Wednesday, 8:15 AM. 10 degrees, wind SW, calm to light. The channel is wrinkled and there is no lake smoke rising from it, so the surface water is getting cold. The sky is overcast and the barometer predicts snow.
Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know that I have often written about hunting in Wisconsin: grouse, goose, and deer hunting, and about hunting dogs. I am actually much more of an outdoorsman than hunter, and like to look at nature from a scientific and esthetic standpoint more often than from that of a sportsman. With these factors in mind, I would like to explore the 2009 Wisconsin gun deer season. This is a rather lengthy topic, and I will break it into three separate blogs, this being the first. I will first give my impressions of the season and those of friends and acquaintances: then some further observations and DNR statistics and policy statements; and in the final discourse my analysis. Part One:
I enjoy deer hunting but have not always been that serious about it. I hunted regularly as a young man but had not hunted for maybe forty years until starting again in Bayfield in 2004. I have shot two deer since then so you may rightly consider that I am not the best of deer hunters but I spend a lot of time in the woods and am a better than average observer of nature. One can rightly suspect that those hunters who shot a deer will consider the season pretty successful and those who, like me, did not will consider it an unsuccessful season; this will tend to prejudice any analysis.
Here are my observations and those of my fiends and acquaintances. I saw only two deer all season, and got a shot at neither. I hunted almost every day and I saw some deer sign (buck rubs and scrapes, trails, droppings) but not enough to indicate a robust deer herd in the two areas I hunt. Except for opening morning I heard very little shooting and none of that close, and saw virtually no other hunters in the woods. In the apple orchard country where I have my stand, and know a number of people, I heard of no deer being shot during the gun season, and in the past this has been prime deer country. The orchards are surrounded by thousands of acres of pretty rugged terrain. In the sugar bush area which I often write about, I saw only one deer. However friends in this area shot three bucks and a doe, so there certainly were some deer there. This is a more mixed habitat area, with some small farms but also several thousand acres of county forest, some of that being dense cover. Several Bayfield neighbors got bucks out in the depths of the pine barrens were one has to go in with an ATV, but I saw no other deer hanging in Bayfield, and one group which usually has half a dozen deer hanging by opening weekend had none.
Friends hunting in other parts of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, for all intents and purposes most of the northern one-third of the state, saw few deer and were unsuccessful. Friend Paul, a very serious hunter and retired DNR naturalist, hunted in the southern regions of the forest with a large group and they never saw a deer.
Other indications of a depleted deer herd are that few fawns have been seen this year by any of my friends, and I remember seeing only two. I have seen few road kills of deer all year, and Joan and I have remarked on the small amount of deer we saw all spring, summer and into the fall. It seems pretty obvious that deer numbers are way down, although there are some deer being seen and showing up on trail cameras now that all the seasons are over.
Next: why is the deer herd down, and what does the Department of Natural Resources have to say about it?
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