× Expand Todd Hubler

By some estimates, there are now more deer on Wisconsin’s landscape than since the Ice Age. With 2019 herd estimates ranging between 1.9 and 2 million-plus animals, the annual fall hunt for the white-tailed deer — the state’s most iconic animal after the cow — should be a productive one for the more than half a million gun and bow hunters who will take to the field.

But the abundance of deer, especially in the southern portion of the state but also in the north where the regeneration of certain tree species is now at risk, continues to be a fraught bio-political issue.

“There are 51 farmland counties where deer have been allowed to grow beyond control,” says Keith McCaffery, a retired and decorated Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources wildlife biologist and deer expert. “Herds in 15 of the 18 northern counties are above ‘silvicultural thresholds.’”

McCaffery, who continues to stay abreast of deer trends and politics from his home in Rhinelander, dubs the deer status quo in the Badger State a crisis. He’s not alone. Ecologists and other wildlife professionals echo the concerns posed by a large population of animals managed primarily by the humans who hunt them.

Tim Van Deelen, McCaffery’s successor at the DNR, and now a professor of wildlife ecology at UW-Madison and a self-described ‘deer nerd,’ says it’s a complex issue with ecological, economic, social, cultural and political dimensions. “It’s causing ecological dysfunction. It’s causing property damage. It’s a hazard on the roadways in certain areas. We’re losing plant diversity. It is difficult to regenerate commercial timber species.”

Studies by retired UW-Madison forest ecologist Don Waller, an expert on the effects of deer on forest ecosystems, have shown that plant species diversity due to an overabundance of deer has been reduced by 15 percent. Tree species such as hemlock, white cedars, yellow birch and pines, among others, are failing to regenerate, changing forest composition. Likewise, the native plant communities that make up the forest understory are listed by Waller as ‘losers’ in the deer vs. plant calculation. Native orchids, lilies and a litany of less flashy forest herbs rank high on the deer menu. “There are a lot of cascading effects on other species,” says Waller, adding that browsing deer often pave the way for invasive plants.

But deer hunting also fuels the state’s economy, pumping in roughly $1.4 billion a year, according to Van Deelen. Funds from license sales are essential DNR revenue, supporting a variety of programs, not just those for the hunting public.

“It’s all interconnected. The sale of [hunting] licenses funds conservation,” says Robert Holsman, a DNR resource sociologist, pointing out that money earned through license sales is the largest source of support for the purchase of game habitat — forests, wetlands, prairies — and that those land purchases benefit the wider community of people who appreciate nature through activities like hiking, kayaking and bird watching.

Van Deelen also notes that deer hunting is culturally deep-rooted in Wisconsin. It can be an important family tradition, and western parts of the state rank among the top white-tailed deer hunting destinations in North America, bringing in money from out of state and underpinning an industry estimated to support as many as 15,000 jobs.

A hundred years ago, when Wisconsin’s forests were still recovering from the epic “cutover” of the 19th century when 8 million acres of old growth forest were cut, and when hunting regulations first began to be imposed and enforced, deer were far less common. Anecdotal reports of deer in Dane County in the 1950s were sometimes deemed newsworthy.

From the 19th century through the turn of the 20th century, traditional deer predators such as wolves, cougars and wolverines were hunted relentlessly and, in the case of the wolf and mountain lion, extirpated from Wisconsin. Now protected, wolves have rebounded with a 2017 population estimate of about 800 animals. Cougars pay an occasional visit and there is hope a breeding population may one day be reestablished.

Today, Wisconsin’s landscape is vastly different from the late 19th century and early 20th century and deer populations have no problem rebounding from the annual hunt, which this year is projected to kill between 325,000 and 350,000 animals statewide.

“This is an animal that through the eons has developed to survive predation,” Van Deelen says, noting that a doe can become pregnant before its first birthday. “There is no reproductive senescence in deer. It has an incredible reproductive capacity for an animal its size. Deer always bounce back.”

“From an ecological standpoint, [the population] is much too high,” notes Kevin Wallenfang, the DNR’s deer and elk ecologist.

There are signs, he adds, that the deer population in southern Wisconsin may have reached a tipping point. “We see fawns starving to death in farmland areas. There is a nutritional shortcoming somewhere,” possibly due to too many animals competing for less food as new farming techniques leave less waste to scavenge.

Another complicating factor is that the number of hunters headed into the woods each fall is dropping. An estimated 49,000 people stopped hunting in the 15-year period between 2003 and 2017.

“We see a couple of things happening demographically that are undercutting hunting,” says the DNR’s Holsman. “Wisconsin has an aging population, especially in rural areas. We’re aging in places where hunters live.”

Older hunters spend less time in the field, may not travel far from roads, or may abandon hunting altogether. The population is declining in rural areas as people follow jobs to urban areas, and the activity of deer hunting now competes with a growing menu of alternative pastimes. “The data tells us people are prioritizing life and family issues,” says Holsman. Some hunters are also finding the activity to be less enjoyable, he says, because finding land to hunt on can be difficult and hunting has assumed different cultural norms from decades ago when it was a more communal activity, with groups of hunters driving deer. “It’s a little bit more solitary. And hunters are more selective. They want that bigger buck.”

The big buck fetish is yet another cultural factor. Deer populations in Wisconsin rebounded in part due to regulations and hunter reluctance to shoot antlerless deer. Past efforts to control the size of the deer herd played out through strategies like “Earn a Buck,” where hunters had to first shoot a doe for the privilege of shooting a buck. Earn a Buck, which was eliminated by the Legislature during the Scott Walker administration as a bone to hunters, was perhaps the most effective tool for managing the size of the state’s deer herd.

“Hunters have an opportunity to kill one to three antlerless deer in some counties, but I think we’re at a saturation point for the number of deer [that] hunters want to take,” says Wallenfang.

The emergence of chronic wasting disease (CWD), experts say, is also discouraging hunting. This makes it more difficult to control the disease because dense deer populations are believed to help the CWD agent — a weird infectious particle known as a prion that’s been shown to persist in soil and even be taken up by plants — spread.

Frustration is building, even among hunters, as the overabundance of deer is recognized as a multifactorial problem. Deer hunting in each Wisconsin county is now informed by a county deer advisory council, many of which are dominated by hunters. The councils are responsible for public input and recommendations to the DNR and the Natural Resources Board for the deer hunt in their respective counties. Earlier this year, Buffalo County, a Mecca for trophy buck hunters, recommended a no-buck deer hunt. The pushback from hunters and guides, whose jobs depend on helping clients shoot a trophy deer, was immediate and sank the recommendation.

Previously, according to Wallenfang, two other Wisconsin counties, Door and Waupaca in 2018 and 2016, respectively, made similar efforts with the same motive and the same result: “The concept of each was the same. Too many deer, no hope of harvesting their prescribed antlerless quota and looking for a new way to get there. They recognize that there are too many deer and that chronic wasting disease is moving in their direction. They are asking what we can do to provide a new tool. I’m not sure there is a silver bullet. We’re all scratching our heads and wondering what we’re going to do here.”