DNR deer advisory committee looks at previous season, long-term trends

The Department of Natural Resources (DNR) deer advisory committee held a fairly lengthy meeting March 12 focused on the 2023-24 deer season. Prior to the meeting, DNR deer program specialist Jeff Pritzl mentioned that this winter would likely go down as the mildest on the Winter Severity Index (WSI) on record in the northern third of the state. However, that was certainly not the case last year. The committee met to discuss the past deer season and what information they would be able to provide to County Deer Advisory Councils (CDACs) as they prepare to make their recommendations for the 2024-25 deer season in their counties.

Pritzl said that antlerless quotas, as well as shift in hunter effort, it was painting a different picture than in decades past. In 2023, he said, quotas were overall higher than in 2022. The WSI for 2022-23 was variable, but that variability was spatial with severe and very severe conditions across the northwestern part of the Northern Forest Zone and not comparatively milder in the southeastern portion of that zone. He also said the opening date for the 2023-24 season was the second earliest possible and was closer in proximity to the rut. Following the rut, deer movement tends to decline slowly

Dan Storm of the DNR Office of Applied Science said that when the season is early, hunters tend to experience more deer movement than when opening day is later.

“Last year should have been one in our favor in the sense of having a higher harvest. However, the weather conditions weren’t great necessarily,” Storm said. “We didn’t have the snow. We had pretty good snow depth and it was quite cold opening of 2022. But last year, 2023, was brown and warmer. So that was not in our favor.”

Another factor, he said, was the number of hunters in the woods. That factor, he said, has not received much attention, and it has changed considerably, especially in gun license sales. In the last few years he said, license sales had dropped to a point lower than they have been for the last 50 years. 

“We just have to keep that in mind when we’re interpreting harvest — we just have fewer hunters,” Storm said. “Maybe 5,000 or so fewer hunters per year.”

He showed, graphically, the harvest across the state. His graphic showed strong declines in harvest across the North, and especially in the Northwestern part of the state. There were even declines in Northern and Northwestern farmland areas. He showed at least some increases in harvest across much of the Southern and Eastern farmland portions of the state. 

Even though the Northeast saw a much milder winter than the Northwest, Storm said, there was still a fairly sizable decline in harvest numbers. There is not a clear-cut reason why the harvest was down, but likely there were several things at play.

Next year, the season will open on the latest possible date, Storm said. That normally equates with a decline in harvest. But harvest has been oscillating back and forth according to recent registration numbers. That, he said, would make it difficult to predict what the next hunting season will bring. 

The change in harvest was similar spatially and was not just restricted to the north. There were declines in harvest in areas where the winter severity index was not a factor. But there were increases in harvest in other places where one would not expect it, based on the WSI. For that reason, he reiterated, it was clear there were many different factors at play.

“It’s not just a Wisconsin phenomenon,” he said. “It’s not just a Northwoods phenomenon, or a wolves phenomenon or what have you. It’s likely pretty complex combination of reasons that we’re not, that we don’t fully even know.”

Storm also looked at deer population estimates. There were an estimated 1.97 million deer last year pre-hunt and 1.63 million post-hunt. This is the third highest pre-hunt and second highest post-hunt estimate. There is some uncertainty in those numbers, he stressed.

Pritzl asked Storm to walk through the data on the northern counties with the group to take a closer look at harvest numbers. One thing that was similar in northern counties, Storm said, was a heavy decline in buck harvest. Buck harvest is a big driver of population numbers. Some Northern counties experienced their lowest harvest numbers in a decade, and in other northern counties, it was higher than in 2019, which was the last “low.”

“One thing we don’t have a great handle on, and the post-season survey helps us with this, but we still have to figure out ‘can we do this at a DMU level?’” Storm said.

He spoke about 2019 being a down year for harvest as well as 2014-15. He said he was interested in knowing how many fewer hunters were hunting in the north. “We don’t really know that. That makes the interpretation a little more difficult.”

