At public hearing, DNR management of deer herd is criticized

At a joint public hearing last week, state lawmakers heard again that the state Department of Natural Resources is not managing the state’s deer herd as it needs to be, and that the situation represents a looming crisis.

That prompted a legislative hearing in Madison earlier this year, and a follow-up joint hearing in Park Falls on August 28 by the Assembly Committee on Sporting Heritage and the Senate Committee on Financial Institutions and Sporting Heritage, this time specifically focusing on what many hunters call a dire situation in northern Wisconsin.

At the earlier hearing, a group of hunters including Lakeland Times and River News publisher Gregg Walker urged the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to abandon its current county-based system of deer management and to return to a unit-based system based on habitat rather than county lines.

The hunters also said the state should return to setting population goals within the units based on specific deer population counts. Right now, the DNR does not conduct actual counts but makes estimates based on harvests and does not set population goals in the county units.

Walker returned to the Park Falls hearing to underscore his message.

That message is timely because the DNR is set to rewrite its deer management plan, which expires this year. The agency is developing a new three-year plan.

For the DNR’s part, the agency has said it manages deer by harvest goals rather then by population count, and they prefer a landscape scale of management — by county rather than by units defined by habitat. That might create micro-conflicts within counties but is beneficial overall, the DNR’s Jeff Pritzl has said.

“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 the unit level,” he said at the earlier hearing. “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.”

Yes, we have no deer

At last week’s hearing, Walker lamented the lack of deer in northern Wisconsin, citing the flight of hunters from the region, including one of the hunters who testified earlier this year, whom Walker said had hunted in northern Wisconsin for 41 years but would be in South Dakota this deer season hunting pheasant “because there are no deer here.”

“The biggest concern is, we’ve always had deer in northern Wisconsin,” Walker said. “We’re not seeing the deer herd cycle. So it is has been spotty, we had our great years, but you get into 2013, 2014, the deer herd plummeted.”

Walker specifically referenced Unit 31, the western half of Oneida County.

“The herd is not cycling, and I think that’s a huge concern for our area,” he said. “And when that didn’t happen, we’ve seen our hunter numbers go way down. That’s a given. There’s not near the hunters there used to be in our area.”

Walker said the number of hunters in the area along the border of Price and Oneida counties had declined by about 80 percent in the past decade.

“In the area that I hunt, there’s hardly any,” he said. “What the DNR doesn’t do is manage the deer herd by population goals anymore.”

That’s critical, Walker said. 

“And the reason that’s critical is back when we had the units, the goal was about 20 deer per square mile in unit 31,” he said. “Today, I would bet that number is three. And there’s vast areas of square miles where there might not be a deer. The problem is, if you’re just going to harvest and base your number off a harvest, not a population goal, they just issue tags throughout the county and you have does being killed there.”

Shutting it down

Walker said, under the unit system guided by previous DNR biologists, with population numbers as bad as they are, there would be no harvest at all.

Walker presented lawmakers with historical harvest data from Unit 31.

“You see the units, you can go to unit 31 and you can see the deer kill,” he said. “So my point is, is that if you go to 1970, 1971, 1972, you'll see that the numbers are way down. So what did they do? No doe harvest. As you look at how those mature, those numbers double in 1975, 1976, 1977. That’s deer management. It’s managing to a goal. And when you manage to a goal, you’re going to increase your numbers. So when you are managing for that, not a harvest but a population goal, you’re going to be able to raise your deer herd, even against some of the predators we face.”

Walker also presented data from the Northwoods Youth Deer Hunt Challenge.

“We started that in 2004,” he said. “You can see entrants and harvest and this is from Vilas, Oneida, Price, and Iron counties. When you look at that, look at 2005, 70 entrants, 56 deer harvested. That’s a good ratio.”

As the years go on, Walker continued, there are bad numbers in 2013 and 2014.

