Wisconsin’s deer hunting heritage lives and grows through the sharing of hunting stories. If each licensed hunter created one new story to share at camp this year, there are 633,460 new stories to pass along, with more than 243,000 of them ending with the harvest of a deer. This year’s preliminary tally indicates 243,739 deer were registered by gun deer hunters from Nov. 17-26.
“It’s great to see the level of hunter participation that we do in Wisconsin, and equally as great to see that more hunters had success than last year,” said Kevin Wallenfang, big game ecologist for the Wis. DNR. “I’ve talked to several hunters that saw more deer than in past years in much of the state, but also to some who saw less. So there are areas where deer observations were low, as we knew there would be. This sort of feedback, along with the harvest numbers, is important as we continue to work with hunters to best manage deer populations in the state.”
This year’s preliminary harvest totals are up 7.7 percent from 2011. The preliminary tally showed hunters harvested 114,822 bucks and 128,917 antlerless deer. This compared to 2011 preliminary harvest figures of 102,837 bucks and 123,423 antlerless, for a 12 percent and 4 percent increase respectively. Lincoln County had a 2% increase in buck harvest but a 4% decrease in antlerless harvest for a net overall loss of 1%.
A breakdown of the harvest by DNR region and county is available in pdf format on the DNR website.