Nine-day deer harvest easily beats last year, also tops recent averages

BY MATT FREY

SPORTS EDITOR

The numbers are in and the strong pace deer hunters in Taylor County and throughout the state set on opening weekend continued through the end of the 2022 nineday gun deer hunting season on Sunday.

Locally, many more Taylor County hunters were happier this season than in recent falls with a total of 3,845 deer being registered by the 5 p.m. deadline on Monday for deer taken on the last day of the season. That is an increase of 18.6% over last year’s total of 3,243. Registration totals for antlered bucks jumped 26.6% from last year’s count of 1,558 to 1,973 this year and with ample antlerless harvest authorizations available, especially on private lands, 1,872 antlerless deer were registered in the county, up 11.1% from last year’s mark of 1,685.

While the harvest numbers in the county still don’t compare to some of the peak years in the decade of the 2000s or even those before the severe winter of 2013-14, they are above the five-year averages for the county from 2017-21 of 1,609 bucks, 1,522 does and 3,131 total deer taken during the nine-day season.

In fact, Taylor County led the 20-county Northern Forest Region with its harvest numbers and also led the region with four deer harvested per square mile during the season, according to DNR deer program specialist Jeff Pritzl.

This year’s nine-day gun harvest in Taylor County will beat seven of the last eight years, with 2018 (4,026) being the lone exception.

“It was a pretty good season,” said Emma Hansen, the DNR’s wildlife biologist for Taylor and Rusk counties. “I think that snow on opening weekend, having that snow on the ground helped a lot. Even though it was cold and a little windy it seemed like it wasn’t enough to bed the deer down. There were still a lot of deer moving around. I’ve heard reports from several people that they even saw some bucks still chasing does, so I think we were still hitting the tail end of the rut.”

The opening weekend success, which included a 15.3% overall increase in registration numbers over last year in Taylor County, was accomplished despite some cold, snowy and windy conditions on opening day, Nov. 19.

“I don’t know if I was too surprised,” Hansen said. “Of course for people, it’s not fun to be out in the cold and everything, but I think we’d had enough time for the animals to adjust. All of those other components where we were hitting the rut and the snow helping with visibility, I think a lot of that was just able to come together to make conditions pretty good in general.”

The Northern (19.3%) and Central Forest (30.6%) regions of Wisconsin had the highest increases this year over last.

Overall in the state, 203,295 deer were registered for the nine-day hunt, a 14.4% increase over last year and 7.7% above the five-year average. The buck registration total of 98,397 was up 14.7% over last year and the doe harvest of 104,898 was up 14.1% over last year.

“A number of variables contribute to that,” Pritzl said Tuesday in a briefing with statewide media. “Overall, the hunting conditions were good. Certainly the snow on the ground through opening weekend which persisted into the week helped as well. We didn’t have any real negative weather events other than that high wind on opening weekend. That, along with other variables, mostly pointed in the right direction for the hunters.”

Pritzl guessed the sharper increases in the state’s forested regions may simply have been a matter of those areas being more protected from the wind on opening day and the sun melting the snow as the season progressed.

“That probably makes sense because of the weather conditions,” he said. “They may have been a little more buffered from that strong wind on opening day because of the cover on the landscape and the snow cover probably persisted a little longer on those forested landscapes. The Central Forest was 30% ahead of last year’s nine-day gun season and the Northern Forest was 20% ahead of last year. That was great to see. The farmland zones were also ahead, but not as much.”

The Central Farmland Zone in Adams County led the state with over 12 deer registered per square mile. Vernon County led the Southern Farmland Zone with almost seven deer registered per square mile. The Central Forest Zone in Eau Claire County registered 4.8 deer per square mile.

Since the archery and crossbow seasons opened on Sept. 17, hunters have registered 301,540 deer statewide.

If hunters forgot to register their deer through the state’s electronic registration system or the telephone

See NINE-DAY on page 16 call-in option, DNR officials urge hunters to still do so to create as accurate of a harvest count as possible.

“There is not a grace period that’s established but the guidance would be absolutely register your deer,” Pritzl said. “The numbers we’re sharing (Tuesday), we specifically describe them as preliminary because history has shown us that we will probably add a couple thousand deer over the next month to this total from folks that discover or realize or had issues last week with their connection. The bottom line is we want the deer registered. There is not a red flag that will pop up and say this deer was registered past that 5 p.m. deadline.”

Deer may continue to be harvested with firearms in Taylor County through December 11. The 10-day muzzleloader hunt goes through Wednesday, Dec. 7 and the four-day statewide antlerless-only hunt starts the following day. Archery and crossbow seasons will run through Sunday, Jan. 8. As of Wednesday morning, there were still 2,200 private-land antlerless tags for Taylor County available for purchase.

“We’ve had some pretty mild winters the last few years and a lot of food on the ground during the growing season, so we’re able to produce quality bucks and it’s good for fawn survival,” Hansen said. “We have a pretty robust deer herd right now I think. There’s still some privateland tags left. With our strong deer herd, harvesting those antlerless deer isn’t really going to affect the population too negatively. That helps take pressure and competition off the bucks and the population in general having a more balanced deer herd.”

Hansen said about 60 heads were collected for chronic wasting disease sampling in the county, just during the nineday season. Carcass waste dumpsters are still likely to be available through December at the Medford DNR Ranger Station, the Gilman Corner Store and at a new location, K& T Meat Processing in Jump River.

“Around where the game-farm positive was (in the Gilman area), we have a goal of trying to test 150 deer,” Hansen said. “We still have a little ways to go with that, but I’m still glad to see there are people submitting samples just to know whether deer are safe to eat or not.”

License sales

As of 11:59 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 27, sales for gun, bow, crossbow, sports and patron licenses reached 795,072. Of that total, 436,423 were for gun privileges only and 554,898 were for all gun privileges including gun, sports and patron licenses. The year-to-date sales for all deer licenses are down 1.6% from the same time last year.

Of the licenses sold to date, 63% were purchased online. The remaining 37% were sold in-person through transactions at DNR license agent locations. Deer hunting license and harvest authorization sales will continue throughout the remaining deer hunting seasons.

This year, licenses were sold to hunters in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Additionally, hunters came from 21 different countries to deer hunt in Wisconsin, including New Zealand, Chad and South Africa, according to DNR Wildlife Management Program director Eric Lobner.

Two more incidents

There were two more hunting incidents during the second weekend of the season to bring the nine-day season total to eight, one of which on opening weekend was fatal in Green Lake County.

The last two occurred in Jefferson and Sauk counties.

On Friday at about 3:20 p.m., a 36-yearold male was the victim of a gunshot wound to the leg in Palmyra Township in Jefferson County. The victim was deer hunting from a ground blind on private property adjacent to public hunting land when a group of seven individuals conducting a deer drive shot at two running deer. A 51-year-old male was identified as the responsible shooter. The victim was driven to the hospital and treated. The victim and shooter were not members of the same hunting party.

On Nov. 26 at about noon in Sumpter Township in Sauk County, a 27-year-old male suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the leg. The victim was attempting to sit on the ground by a boulder when he lost his balance. He then had an unwanted discharge from his firearm. The victim was flown to the hospital via Med Flight for treatment.

The average hunting incidents per year for the last 10 gun deer seasons (2013-2022) is 6.4. In addition, there were zero fatalities in six of those 10 years.