Storm said he did not have the data yet from hunter surveys. While the surveys don’t produce a perfect picture, because surveys are only sent to hunters who registered a deer, he said he would be shocked if they did not show hunters were seeing fewer deer. 

“There’s lots of things that happen,” Storm said. “I don’t want anyone, to be in the business, including myself or Jeff [Pritzl], of having to be expected to be able to explain all of it, because there is just this element about what happens that, you know, we try our best, we collect the data we can, we try to understand what we’re studying and managing as best as we can. But we do have to acknowledge, like, there are limits to what we can understand. And this was a head scratcher.”

“I appreciate you saying that, Dan,” Pritzl said, before suggesting a closer look at the bigger map Smart had shared, showing the spatial differences in harvest across the Upper Midwest. 

“If there was a headline for the 2023 deer season that could capture the general sentiment throughout the Midwest, it would be, ‘’23 was a strange deer season.’ And yeah, that compulsion or that expectation that we always have all the answers, if we even try to put together or speculate, well, was it the acorns? Was it the weather? Was it this or that? Of course that gets looked at when it comes from the agency as, is the agency lining up excuses for why things didn’t turn out the way we expected.” 

He said what was done in Wisconsin did not generate a difference in what hunters were experiencing in Iowa, for instance, who were not seeing deer moving this year. He said that is why people should be comfortable with why the department looks at trend information and that people shouldn’t get “too hung up” on what happened in one year. 

“If it happens this fall, and then again the next fall, well, shoot, then we’ve got a pattern,” Pritzl went on. “We have to be careful not to assume there’s a pattern at this point.” He mentioned the late gun season for 2024 and wondered how that should be interpreted.

Tom Hauge, too, said the high acorn production may have been a contributor to deer not moving, especially as the season wore on. As hunters went into the woods,  the high acorn mass may have allowed them to stay in one place, rather than move around to look for food. Wisconsin, however, does not have a way to record mass index. Michigan does, and it may be something the department may want to take a look at in the future. 

As he went through the counties, Storm noted that Florence County had a relatively mild winter. The County Deer Advisory Council (CDAC) quota went up, but harvest was down. In that case, it did not seem to be the WSI that was influencing harvest.

Update from GLIFWC

Travis Bartnik from the Great Lakes Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) shared an update regarding the Ojibwe off-reservation deer harvest for 2023. Ojibwe hunters registered a total of 464 deer in off-reservation public lands. This included 241 antlered deer, which was 52% of their harvest. 

That number, he said, was down approximately 30% from 2022. Tribal harvest was also down 38% from the most recent five-year average. This continues a downward trend he has observed in the past several years. Tribes, he said, are dealing with many of the same issues with hunter retention and recruitment. Based on the number of deer registrations by county, the tribes did not exceed any antlerless quotas in any county. The decrease seen was even across the counties, he said. Even in the top eight counties, tribal harvest was still an insignificant amount of harvest when compared to overall harvest during the season. Anecdotally, Bartnik said, he did not hear tribal hunters saying they were seeing fewer deer. Hunters who were doing deer drives had more success than those who simply sat. Tribal hunters also reported more deer during the cold snap than they did during the early part of the season. The main issue he heard from tribal hunters was just being able to locate deer during the day while they were hunting.

Pritzl’s Update

At the time of the meeting, the proposed bill implementing a no antlerless harvest for a period of four years was in the process of receiving a vote. Pritzl said it was unlikely there would be a resolution on that prior to the CDACs meeting six weeks from the time of the committee meeting.

The deer management unit review was past due for initiation, he said, as laid out on the three-year schedule. He said he had been working with leadership to decide on a path to sort that out. He said he felt the review would be coming, but he could not commit or speculate how that would play out.

“You’ll see it when it happens,” he told the committee. Next Pritzl recapped his presentation to the Natural Resources Board (NRB) meeting. He said chairman Bill Smith asked for a deeper dive into the Northern Forest Zone harvest. While he did not have time during that meeting to delve as deeply into it as he would have liked, he felt it would be good information for the committee to have.

