CDAC sticks with public majority and its increase the herd objective

TAYLOR COUNTY DEER COUNCIL

Taylor County’s Deer Advisory Council (CDAC) last Thursday didn’t budge from its preliminary recommendations and forwarded an increase objective for the county’s deer population for the 2021-23 three-year cycle to the Department of Natural Resources and the Natural Resources Board.

As it did in December, the council members voted 6-1 to stick with the increase objective that has been in place for the past two three-year cycles. Forestry representative Jake Walcisak again cast the lone dissenting vote. While new agriculture representative James Livingston was absent, new urban representative Myron Brooks, who missed the December vote, voted for the increase objective to keep the vote margin the same.

A public input survey conducted on the DNR website Jan. 4-13 drew 435 responses with 352 people supporting the increase objective and just 83 opposing it. Of those opposing, 60 said the county should go to a maintain objective and 22 said it should go into a decrease objective.

Several council members made it clear in December and confirmed that on Thursday that the increase objective is focused on public lands and they aim to maintain populations on most private lands.

“My rationale for supporting the increase initiative is I think it gives us more flexibility in establishing a quota that we can actually use to maintain on private land if we choose and increase (the herd) on the public land,” hunt/conservation club representative Chip Courtney said. “The data that we used to set the antlerless harvest quotas were pretty aggressive and I think actually served to maintain or to actually decrease in many areas. So I support the increase initiative and I look forward to taking a long hard look at the antlerless harvest quotas this spring.”

Council chair Mike Riggle noted that, unlike the last three-year cycle where Taylor County was on a bit of an island in staying with an increase objective rather than going to maintain mode, many northern counties are going back to an increase objective this time around.

“I support the same as what I said in our first preliminary meeting,” Walcisak said of his opinion to go to the maintain objective. “The majority of the county is private land. Maybe 25-30% is public. We’ve all kind of talked for quite awhile that on private we should maintain or decrease slightly and public land can increase slightly. Balancing that with the science that’s available and public comment, I believe that the science shows that a small decrease is appropriate and public comment shows that an increase is desired so I would like to see a maintain as the compromise between those two.”

The DNR’s Price County wildlife biologist and the wildlife liaison for Taylor County, Derek Johnson, made one more push to possibly nudge the council into thinking more about a maintain objective.

“I think you could get there with a maintain objective because, again, you’re trying to maintain on the majority of the county, the vast majority of the county,” Johnson said. “Then you’re trying to increase on the public lands, which is the noticeable minority of the county.”

Senior forester Jeff Sorenson, the DNR’s forestry liaison to the council reiterated his stance that the council should have gone with a maintain objective as a recent report from a new DNR Forest Regeneration Monitoring project was showing deer browse was having a significant impact on forest regeneration in Taylor County.

“We’re just trying to use science and to use that, we’re just using as many tools as we can in our toolbox to create an environment where all of our land owners can be happy, not just the deer hunters,” he said. “It’s folks that want to have a garden that won’t get obliterated. I think we have to do a better job of looking at everybody in the county not just deer hunters.”

Discussing a split

The other part to finalize for the new cycle was potential boundary changes to deer management units. Taylor County is a singular unit that is included in the DNR’s Northern Forest Zone. In December, the DNR’s recommendation was to keep the county that way, which the council agreed with then and it did not change its viewpoint Thursday. In the public survey, 380 supported keeping things the same and 47 preferred a split and adding the southern portion of the county to the DNR’s Central Farmland Zone.

Any changes wouldn’t have gone into effect until 2022 at the earliest.

Johnson said splitting the county into two zones is a worthwhile discussion to have, if not now, certainly during the next time the option becomes available. He said putting land south of Hwy 64 into the Farmland Zone, or adding land west of Hwy 73 to it as well, may be viable options down the road. It would easily meet the qualifications to do that, such as the 200-square mile minimum for a unit and using roads or rivers as boundaries that clearly separate habitat types.

As the council has discussed with the county-splitting issue in the past, the drawbacks center around needing to do two separate private/public quota-setting processes for each zone, which becomes more difficult when you potentially include free tags that can be offered with every license purchased by hunters in that zone.

Johnson, however, noted those free tags can be a valuable tool if the herd in a farmland area starts getting too high and sales of regular antlerless tags aren’t adequate.

“It gives those hunters in those areas another option to manage the herd,” Johnson said. “It gives you guys another option to manage the herd. Having grown up in that area, hunted in that area and just what I see on DMAP properties in that southern tier of Taylor County, their habitat is getting hammered, whether they know it or not.”

As they did last month, council members expressed their concerns about how many antlerless permits private- land hunters in Taylor County are now willing to buy and make the effort to fill.

“That is a concern when your supply exceeds demand,” Johnson said. “That’s going to be the troublesome part if we ever truly get to that point where we can’t sell enough tags to manage the herd.”

Tourism representative Allan Koffler questioned if free farmland tags may entice more hunters to become violators and put deer harvested on public forest land on them.

“It goes without saying that would happen,” DNR conservation warden Kurt Haas said. “To what degree, we don’t know. When you have a county that was buck only for quite some time where Taylor County antlerless tags were like gold and now you’re giving them out like candy, it’s even easier for people to do that. It really doesn’t matter on our end. It is what it is. If people are going to violate that, they’re going to violate that and there’s really nothing we can do unless we catch them out in the field.”

The council will meet again twice in early spring to set antlerless harvest quotas and permit levels for the 2021 season.