Oct. 19–Deer management boils down to two questions: How many deer are there? And how many deer should there be?
The answers to both are elusive.
The first is quantitative. The second requires more social and subjective input.
And then there’s the “angel” in the details: What regulations should be used to resolve differences between the two?
Deer management has challenged even the greatest minds in wildlife management and conservation. Aldo Leopold, for example, fought an uphill battle while advocating for increased deer harvests in the 1940s to better balance the herd with the habitat.
This year Wisconsin is grappling with the most significant makeover of its deer hunting regulations in several decades.
It started as a 2010 campaign pledge by Gov. Scott Walker. Reacting to the discontent of some hunters over declining deer kills and what some deemed overly aggressive deer management policies, Walker used an executive order to create the position of Wisconsin white-tailed deer trustee to conduct an “independent, objective review of the state’s deer management program.”
In October 2011 the governor named James Kroll of Nacogdoches, Texas, as deer trustee. Kroll then added Gary Alt of California and David Guynn of South Carolina to a review team that produced a 2012 report of 62 recommendations.
The public was engaged from March to July this year to review and help implement the deer trustee report. Four action teams of volunteers advanced dozens of recommendations to the Department of Natural Resources.
The agency released its proposed rules changes last month; the public can comment on the proposals at hearings this month or online.
The DNR plan embraces virtually all of the recommendations of the July 2012 deer trustee report. It ignores several key recommendations of the Science and Research Action Team.
The plan includes proposals to use phone and Internet registration for deer kills, establish a deer management assistance program, change its method of estimating deer numbers and discontinue the use of quantitative deer population goals.
It also offers alternatives to the current deer management unit structure.
The plan has drawn fire mostly for its intent to change some of the science planks to its deer management program. The Natural Resources Board has scheduled a special session at its Tuesday meeting in Madison to review science information and hear from concerned parties.
The plan would allow electronic or phone registration of deer in Wisconsin for the first time. Since the 1950s, hunters have been required to register deer at stations. Though time-consuming, the practice enabled the DNR to collect important physical data on harvested deer. And not insignificantly, it produced a number nobody could debate — the deer kill.
The plan also would do away with numeric deer population goals. In the future, the DNR would manage toward “deer population objectives.”
The goals would be expressed simply as: increase the deer population; maintain the current deer population; or decrease the deer population.
Members of the Science and Research Action Team called for the agency to continue its practice of using quantitative deer goals.
The plan also recommends a change to the number and configuration of deer management units. The units would either be consolidated along current boundaries (roads and rivers) or changed to county boundaries. The action team recommended an aggregation only if it retained current DMU boundaries so historical information would be valid.
The DNR has 134 deer management units. The plan would reduce the number to 53 in the aggregation option or 72 in the county option.
The plan also would eliminate the December antlerless deer hunt. Instead, four days would be added to the muzzleloader season. Under the proposal, the muzzleloader season would begin the day after the nine-day November gun hunt and continue for 14 days.
The Holiday Hunt gun deer season would also be expanded to most of the area south of Highway 64. The season, which runs from Dec. 24 through the Sunday nearest Jan. 6, has been confined to the chronic wasting disease management zone.
Estimating the population of a wild animal such as deer has never been easy. The Sex-Age-Kill model long used in Wisconsin has been subject to more scrutiny than any. Outside experts and the action team recommended its continued use.
But while SAK has become a popular whipping post, the DNR’s answer to question No. 1 wasn’t the primary source of discontent. The real rub has been related to how many deer we should have.
As the deer herd swelled in the 1990s, the DNR began to use regulations such as Earn-A-Buck and early antlerless deer hunts in an effort to drive the population closer to legislatively mandated goals. The regulations worked too well for some hunters and attracted Walker’s attention.
Balancing the many aspects of deer management is tough work. The views of deer hunters, farmers, motorists, foresters and others are important.
If its primary goal in this reset of deer regulations is to make deer hunting “friendlier” to hunters, the DNR could keep all of its science-based platforms in place and simply change its population goals and ease off on its regulations.
By any measure, Wisconsin has had and continues to have among the best deer hunting in the nation. Deer management must evolve, certainly, and this iteration represents that necessity.
Among the changes, however, the agency should take care to retain the science that has served it well for decades.
Future governors and DNR administrators will need it.
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