hunter migration, and Bortz said a higher license fee should be considered, to raise pay and hire new staff, though not for Madison, he emphasized.
"We need more people out in the woods," he said. "How are we going to count those deer if we don't pay someone to go count those deer?"
DNR management, or lack of?
During the hearing the DNR was mildly dressed down by several lawmakers as they made what some said were surprising admissions.
For one thing, Pritzl testified, the agency doesn't track predation.
"The way we look at mortality factors of deer, and the influence of those factors on the future of the deer population, is to put them as compensatory or additive," he said.
In other words, if wolf predation is likely to add to the declining population, that's additive and an issue, but if it merely replaces another way of death rather than increasing the overall mortality, then it's compensatory and not a problem.
"What is its contribution to the deer population going forward and is it nested within that annual mortality or is it additive and causing additional mortality?" he testified.
But Pritzl also said those considerations are site specific, and they aren't adequately or fully understood at the site level.
"Whether at the county level or unit level, those are the discussions I want to build more room and capacity for in the CDAC process for better understanding of that," he said.
In other words, one lawmaker retorted, "you don't know."
Pritzl also admitted the agency doesn't have a good grasp on tracking hunter effort. In other words, why are there fewer hunters in the Northwoods? Is it demographics, as the DNR suggests, or a lack of deer that are driving hunters to hunt in more deer-populous areas?
"The one thing we don't have a good of a handle on as we did at one time is tracking effort," he said. "Hunter density per square mile, we used to track that for opening weekend and that was when the opening weekend of the gun season was the big event."
That effort has dispersed, Pritzl said.
"So in order to better capture total hunter effort, it's much more difficult to say, 'here is your peak hunter density in that unit,'" he said. "That opening weekend is not so pivotal."
And, as mentioned, the agency does not undertake actual counts of the herd.
"To get population numbers, they collect observational info - not a count - surveys of does and fawns," Pritzl said. "The most viable way to track deer population changes and harvest changes is mandatory registration."
All of which led Rep. Robert Brooks (R-Saukville) to admonish the agency.
"We need to track hunter activity," Brooks said. "Are people hunting in forested areas going down [south] and why? We're not tracking predation. We're not tracking hunter activity. It's a $2 billion industry. If we were talking about any other $2 billion industry, those answers would not be acceptable."
For his part, Justice said he and some other CDAC leaders have tried to get the agency to split units up the way they once were.
"We have not been allowed to," he said. "It would make things so much easier if the people that want to protect this part of the county from doe harvest from the other part of the county where they have a lot of does could be separated like they used to be."
Justice said the public was upset with the CDACs because of their lack of action on that matter, but he said they were in fact powerless to act.
"They don't realize we can't," he said. "It would be a lot easier and it would make a lot more sense scientifically if we went back to these units that are managed dependent on type of habitat and how much an area could hold as far as deer habitat."
Richard Moore is the author of "Dark State" and may be reached at richardd3d/substack.com.
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