For the second year in a row, harvest numbers are down for opening weekend of the gun deer season in Wisconsin.
Comparing opening weekend harvest numbers from this year to last, total deer registered is down nearly 2% from nearly 90,831 to 89,203 deer. Antlerless harvest is up slightly.
Opening weekend harvest is down about 5% from the five-year average.
Harvest in the Northern Forest Zone is down nearly 20% from the five-year average. Within that zone, Forest County is up about 1.7% from last year.
Wisconsin DNR Deer Program Specialist Jeff Pritzl said this was expected given the late start to the season.
“We see that in other years, when the opening date of the gun season is late on the calendar. It's further removed from the peak of the breeding season. It’s further removed from the peak of daytime deer activity as well. That kind of played out over the course of the state,” said Pritzl.
The gun-deer season runs through Sunday. There could be better conditions for hunting up north now that there’s some snow on the ground.
Pritzl couldn’t say how the rest of the season will go.
It used to be that opening weekend is about half the gun deer harvest total, but that hasn’t always been the case in recent years.
“We used to say, ‘Boy, it's hard to recover from a poor opening weekend.’ A couple of years ago, we did see a nice recovery during the rest of the season,” said Pritzl. “We really can't make a prediction like we used to be able to.”
While gun harvest numbers are down, archery harvest in the northern forest zone up until this point is ahead of last year.
Zero firearm involved hunting incidents were reported this weekend. Last year, two people were injured during opening weekend.
