Taylor County deer council meets March 23 to start planning for 2021 hunt
Wisconsin’s County Deer Advisory Councils (CDACs) are set to meet starting next week in their efforts to develop recommendations for antlerless harvest goals, antlerless tag availability and season options for their respective counties for the 2021 hunting season.
These recommendations are provided to the Natural Resources Board along with recommendations from the Department of Natural Resources, which will review them when it meets on June 23.
Councils develop their recommendations each spring using two meetings separated by a public input period to provide transparency and multiple opportunities for public input. The first set of meetings will be held March 22 through April 2.
Taylor County’s council will meet via teleconference (Zoom) on Tuesday, March 23 at 7 p.m. to review deer herd metrics and harvest data from 2020 and recommend a preliminary antlerless harvest goal and set preliminary permit numbers for private and public land.
Those recommendations will be subject to a public comment period April 12-25 with a survey form being available on the DNR web site. Final quota and permit level recommendations will be made by the Taylor County CDAC in a meeting sometime between May 3-7.
In 2020 in Taylor County, there were 8,350 antlerless harvest authorizations for private land and 1,000 for public land with a total antlerless quota in the county of 2,800 with 2,500 of those targeted for private land and 300 for public land.
According to statistics posted online by the DNR, the county registered a total of 6,168 deer in all 2020 seasons, including 2,821 bucks and 3,347 antlerless deer, up from 4,870 in 2019, which included 2,447 bucks and 2,360 antlerless deer. The success rate on the private land antlerless tags was 28.6% and the success rate on the public land tags was 24.2%.
Permit levels were set last year using predicted success rates of 30%.
In January, the council recommended that Taylor County stay in the increase population objective it’s been in the past six years for another three years. That recommendation was supported by the DNR and approved by the Natural Resources Board in February.
As it was the past three years, the focus for the Taylor County council in the 2021-23 three-year cycle is to increase populations on public land and keep deer numbers steady on private land.
The public is welcome to join the March 23 Taylor County meeting through the Zoom link, which is available on the DNR’s web site. Visit https://dnr.wisconsin. gov/topic/Hunt/cdac and click on the “found here” link under the March 22-April 2, 2021-Preliminary objective setting heading. From there, choose Taylor County from the drop-down menu and the link is located under the “council meetings” heading. There is a call-in option as well at 1-312-626-6799. The code is 873 7657 2719.
Among neighboring counties, Price County meets March 22 at 6 p.m.; Marathon, Rusk and Chippewa counties meet March 24 at 7 p.m. and Clark and Lincoln counties are scheduled to meet on March 25. Clark County starts at 6:30 p.m., while Lincoln County starts at 7 p.m.
