According to Durkin’s reporting, fawns get hit hardest by wolves and black bears in Minnesota, bears and bobcats in Wisconsin, and coyotes and bears in the U.P. Interestingly, while wolves are by far the most controversial predator species in the state, they might not be the most influential one when it comes to deer populations. There are an estimated 1,007 wolves in Wisconsin. There’s no doubt that wolves take their share of whitetails, especially fawns, and under federal protections, state DNRs are currently unable to implement wolf management plans (wolf hunting or trapping) even if they wanted to. Most comments read something like: “Oh great, there will be more does for the wolves to eat.” (At least those that aren’t espousing conspiracy theories.) On social media pages and forums, threads about this proposal are flooded with commentary about wolves. So, what happened? The Problem Is Wolves, Right? Talk to any veteran Northwoods hunter and they’ll tell you about glory days in the early 2000s, when everyone saw plenty of deer and the pickup trucks heading back south on Highway 51 would be stacked full of bucks and does. The buck harvest then rose to 30,000 in 20, before falling back to about 25,000 in 2019, according to Durkin’s reporting. It sank to about 24,000 in 2009, rebounded to about 35,000 in 2012, and then crashed to about 17,000 in 2014. The Michigan DNR, meanwhile, documented a declining buck kill for 35 years in the Upper Peninsula. Northeastern Minnesota’s buck harvest declined 57 percent over the past decade. Similar harvest declines can be seen in northern Minnesota and Michigan, as Pat Durkin reported for Outdoor Life in 2022. This Northern region accounted for only 16 percent of the total harvest in 2023. In other words, relatively few deer are being killed in the large expanse of Wisconsin’s Northwoods, where most of our public land is. For reference, the Southern Farmland Zone covers a smaller huntable area but hunters in that region harvested a total of 41,692 deer. According to 2023 harvest data, the Northern Forest kill of 28,020 total deer was down 30 percent from the previous season and down 19 percent from the five-year average.Īs you can see in the map below, the Northern Forest Zone encompasses 20 counties in about the top third of the state. The harvest numbers back up Northwoods hunters’ complaints about slow seasons. That’s because deer populations fluctuate based on a variety of factors, including predators, winter severity, and quality of habitat. But hopefully the “proper plan” Green mentions is about establishing a more comprehensive strategy for the Northwoods, because simply halting doe harvests probably isn’t going to save deer hunting here. The proposal will certainly be popular among some Northwoods deer hunters, many of whom are not interested in shooting does anyway.

With more fawns on the ground, more will survive, and the deer population should increase.

The concept here is pretty simple: Reduce the number of does being harvested in the fall and there will be more on the landscape in the spring to birth fawns. “We’ve heard from hunters that we need to do something in the north.”

“We want to pump the brakes and stop killing does until we get a proper plan put together,” one of the bill’s authors, Representative Chanz Green, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It felt … discouraging.īefore long, I fled south to a different property that I hunt in the Central Farmland Zone where I saw deer on every sit and killed a few does for the freezer.Īnecdotes like mine have led Wisconsin legislators to propose a bill that would prohibit the Department of Natural Resources from issuing antlerless deer tags in 20 northern counties (including the county where my family property is located) for the next four years. Opening morning, which often sounds like a warzone with rifle reports booming near and far, was eerily quiet. My family members saw very few deer as well. This season I hunted hard for two days and never saw a single deer. The beer is always cold, the food and company are always good, and we always see enough deer to keep our sits interesting. We don’t always kill big bucks, but that’s not really the point. My family and I have had some great hunts on our land, which consists of about 260 acres of popple, hardwoods, and beaver swamps. I’ve hunted in what’s now considered Wisconsin’s Northern Forest deer management zone on the same property for 24 consecutive gun seasons.

Is wisconsin in central time zone