GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – The annual nine-day gun deer hunting season in Wisconsin begins on Saturday.
Officials with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources are excited about the 2016 season for hunters.
“Overall the expectations are to be optimistic that deer populations are certainly at least as strong as last year, if not stronger in most places,” says Jeff Pritzl, DNR Northeast Region Program Manager. “That’s based both on the trends we’re seeing in the early archery harvest and the weather conditions we’ve had the past two winters that have allowed for good productivity of the herd.”
According to the DNR, the state’s 4 Deer Management Zones and county-based Deer Management Units have not changed in 2016. DMUs follow county boundaries in most cases, and nine DMUs are split by zone boundaries. DNU and land type-specific antlerless permits are intended to help manage deer populations more closely on each land type with the hope of enhancing future hunting experiences on public land.
It’s also the second year of electronic deer registration through GameReg. Pritzl expects it to go even smoother than the inaugural year, which did see a few bumps in the road.
“Easily 90 to 95 percent of the hunting community successfully navigated the systems and our registration data was as good as it had been with in-person registration,” Pritzl says.
BIGGEST ISSUE FOR ’16
Pritzl says there aren’t many new rules or regulations on tap for 2016. But if there’s one thing that is a change from last season involves hunters in Marinette and Oconto counties.
“Those are two counties where the Deer Management Zone is split between what we consider the Farmland zone and the Forest zone,” says Pritzl. “We did see errors last year where hunters had the right county but they were registering as a Farmland deer when it actually was a Forest or vice versa.”
So to combat that problem, Pritzl says they’ve added a number to the title of the zone.
“As in Zone 1 and Zone 2, and so we’re just hoping that’ll help hunters recognize where on the map they are, and if they’re in the Forest or Farmland zone, that’s how they need to register their deer,” Pritzl says.
DNR officials say with each deer hunting license (archery/crossbow and gun), hunters will receive one Buck Deer Carcass Tag valid statewide. Also, each license includes one or more Farmland (Zone 2) Antlerless Deer Carcass Tag that must be designated for use in a specific zone, DMU and land type (public access or private) at the time of issuance.
Farmland (Zone 2) tags may not be used in the Northern Forest or Central Forest zones, but bonus antlerless tags may be available for specific DMUs within these zones. Bonus permits cost $12 for residents, $20 for non-residents and $5 for youth (ages 10 and 11).
Last year, 10 county DMUs, in whole or in part, are designated as buck-only units. All buck-only units are restricted to the Northern and Central Forest zones. Only the Buck Deer Carcass Tag issued with each deer license is valid in these DMUs, with some exceptions for youth, Class A and C disabled and military hunters.
BAITING BAN IMPACT?
The Wisconsin DNR, starting November 1, banned baiting and feeding deer in Oconto and Menominee counties due to the discovery of chronic wasting disease in those areas.
So will that hurt efforts by hunters there to bag that trophy buck? Not in the least, according to Pritzl.
“In other areas where this has happened in previous years, we really have not seen a change in overall harvest statistics at the end of the year,” Pritzl says. “And when you compare counties against each other that do and don’t have baiting, it’s really hard to see any statistical difference.”
Pritzl says it may affect individuals on whether or not they see as many deer, but on a, “landscape scale” it really doesn’t affect harvest totals.
“For every one that may be concerned that they lose baiting as a tool to see deer, there’s someone that recognizes that baiting to a high extent actually can reduce deer sightability,” explains Pritzl. “And the absence of baiting can actually increase deer sightability.”
CWD attacks the brains of deer, causing the animals to grow thin, act strangely and eventually die.
The ban, however, does not restrict the sale of bait and feed in the counties for other uses or for use elsewhere. It is also still legal to feed birds and small mammals as long as feeding stations are within 50 yards of a human dwelling and too high for deer or otherwise designed to prevent deer from getting into them.
You can find out much more about deer hunting in Wisconsin here.
