(WTAQ-WLUK) — Hunters in Wisconsin bagged fewer deer than last year.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources released preliminary totals from the gun deer season on Tuesday. The nine-day season ended on Sunday.
“Kind of the pace that was set with opening weekend, that was kind of described as a quieter than average gun-deer opener. Kind of persisted through the rest of the nine-day season,” said DNR State deer program specialist Jeff Pritzl.
Pritzl said the 2023 preliminary totals were down 17.6% from 2022 and 11% lower than the five-year average.
Hunters registered 173,942, including 85,390 antlered and 88,552 antlerless deer.
The buck harvest was down 14.7% compared to 2022. That’s the same percentage as the increase from 2021 to 2022.
Pritzl said the biggest areas of decline were in the DNR’s central farmland and northern forest regions.
“It was really in the central farmland, which is really the biggest generator of harvest numbers, and then more so in the northern forest, where we saw the decline relative to last year. 10 percent in the central farm, and closer to 20 percent in the northern forest,” he said.
A harsh winter, particularly in the northwestern part of the state, led to fewer deer being on the landscape, Pritzl said.
Preliminary numbers from opening weekend were down 16% from 2022, with DNR officials citing milder weather conditions.
Pritzl says fewer hunters took to the field as well. As of Sunday, all deer hunting license sales totaled 788,697. That’s a drop of 0.8 percent from last year.
“And that fits with the trend that we’ve been seeing, as we shared, over the recent decades, actually. And actually less that a percent decline in license sales is better than what we’ve been seeing in recent years. It tends to run between one, and two percent,” he said.