“Then you get into 2016, 221 entrants, 73 harvested,” he said. “As you can see the numbers for themselves, it just goes down. Success rates are way off.”

But that doesn’t tell the worst part of the story, Walker said.

“The worst part about it is that from 2016 to 2021, as the harvest rates go way down, the DNR kept the doe kill up,” he said. “They kept the harvest numbers up. There was no end to killing does.”

And that’s why the herd isn’t cycling, Walker said.

“If the deer herd isn’t cycling, that’s bad because everything cycles in nature,” he said. “The deer herd is not.”

Walker said a survey in the north revealed other sentiments about how to revive the population.

“People think there’s way too many opportunities,” he said. “They think cross bows have changed the game tremendously. Not getting rid of cross bow but maybe setting a season up for that.”

The bottom line is, Walker said, there has to be a way to better manage the deer herd.

“The quality of our deer is probably the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he said. “The mature bucks, we just don’t see them. Overall, fawns have got to be the least I’ve ever seen. This is the worst amount of deer where I hunt and it’s the least amount of hunters that I’ve ever seen.”

The bottom line is, Walker told lawmakers, if you’re going to manage deer, you have to count deer.

“Now we’re not going to know every deer out there, but we have an idea of what’s there,” he said. “What I’m saying is that I think the DNR needs to bring more numbers to the CDACs (County Deer Advisory Councils) because I’m questioning the DNR’s deer numbers. They are based off harvest. That’s very difficult when you’re basing it off what you have killed. You should be basing it off deer per square mile.”

In the county-wide deer management system, the CDACs provide input and recommendations to the department on deer management and help develop three-year recommendations on county population objectives and annual antlerless harvest quotas. But Walker said the CDACs need to have solid data.

“And I think that when you walk into a meeting, you can make a decision based off good factual, information way better than you can not having right or accurate information,” he said. “And that’s what I’m saying that the CDACs lack. That’s something that’s very important. You have to have good information.”

Walker said he met with a DNR biologist this year.

“We went out on the land and we could drive miles before you crossed a deer track,” he said. “And I think the biologists know we don’t have a lot of deer. It’s the higher ups in the DNR that’s keeping them wherever they’re at.”

Felzkowski; Consider economic impacts in management plans

State Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) said she had her staff collect deer metrics for all 12 counties in her Senate district, which stretches from Lincoln, Oneida, and Vilas counties eastward to Marinette. 

“So I have a pretty broad area and in my opinion, one of the prime areas of hunting back in the eighties, nineties,” Felzkowski said. “So if I pull all of these, they have the hunts from 1960 forward, and it seems there was a spike around 1995 and then from 1998 to 2000 we had great deer hunting. And after that it slowly falls off.”

Felzkowski observed that state Rep. Rob Brooks of Saukville had commented that, in his county, they are managing very well and he wondered how they could do that there when up north seems very disjointed. 

“Part of my answer is, what’s your bear population and what's your wolf population?” she said. “And we have various competing factors and we have competing hunters. But I think the one thing that has never been decided in the state legislature or amongst the hunting community is, what are our overall management goals?”

Those competitive factors have to be managed, Felzkowski said.

“Now if I’m a bear hunter and a bear hunter only, I know what my management goal is,” she said. “If I’m a deer hunter and a deer hunter only, I know what my management goal is. But we have a lot of hunters.”

As an aside, Felzkowski said her family had sold hundreds of acres the family used for hunting.

“We left deer hunting and sold off our 500 family acres because when you go five seasons in a row, and you have 13 people that don’t see [deer], how do you keep people interested? You don’t,” she said. “And what do you see? We have a abnormally high bear population in that area and we have an abnormally high wolf population in the area.”

People in other parts of the state find it difficult to grasp what that means, the senator said.

“And when you get up in the morning and the horses are going wild and you see the wolves running along the fence by your horses, it makes you think twice,” she said. “And I know that people from other parts of the state do not understand that because you will never understand it until you live with it. But the one disappointing thing that I see is, ….. what are we doing here?”

