After-hours deer drive detracts from buck harvest

With the close of the 2021 Wisconsin Nine Day Firearm Gun Deer Season, we await the final results. We know that the license sales were down by 1.5 percent from the previous year. But the license sales only jumped by essentially the same last year with COVID when most of the other states in the nation saw a double digit increase in hunting license sales.

The harvest was down by about 14 percent from the previous year and there could be several reasons for this. When the preliminary firearm season totals come out the picture will be accurate — although most of the deer harvested in the gun season are done so in the first two days.

Opening weekend saw three firearm incidents with no fatalities due to firearms. Treestand incidents are not tracked by the DNR. My hope for a deer season with no incidents will have to wait for next year.

I heard a number of hunters saying that they saw few deer opening weekend. Our camp had no deer even shot at on opening weekend. We also didn’t see very many deer. A couple fawns and two does that didn’t offer a shot. We did see a couple of bucks riding from camp to our hunting location. One was a wall hanger. From the stand we were just happy when a squirrel or chickadee passed through — one flew through my tent blind.

As the season continued, I saw some fawns and one yearling doe that stayed in too thick of brush to offer a quality shot. On Saturday afternoon, with two buck fawns frolicking around me, a mature doe approached. The fawns were now five yards from me so I couldn’t raise my rifle. While waiting patiently for a chance to raise the rifle and turn towards the doe, a buck approached from the opposite direction. He chased the fawns away, and the doe was watching the fawns bound off when the buck stopped five yards from me, looking at her. I raised the rifle, he heard that and started to run off with a steep quartering away angle. He dropped 12 yards from me and died about ten seconds later.

That was a good thing. But on that same late afternoon and unfortunately early evening I witnessed a couple things that disturbed me a lot. One was legal, about a mile and a half northwest of me, but raises questions of ethics. The other, a mile and a half northeast of me, was clearly not legal. I killed my buck exactly a half hour before shooting light expired. I dragged it to a trail and fetched a UTV parked about 150 yards away. I drove back to the deer, loaded it and my gear up, and hauled it to an area away from my hunting area to field dress it. It took a bit to do all this and when I shut off the UTV and jumped out of the cab exactly 20 minutes after the close of shooting hours, and quite dark, a deer drive to the northeast was still going on. I heard at least 20 rounds fired in the next five minutes. There is absolutely no individual within ear shot of that who wouldn’t have the hair on the back of their neck stand up. I needed a headlamp just to see the deer, much less field dress it.

I thought back a long time ago to a hunting incident that happened about the same amount of time after shooting hours, and it claimed a life.

Every year someone someplace tells a story about how they were ticketed by a warden when they shot only a minute or two after shooting hours. Don’t believe that for an instant. They shot in the pitch dark and often with the aid of light. I would have felt better if these shots involved the aid of light but the only light that was involved was moonlight and very little of that. Thankfully I haven’t heard of anyone getting shot from that.

It certainly dampened my mood from having harvested a buck on the second Saturday of the gun season.

But after Josh and I loaded the buck in the truck, we fired up a little “Fred Bear”, the original, by Ted Nugent on the way home. We banged that out a couple times, enjoying the feeling of my hunt and letting the music wash away the rest. Through a

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