CDACs to meet Tuesday evening in Vilas, Oneida

For the last several years, there has been a push by several counties in the Northern Forest deer management zone to return to habitat-based deer management units (DMUs). Similar management zones had been used for decades, up until just over a decade ago. Now, those habitat based management zones are set to come back for the 2025 season, with a few changes. County Deer Advisory Councils (CDACs) will be meeting next week to look at some recommendations for the new DMUs that lie at least partially in their county. Stakeholders and the public are encouraged to attend the CDAC meeting in their county and give input as to what they would like to see for the coming deer season. Public input is an important part of the CDAC process, and one of the reasons the councils were created to begin with.

The CDACs were created in 2014, following the recommendations of the Wisconsin Deer Trustee James Kroll. At that time, DMUs became, for the most part, the boundaries of the counties. This is much like how DMUs of the 1920s through the 1940s looked. In the 1950s, the state moved to a more habitat-type based system where DMUs were concerned. While this worked well for a number of years, there was ever-increasing desire to chop those DMUs up again and again until, by 2012, there were over 120 DMUs statewide. The issue with this was that the DMUs were then too small to be able to effectively manage the deer herd any longer. The decision was made to not only change those boundaries to county lines, but also to create the CDACs as a citizen stakeholder group in each county that would work in an advisory capacity to the DNR for managing the deer herd in each county.

In the process of redrawing the DMU lines, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) took a great deal of public comment and consulted with stakeholder groups in an attempt to ensure the new units would best serve CDACs and the department when attempting to manage deer in different areas of the Northern Forest Zone.

After DNR deer program specialist Jeff Pritzl revealed the first iteration of the map, it was scrutinized by the department’s deer advisory committee, the Natural Resources Board (NRB), stakeholder groups and the public. This brought about an “Option B” map, which is the map that will be in place for the 2025 deer hunting season. There was some debate originally regarding two of the new units, 111 and 116, showing that not everyone could be made happy, and that there would still be some difficult areas with which CDACs would have to contend with these new DMUs, but there was overall agreement that this new system, essentially a new iteration of the older system, would make management of herds in different habitat types and suitabilities a more manageable task.

During the creation of these new DMUs, there was some concern over how CDACs would operate and overlay these new maps. This coming week, both Vilas and Oneida counties will navigate the new system, sharing portions of some DMUs with other counties. For the most part, CDACs in North Central Wisconsin have shown support for the new system, however, and are ready to work together with neighboring counties to make the best decisions possible for growing the deer herd in areas where it needs to grow, and attempting to control it where it could use more control. Of Oneida County, especially, it has been said that there are very few deer in some areas, while in the areas where there are deer, there are far too many. This new system has been created to help to address those issues.

However, there will still be the issue of public and private lands, as some have brought up in the past. Issuing of antlerless tags, which is one of the main herd control tools in the CDAC tool box, can be split between public and private lands. However, for obvious reasons, there is still little control over how many antlerless deer are taken on private lands. Portions of the herd that have moved into more populated areas or into cities, whether due to illegal deer feeding or other reasons, pose special challenges as well.

Overall, however, there is a sense that these new DMUs will give the CDACs the ability to make decisions based on habitat on the landscape rather than county boundaries, which are quite arbitrary as far as wildlife is concerned.

The new DMUs do not mirror the old, numbered units completely. One of the issues with the old DMUs was many of them were too small to properly manage the deer herd. 

CDAC process

CDACs in each county are made up of a chair and an alternate chair, who are members of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress and up to eight members of the public from various stakeholder groups, including tribal, agriculture, forestry, tourism, transportation, local government, hunting organization and cooperators in the Deer Management Assistance Program.

Every three years, the CDACs set an objective for the deer herd, which will now be done using the new, numbered units. That overall goal can be to increase, decrease or maintain deer numbers in that management zone. Based on those overall objectives, the CDAC then takes input from the public as well as the wildlife biologist in their county and, looking at as much information as is available, then sets the antlerless quota that will help them to obtain that overall, three-year objective. 

Once the CDAC recommendations have been completed, they are sent on to the NRB for final approval. The process will remain the same, but the twist will come in where DMUs cross county lines and CDACs will have to come to agreement on both objectives and quotas.

The public is encouraged to weigh in on the matter. Both the Oneida CDAC and the Vilas CDAC meet this coming Tuesday night at 6 p.m. Oneida County’s meeting will be at the Woodruff Town Hall. Vilas County’s meeting will take place at the Boulder Junction Town Hall. 

More information about the CDAC and their process, see the DNR website at dnr.wi.gov and input the search term CDAC. Those looking for the deer metrics used in establishing the quota can find those by searching “deer management” on the DNR website.

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