“One of the things chair Smith asked about was simply documenting what we were hearing, that people were not seeing deer this year as expected, especially in the Northern Forest and how can we capture that?” Pritzl said. He reviewed information again about deer seen per hour based on surveys sent to hunters who successfully harvested and registered a deer.

Deer seen per hour effort was captured in two ways — through hunters who were successful and hunters who did not harvest a deer, but who took the survey voluntarily. In total, he said, deer seen per hour of hunting effort was down 11% across the North relative to the last four year average. The most extreme case was Sawyer County, where that number was down 30% from last year. Florence and Bayfield County were also outliers of the gradient pattern from the southeast to the northwest.

Looking at the last 15 years, Pritzl said, the harvest numbers continued to see highs and lows. This year was a low, just as 2019 and 2014-15 were. He said the Northern Forest buck harvest has always been on a rollercoaster of sorts, but the highs and lows were relatively stable. This year, the drop was unexpected as it related to deer season dates but not unexpected as it related to weather and snow conditions. 

“When you look at it from that perspective, yeah, there’s a slight downward trend,” he said. “But that downward trend probably lines up with, and is probably not as downward as license sales and hunter effort that we’ve been talking about and documenting.” To look back as far as the turn of the century, there was definitely a downward trend, he noted.

Pritzl said the North would not return to those “overpopulated” numbers of the beginning of the century. But, he said, it would be preferable to get back to numbers near 2008. He again mentioned the decrease in license sales, specifically in gun license sales.

“We probably are where we were in the mid 1980s,” he said. 

“The reality is that, long-term, we’re not really that different than we were, the difference being, at this point in time, things have never been better from a harvest standpoint. But there were more hunters on the landscape during this period of time [the 1980s] than we’ve had recently.” He said the deer kill per hunter is actually better now than it was back then.

For the first time in the three-hour meeting, Pritzl admitted, an hour and a half in, that predator loads were much different in the 1980s than they are today. 

“That’s a big part of the conversation,” he said. “But again, I just, in terms of the description of why people look at what happened this past fall as a signal of really bad direction where things are going, it has to be taken into broader context. Looking at this long-term pattern does that.”

He spoke again about the mail surveys, which are sent out to 10,000 hunters. From the results, he said, the decline in participation was happening during what he called the “heyday.” Since that time, he said, hunter participation had slid relatively consistently, until the last few years, where there was a bit of a steeper drop.

Pritzl said that somehow attempting to protect and save, or recover the Northern Forest deer hunting experience by attempting to get more deer on the landscape in the hopes of reversing the trend was not something that his data would seem to support.

“As I said during the board meeting, this really is about setting realistic expectations,” he told the committee. “It becomes the chicken and the egg argument of what’s causing what. But the reality is we are shedding hunters and harvest capacity.” The Baby Boomer generation is aging out of hunting and not being replaced by the same numbers on the incoming end, he noted. Harvest capacity, then, lies with the group in the middle ages. He said this has been a long time coming, and it will continue to come.

Pritzl also explained away the idea that, without in-person harvest, part of the problem was that people were not registering deer. He said, when looking at the pattern of registrations starting in archery season, with a swell during the gun deer season, there would surely be changes in that curve if non-registration was a problem or was skewing numbers. Weekends, and especially weekends during the rut, showed the same types of increases from year to year.

As far as Deer Management Units (DMUs), Pritzl said he felt that, at some point, there could be a look at how the units used to look versus how they look now. As far as statistical performance, he said, the old DMUs were seen as too small to provide good data. He said there was an idea to pair up similar units to see if those would provide large enough datasets to show a better picture. 

While that may be down the timeline, he wanted to broach the idea to the committee. He said the first course of action is to get the units right. Then what the CDACs looked like could be determined. 

All of this, however, was laid out in administrative code and would require a formal rule change process in order for changes to be made.

Beckie Gaskill may be reached via email at [email protected].