With two 'hot pockets' of known chronic wasting disease in this region, a DNR biologist says hunters can play a major role in researching the disease. The deer archery season begins Saturday.
Jeremy Holtz says the DNR is putting an intensive push to sample the northernmost 18 counties.
He says the want to maximize the number of samples..
"...We want to keep abreast of the status of CWD in our deer herd. We want any hunter that shoot a deer to find a local CWD sampling kiosk and drop off the head so we can their adult deer..."
Jeremy Holtz says they need to get samples from every location they can get so they can find out if the disease has spread...
"...that's it's not being overlooked in the Woodruff-Arbor Vitae area or Eagle River. Doesn't matter where it is, we want a sample , as long as it's an adult, male or female, it doesn't matter. If you want to keep the antlers you can saw them off first and then we'll take the rest of the head...."
He says as the deer season moves forward they're going to be trying to get additional samples from the two CWD surveillance blocks in Oneida county. He says they would like to get 450 deer heads from the two surveillance areas...
"...The reason we have that number is we're trying to get within a 99 percent confidence interval that we can detect the disease in one percent of the population. We want to be absolutely certain that we know how many deer have this and exactly where it is located..."
He says the block south of Rhinelander came close to goal last year.
More information on the effort is on the DNR website.
