Not much to like in Wisconsin regulations

As a first-time Wisconsin deer hunter last weekend, I'm not sure what's happened to the state's grand tradition, but my gut instinct says it's a mess. A mess? Well, one's first clue might be that the 2007 Wisconsin deer season requires a 55-page booklet of rules and regulations.

The bulk of those pages has to do with chronic wasting disease, dealing with it, controlling it, etc., etc.

Deer season brings friends and family together

http://www.rhinelanderdailynews.com/articles/2007/11/24/outdoors/sabota.txt

The 2007 Wisconsin gun-deer season is drawing to a close. As mentioned last week there are still many opportunities to hunt deer yet this year. The muzzleloader season opens tomorrow and runs until Dec. 5. In addition we have over a month of archery hunting.

These thoughts are being put on paper on Sunday evening the second day of the gun-deer season. Our group in Camp tonight has decreased to three of us. It includes Tom Twesme (The Osseo Jinx), his older son, Troy, and this scribbler. Our son, Craig, left a short time ago, as did Duane Frey.

Troy is on active duty in the Air Force and we were not sure if he would be able to join us until last evening when he flew into Rhinelander. He is stationed in Tampa, Florida and commutes to Qatar at least once each month. Troy, like his Dad and me, lives to hunt deer. Even during the years when he was a student at the Air Force Academy he managed to fly back home to hunt with us. The only year he missed was 1999 when he was in Korea. It is great to have him back in camp.

Opening morning I crawled onto my elevated platform about ten minutes before 6 a.m. and noticed how dark it was. To walk from the trail to my stand I had to use my flashlight just to see where to put my feet. After getting my gear arranged on the platform 12 feet above the ground, I settled down to wait for daylight. Shooting hours began at six-thirty and it was questionable if we would have enough light by that time to safely shoot. Normally we hear a few shots at least twenty minutes before legal shooting hours. Saturday morning we did not hear a single shot until twenty minutes after legal shooting hours.

Opening morning was very quiet this year. We heard more shooting on the two weekends before deer season as we were scouting the area. In an attempt to keep my mind occupied the following thoughts were being considered. I knew that our son, Craig, was sitting on an elevated platform where he could look over a very large hay marsh with a creek running through the middle. Twesme and Duane Frey were still-hunting on several overgrown logging roads near Craig.

As I sat on my platform I was rethinking what we were doing. We know that the deer population is extremely low in the Monico Area but we have the shack in that area and enjoy hunting there.

Back to opening day and sitting on my elevated platform. I had sat on that platform several times with my bow during the fall archery season and saw very few deer. Just after 7:30 a.m. I heard Craig’s voice on my radio.

“Anybody out there got their ears on?”

I asked what he wanted.

“Dad, I took a very long shot and after I shot the deer disappeared,” he said. “I saw this deer feeding in the waist-high marsh hay just out from the alder brush. As I watched the deer I kept thinking that it acted and looked like a buck. I cranked my scope up to nine power and saw spikes on the buck’s head. I took a rest aim, raised it to the top of the back, squeezed off a shot and the deer disappeared.”

I asked if we should leave it for a couple hours and he replied that he was not sure enough for that.

Then he said, “Dad, the buck is on the other side of the creek so we have to

go around to check it out.”

I unloaded my gun and climbed down and hour and a half after opening and drove to pick up Craig. We drove around the creek, estimated where we were, parked and headed into the woods to determine where the buck was when Craig shot. Craig had carefully picked several landmarks from his stand so we could find the buck and he had Duane crawl onto the stand before we looked for the buck so that the marsh was covered in the event that he jumped and ran. Craig pointed to a dead spruce tree and told me that the buck disappeared very near that tree.

As we approached the dead spruce a spike buck jumped between us and one shot put it down. Craig had shot it from about 225 yards and it had not moved.

Opening afternoon we were making a two-person push along the gas line. I was a stander watching the opening when Frey appeared several hundred yards to the west of me. I saw a deer run across the opening and saw him shoot. After an hour of searching we located a faint blood trail. We tracked that buck until dark, started again at daybreak and gave up at eleven in the morning. We sure hated to give up.

Sunday morning dawned bright and cold. My flashlight was not needed as I walked to the elevated platform. As the sun poked over the trees to the east the cold became much more intense and it was very quiet in the woods.

When the alarm went off Monday morning at 5:00 the rain was pouring down. Twesme declared that it was an eggs and bacon morning.

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I'd tend to agree with the author about complexity, I wonder about the data behind some of these rules.

He makes a good point

Want more does shot? Increase the bag limit. If I choose to shoot a buck first, then it's antlerless deer after that. If I choose to shoot an antlerless deer first, fine. Let me, the hunter, determine my hunting choices.

And there are multiple ways of doing that. Longer seasons, just why did the doe season go from warm October to mid December. Particularly foolish is that it's a earn a buck opportunity for those who need a doe. Though I'm perfectly happy with current archery and blackpower regulations, I do recognize that crossbows and scoped rifles would increase the number of hunters. Baiting, a controversial topic, by again different regs county to county and if the problem is too many deer, that's also part of the solution.

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