This year’s 9-day Gun Deer Season Opener is just about on-par with the same point last year.
Total license sales are down less than half a percent from last year while harvest numbers are up nearly 4%.
In total, hunters registered 90,671 deer statewide during the opening weekend of the 2025 gun deer hunt, compared to 87,248 registered for the same period in 2024. This is a 3.9% increase from a year ago and 1.1% below the 5-year average.
With the new deer management units in the northern forest zone, DNR Deer Program Specialist Jeff Pritzl says there won’t be exact numbers to compare harvests in that area for a couple years.
“It seems, as we've seen with the rest of the state, relatively close to harvest patterns from where we/what we saw last year,” said Pritzl.
The snow in the forecast will greatly change conditions for the second weekend.
Snow on the ground generally means more successful conditions. But if it’s still snowing and windy, hunters may be less likely to be out in those conditions.
“Oftentimes we kind of just round up and say, when we have snow cover on opening weekend, it can influence the harvest by 10%. It's really hard to predict,” said Pritzl. “It's all we can hope at this point is that it will improve opportunity, as long as the conditions hold out and after the storm passes, it'll just provide better conditions and it'll keep more people out hunting in the second half of the season.”
A 24-year-old hunter in Fond du Lac County died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the chest.
The DNR’s preliminary investigation shows he was hunting from a tree stand when the gun accidentally went off.
Another hunter was injured in Grant County when he was accidentally shot in the butt by a stray bullet. He is expected to recover.
