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.

Wisconsin time zone map