Taylor County CDAC recommends sticking with increase objective

Taylor County’s Deer Advisory Council (CDAC) members held nearly the same discussion on Dec. 16 to the one they held three years prior in offering a preliminary recommendation of keeping a deer population objective of increase for the county.

The outcome last week was also the same.

Feeling an increase objective gave it more flexibility to carefully manage the county’s deer herd, the council voted 6-1 to again recommend an increase objective for the next three years over the options of maintain or decrease. There was no interest in turning part of the county into a farmland zone, which is also part of the three-year review process.

Just as it did in 2017, the council offers the recommendation with the understanding that the herd increases are focused on public land. The members all expressed a belief that private-land deer populations are about where they should be. While they believe the public land deer numbers are close, most felt they aren’t there yet.

“I think that the public property in Taylor County needs to be in an increase mode,” said Scott Mildbrand, the transportation representative on the council, in a statement that summarized most of the comments made prior to the vote. “I think that we’re really close to where we should be on private property, but I think in order to accomplish that I think that we need to do what we did three years ago and call the county in an overall increase, but then knowing that we’re going to be on the maintain side of increase.”

The recommendation will be up for public review through an internet-based survey the Department of Natural Resources will make available Jan. 4-13. The council scheduled its final objective setting meeting for Thursday, Jan. 21. Final recommendations will be presented to the Natural Resources Board Feb. 24.

Those voting to remain in the increase mode were Mildbrand, Tracy Swedlund, Chip Courtney, Brian Bucki and the council’s newest members, agriculture representative James Livingston and tourism representative Allan Koffler. New urban representative Myron Brooks was absent.

The lone no vote came from forestry representative Jake Walcisak, who noted how similar this discussion was to the one of three years ago.

“I think at that time we struggled a lot with whether a maintain or an increase was appropriate and we talked a lot about, ‘hey I think we’re getting really close to where we want to be with private but public isn’t quite there’ is what the consensus was I believe at that time,” Walcisak said. “We had a lot of discussion. It’s in our minutes from back then. ‘Hey we’re going to increase but we’re going to do it slowly and incrementally and not put the hammer down on the increase.’ I feel like we’ve certainly done that.

“I think that we are above where I’d like to see populations for private land in the county and we’re very close to where I think we should be for the public land,” he added. “So however you verb it, a very modest decrease, close to maintain or a maintain with a slight decrease, I’d like something in that flavor.”

Chairman Mike Riggle, who has leaned a little more toward higher antlerless quotas and permit numbers in past meetings, said he favored the increase objective this time around.

“I really think if we stay in the increase mode and continue with the tenets that we have based it on in the past we can still do a good job of managing the herd,” Riggle said. “I didn’t see a huge increase in the herd this year like was predicted. There was nothing dramatic about the number of fawns, the number of deer. We had an increase, but it didn’t bear out.”

Riggle also noted that since the CDAC was formed, Taylor County’s hunters have never reached the DNR’s buck kill predictions that are offered each spring when quotas and permit levels are set. The spring 2020 prediction was 3,030. DNR wildlife biologist Derek Johnson told the CDAC through Dec. 14, the county’s total buck kill through all 2020 seasons sat at 2,758.

Johnson noted 3,073 antlerless deer had been registered in total for 2020 seasons through Dec. 14 in Taylor County, well over last year’s total of 2,360. That increase was expected due to a significant rise in the numbers of antlerless harvest permits offered this year. The council’s overall antlerless harvest quota was 2,800 deer.

Johnson, who is the DNR’s biologist for Price County, said Taylor County’s buck kill increase was more noticeable in archery and crossbow harvests than it was during the nine-day gun season and that’s a trend the DNR is starting to take a serious look at.

“That’s the trend that’s been happening,” Johnson said. “It’s very evident in Price County. I have a lot of experience there where a lot of hunters are switching to earlier seasons, the archery and crossbow seasons. We’re seeing a pretty dramatic shift of when hunters are harvesting their deer. You can look at the crossbow numbers, it’s highly evident in those numbers. As of 5 p.m. on (Dec. 14), there were 841 bucks harvested (in Taylor County) with crossbows. Compare that to the 1,500 (nine-day gun kill). You’re over halfway harvesting as many bucks with crosssbows as you are with guns. Add in the vertical bows and that’s another 378.”

The agenda required Johnson to give his assessment of the council’s preliminary recommendation. He, as his predecessor as the council’s DNR wildlife liaison, Josh Spiegel had done in recent years, warned that the county is teetering on a population that may be getting too high on private lands. Johnson didn’t disagree with Riggle’s stance that with a maintain objective, DNR powers would be watching Taylor County CDAC’s actions closely to make sure it’s keeping the herd in check.

“In a maintain objective, I think there’s a chance for redistribution of population,” Johnson said. “I think the private herd in the county has gone up and we’ve heard that. Most of you have talked about it, that it’s getting close. I think it’s going to continue to go up. If it continues to increase over the next three years, you’re kinda shooting past your goal of maintaining, like most folks have been saying on private land.”

A concern among CDAC members remains for reaching a saturation point in offering antlerless harvest opportunities. In 2020, there were 8,350 private-land authorizations available. Koffler, the owner of AK Outdoors in Medford and a DNR license agent, pointed out those permits did not sell out until opening weekend of the nine-day gun season. The 1,000 public-land permits, as expected, sold out quickly the first day.

“It’ll be interesting to look at our success rate on those doe permits because there’s been years, like back in the early 2000s, we killed 7,000 does in this county,” Riggle said. “This year, we killed 3,000 and it looks like anyone who wanted a doe permit was able to get one. That just kind of tells you how the harvest and the want of people for venison has changed in 15-20 years.”

Regeneration talk

Another discussion point centered on the first report from a DNR Forest Regeneration Monitoring (FRM) project launched in 2018. The report was presented by DNR senior forester Jeff Sorenson.

“Sampling statistics included a variety of numbers that we have looked at, including seedling samplings, species, total numbers of trees, tree heights, overall deer browse, other things like plot locations, overstory, shade density, woody competition and years since the last harvest,” Sorenson said. “There were a variety of really important things for us to look at.”

Sorenson said Taylor and Bayfield counties offered the largest sample sizes of the 45 counties that were surveyed. In Taylor County, 142 stands that included 871 plots were sampled. The data collected put Taylor County in the chronic/widespread risk area for deer browse damage, which is at the high end of the scale above counties rated at minimal, incidental or acute/ localized levels.

The report said 83% of the recently-harvested stands sampled in the county are failing to meet regeneration standards and 73% weren’t meeting height expectations. “This is just the first report,” Sorenson aid. “It’s a picture in time, a three-year window. This is just the start. The more data that we collect over the long haul, the better it’s going to be to let us know where we’re at. The more data we can get, the better we can manage our woods for everybody involved.”

The impact of deer browse has been a long-debated subject among council members and there was skepticism in how to view this report’s numbers.

“We get it as far as forest regeneration,” Bucki said. “We want to protect it and I think we’ve been responsible in including that. But it gets a bit confusing. We’re not sure how low this population has to go before it’s acceptable. Do we have to cut our deer population in half in Taylor County? It’s a concern of ours, but we don’t know where we’re going I guess is what I’m saying.”

“I don’t think anybody is asking us to go down to 10 deer per square mile or anything beyond that,” Sorenson said. “We just have to make sure that we’re actively looking at these numbers every year to make sure that we’re not heading in the wrong direction or trending in the wrong direction.”