County gun deer kill drops 16.5 percent
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By ELIZABETH HOCHSTEDLER
elizabeth.hochstedler@lee.net
Thursday, December 4, 2008 10:34 AM CST
Some hunters complain every deer hunting season that they don’t see many deer and the herd isn’t as large as the Department of Natural Resources anticipated.
This year, they may have been right.
“This year, just from what I’m hearing from some of the biologists out in the field, we were probably hearing more from the people who didn’t see the amount of deer they would’ve liked to see,” said DNR Wildlife Supervisor Kris Belling.
Chippewa County gun deer hunters registered 6,481 deer throughout the nine-day season that ended Sunday. That is 16.5 percent less than last year.
“We expected somewhat of a drop,” Belling said. “I guess I would say I was not expecting it to be as much of a drop as it was.”
The decrease in the amount of deer taken this year is likely due to a decrease in the size of the herd.
“One of the things that may have happened is we know that the winter conditions caused some decrease in the production of fawns,” Belling said.
“It looks like the winter impact on the deer may have been bigger than we predicted.”
A harsh winter likely put stress on does to the point that they were no longer producing as many fawns as in the past, she said.
A statewide summer deer survey found less fawns per doe than in the past 15 years, but that may not have been the case in western Wisconsin.
The October three-day antlerless hunt, which was permitted in five of the county’s six management units, also may have affected the November herd numbers.
“For the past two years, we didn’t have the October gun hunt, and this year we did, and to some extent some of the deer that were taken in the October deer hunt could have been taken in the nine-day season,” Belling said.
However, the DNR sees the drop in the harvest as a positive. “It does look like the deer herd may be back down on the way down to our goals,” she said.
During the previous two years, hunters in most areas have been taking about two antlerless deer for every buck, which is the goal of the Earn-a-Buck and Herd Control units. However, this year the number of antlerless deer taken dropped 17.8 percent, while the buck harvest only dropped 14.6 percent in the county.
While the 2008 gun deer harvest represents a significant drop from the past couple of years, it compares more favorably to figures from as recent as five years ago.
“What we had for registration this year was pretty similar to what we had in 2003,” Belling said. “We’re basically just coming down to where we were back then.”
She stressed, however, that it is too early to determine how the rest of the hunting season will pan out. The totals do not reflect the archery or muzzleloader seasons or the October or December antlerless hunts.
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