And what they are doing, Felzkowski said, is making hunters compete against each other instead of looking at the real issues that are facing how the population is managed. 

“I brought it up earlier and I could have gone into it far more,” she said. “We brought up the economics of deer hunting and we’ll just look at the northern zones. It is hugely impactful. Is that taken into consideration?”

Felzkowski said she already knew the answer.

“It’s not,” she said. 

Felzkowski wondered about the management of public lands for hunters.

“If you look go way back into the 60s, if look at the number of deer that are hunted on private land and the harvest versus public land — the harvest is 25 percent on public land,” she said. “Understandable. I manage my land, I do my food plots. That is my goal. Are we managing public land for sportsmen? I kind of heard no today.”

No cohesive plan

The state does not have a cohesive plan, Felzkowski said.

“I’ll just throw it out there for north of Highway 8,” she said. “What is it going to look like?”

Felzkowski said the DNR estimates the deer population of Oneida County to be 20 per square mile after the 2022 hunting season, which both Walker and Felzkowski said was an inaccurate figure. In fact, Walker said some biologists he has talked to estimate three or less.

Felzkowski said the DNR estimated 29 deer per square mile in Lincoln County and 32 in Langlade — the latter a somewhat believable number because that gets into farm country.

“Nineteen in Vilas, which I know that’s not even close up there,” she said. “Now all you got to do is talk to your local hunters, and I love the idea of the CDACs. I’ll be real honest, I’ve never been a fan of the [conservation] congress because I don’t think it represents true hunters.”

To find that out how true that is, Felzkowski said, all one has to do is go and listen to the Congress and then talk to the people that you talk to on a daily basis back in your own district who actually are out in the woods doing the hunting. 

“You get a totally different story,” she said. “So how do we take forest management? How do we take predator management? How do we manage for the deer population and the bear? How do we do that cohesively to start realizing the goal of everyone and taking into consideration economics because I think that’s one of the DNR’s biggest faults. They don't take into consideration economics when they do a lot of their planning and the economics of the area. So what is our overall goal? What direction should this body go? That’s a huge question.”

Walker said another huge factor in that consideration was the inability to manage the wolf population.

“We can manage bears because we do harvest them, but we can’t manage a main predator,” he said. “That’s significant. And I told the DNR when they come up and say the wolves really don’t impact it or wolves don’t impact numbers, I tell them it’s laughable.”

Walker said that it is a fact that deer are a primary source of food for wolves.

“So when we manage by not managing that, and the loss of our trappers, there is no trapping,” he said. “Well, the coyotes are doing well, they’ve adapted and they will follow the wolves that come through, at least in our area. I can speak to that. And so you have one predator that’s not being trapped anymore and you have another predator that we can’t hunt.”

Combine that with a couple of bad winters, or even one bad winter, Walker said, and the wolves and coyotes get on top.

“It’s very bad,” he said. “High numbers of wolves and coyotes have a devastating effect on fawns and that’s the reality of it. And all I’m saying is if we kill a thousand does in the western side of Oneida County, which I don’t know if they exist, but let’s just say you take 30 does, that’s 30 does that can have up to two fawns. That can help.”

To be sure, if you go into the town of Minocqua, there are clusters of deer, Walker said.

“Yep, there’s a lot of deer,” he said. “But you’re going to need those deer. You’re going to need those deer for dispersal. Wherever there are pockets of deer they will disperse. Bucks will disperse up to 11 miles and the does will push off the other does and fawns and then you get a dispersal rate. That’s the only way we’re going to build our deer herd back.”

It all comes down to managing the population, Walker said

“If we manage everything from a population goal and to the best of the state’s ability count them, then you can manage our resources successfully,” he said.

The prerequisite, Felzkowski answered, was that the state needs to start being honest with the numbers.

“And I don’t think we have been,” she said.

Richard Moore may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.