How changes to the new Deer Management Zone could affect local hunters
In February, the Natural Resource Board voted to approve new Deer Management Zone boundaries for the Northern and Central Forest zones. The new zone boundaries in the forested zones lie along the types of habitat boundaries, similar to the management zone boundaries prior to 2014 when they changed to county lines.
The Northern Forest Zone DMU’s now number from 101 to 126 and start at highway 64 in our area. In the Central Zone the DMU’s will number from 201 to 206. A map of the new structure can be found on the DNR website.
A fair number of hunters from our area hunt deer in both forest zones. Most hunt private land, some hunt public forest, and some hunt a combination.
The 2014 changes came about from the whole Dr. Deer thing. Several people in the deer hunting world didn’t like the proposals put forth by the experts (Dr. Deer) hired by the governor at that time. One of those changes eliminated the Deer Management Units (DMU), the argument hinged around too many small units created disjointed deer management. The DMU’s moved to individual counties, all 72 - so that argument never made sense to me.
County lines don’t lie along deer habitat boundaries. That process also created the County Deer Advisory Councils (CDAC) and the rules governing them. Hunters were screaming for greater hunter involvement in the management process, the majority not trusting the old SAK formula for population modeling used by the DNR. History shows it was more on than hunters felt.
CDAC’s will now be called Citizen Deer Advisory Councils and will still work on setting harvest totals for the counties they are from. Changes may come after 2025.
“This won’t change a thing for us,” said one hunter who hunts on his land with his family in the Northern Forest Zone. “We were buck only the last couple of years. There aren’t enough deer to worry about zones.”
“There are no registration stations anymore, so who knows what zone the deer got shot in anyway. And I think a lot of deer never get registered,” said a Central Wisconsin Forest Zone hunter. “So, what’s the point?”
He went on to tell me that since 2014 he only successfully obtained an antlerless tag for the public land he hunts in Clark County one time. Prompting a move to hunting at a friend’s place in a Farmland Zone on the second weekend if they still want venison.
The current system gets the brunt of frustration from hunters due to a suppressed deer herd in most or all of the forested zones of the state. But the primary driving force for the change to the system we lived under since 2014 came from frustrations with deer populations throughout much of the state - in particular the forested regions. Earn-A-Buck regulations or threats of that in the following season often lied at the heart of those. And a lot of frustrations voiced to Dr. Deer came from an overtly suppressed deer population on public lands. When the threat of Earn-ABuck came about if the population of the DMU’s didn’t get reduced, hunters changed behavior. They traveled to the public forest in their DMU or close to it to hunt does with deer drives. The unsustainable overharvest of anterless deer from public lands avoided Earn-A-Buck. But the public lands deer population became decimated, yet private land hunters felt they “protected their does.”
State game managers knew this, but no mechanism existed to alter it. The Dr. Deer changes created private and public land anterless tags.
“It would be bad to go back to doe tags being good anywhere in a zone,” said a former Northern Forest Zone hunter. “It wrecked the hunting up where I hunted.”
“I grew up in northern Wisconsin hunting public land,” another hunter told me. “I still hunt big public lands because I love big woods, but I hunt the southern forest now. I haven’t gone north to hunt since 2013. And the zones boundaries are not the problem, wolves are the problem.”
That summed up the sentiments of all the deer hunters from the Northern Forest Zone – public and private land hunters.
The older I get the more I realize that no system will be perfect. If a hunter doesn’t see the number of deer they want to see – they’re not happy. And wolves will continue to get the blame, until a lot of things change involving deer and wolves.
THROUGH A
DECOY’S
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BY
CHUCK K OLAR LOCAL OUTDOORSMAN
