The deer are winning.
While Wisconsin’s white-tailed deer population is at an all-time record of about 2 million, the number of hunters has plummeted 17 percent over the last three decades. Popular Madison-based outdoor writer Pat Durkin is pessimistic about the future and, I hate to say it, he makes a convincing case.
This year about 570,000 people will have purchased licenses for the gun deer season that started on Saturday and runs through the Thanksgiving weekend, ending at sundown on Sunday. Durkin points out that the record, which is unlikely ever to be eclipsed, was in 1990 when just shy of 700,000 licenses were sold.
This isn’t a surprise. The Department of Natural Resources has been saying for years that hunting and fishing is on the decline. The reason is simple demographics. These outdoor sports are dominated by aging white guys. It’s the same long-term problem that the Republicans have with the difference being that hunting is an institution worth preserving.
Heroic efforts by the DNR and various hunting and fishing groups to recruit non-traditional groups (women, people of color, young folks who didn’t grow up in a hunting family) have met with limited success. The diversity of hunters is improving somewhat but new hunters aren’t being recruited nearly as fast as old guys drop out.
This has all kinds of implications that might not be obvious. For example, hunting and fishing license purchases fund a big part of DNR wildlife management and habitat improvement efforts that benefit everyone whether they hunt or not. Last year gun deer license sales alone produced $16.5 million.
The exploding deer population is the result of several factors. Game management laws have been effective at stopping the over-hunting that drove deer out of southern Wisconsin entirely between 1850 and 1950. Sustainable forestry in the north provides a consistent acreage of newly cut timber land that is excellent deer habitat. Suburban sprawl everywhere, while bad for land use and transportation, is great for deer. They benefit from the patchwork of refuge (nobody hunts in a subdivision) and remaining farmland (deer love corn). And climate change is producing a series of mild winters improving the winter survival rate.
Hunting has been the key means of keeping the herd in check, but it looks increasingly like a losing battle. The DNR already allows hunters to take up to four does plus one buck in the southern part of the state, but few hunters take all the deer they are allowed. One deer is plenty to feed a family for a year, especially since venison isn’t a food of choice for some.
One tragic limiting factor on the population is, of course, chronic wasting disease. It’s a horrible malady that slowly eats away at the animal’s brain. The Evers administration has, to its credit, ended eight years of a see-no-evil approach to the disease. The DNR has been freed to encourage more testing and to push out more information to hunters, but there is no known cure for the deer.
The disease has not been shown to jump to humans, but no one in their right mind would consume a deer that was infected. Still, in Durkin’s column, he reports that estimates are that last year about 5,500 CWD-positive, but untested, deer were consumed by hunters and everyone they shared venison with.
I’m a hunter. You’d think I would be thrilled that there were more deer out there. And I would be if I knew that the herd was healthy and that the numbers were sustainable. But, at least in south central Wisconsin, the herd is facing a dire health threat and when population numbers soar out of control there is usually some natural limitation that causes them to plummet and that is never pretty.
Deer are an important part of the culture and economy of Wisconsin. Hunting license sales bolster all kinds of good conservation work. But declining hunter participation and a soaring deer population are combining to send us off on an uncharted and dangerous direction.
You could help the resource and yourself by learning how to hunt. The DNR’s Keith Warnke runs the department’s Hunt for Food program, which will teach you everything you need to know to hunt or fish. Warnke says that the program has about 150 participants each year at 15 locations around the state. Everybody’s a novice so there’s no need to feel you’ll be out of your league.
And Warnke says, “Our biggest need at this point is for hunters to come forward to mentor someone new and pass on the heritage.”
So, if you want to learn to hunt, or if you’re an experienced hunter, consider contacting Warnke at Keith.Warnke@wisconsin.gov.
