The Rhinelander Daily News - Online news and information for the Rhinelander, Wisconsin region

Vern Hollister
Correspondent

If informal surveys at Forest County deer registration sites are representative, and by all indications they are, the 2008 hunting season has created a large number of unhappy hunters. Even sight viewing, as pickup after pickup with drivers clad in blaze orange at the wheel, head back south, their trailers behind are empty or holding an ATV with no deer alongside.

Bob Bristol, registering deer at Connors Builders Supply in Laona, said, "There are very few deer. It was bad in the late '60's, but nothing like this."

Friday afternoon at Main Street Ed's in Argonne where disconsolate hunters gathered for lunch and the counter was lined with men in blaze orange, like pumpkins on bar stools, the atmosphere was not rife with stories of hunting successes. Al Marvin, Don LeMaster and Jim Deaton were members of a party of seventeen.

Marvin, who would go back out as soon as he finished lunch, began by saying, "It's the worst year I've ever had."

His hunting party had prepared their stands, saw hardly any deer, or more rightly, no deer; and they resorted to the traditional deer drives. Even those did not produce deer. About the only deer by Friday was a doe that no one in the party wanted to claim. No one wished to be near the deer for a photo including the one who had shot it.

LeMaster, selling tickets for the Argonne Volunteer Fire Department's traditional gun raffle that would occur at Main Street Ed's that evening, said, "The DNR overestimated when they gave out too many doe tags (in previous years), that and there are too many predators. There are too many doe with no fawns. In the spring, the fawn is the bears' favorite food and also that of wolves and coyotes."

The Argonne area, usually good hunting territory, was way down in registration. Jessica Howard said that at Main Street Ed's she had registered 40 deer opening weekend and by Friday with two days left a total of 77. Last year at the same time period, registration was 300 with a final count of 360. Hiles as of Friday had registered 44 deer, another count that was down.

Members of the LeMaster and Marvin party said they knew of another serious hunt group from the Crandon-Argonne area. "There are 20 guys, all good hunters," they said, "and they got four deer, the biggest a three-point buck."

A number of possible causes for the poor hunt were offered, but weather and the previous winter were not even included by hunters. The two most prevalent reasons offered were the overestimation of the deer herd and the underestimation of the effect predators have in destroying the deer population, especially fawns. The bear population is much larger than given estimates, hunters say, wolves are protected, and coyotes also kill off deer. One hunter said that by Scott Lake he saw plenty of wolf tracks but no deer tracks.

Ted Rosio from Laona said that while hunting in the Nashville area, he saw two cougars. Another hunter reported seeing a cougar south of Goodman. Although this information is unsubstantiated, a hunter who registered at the Laona station said that a friend of his is a friend of a DNR worker. With a camera on a wolf den near Rhinelander, the recorder showed sixteen fawns being carried to the den as food for the young. Jeff Stegwell of the Laona Food Depot, who used to accept deer to process for a few years, said that if one wolf killed three or four fawns and then another three or four, it adds up. He said he had heard the deer population had moved farther south.

Terry Lucas at Connors Builders Supply said that this is his first year registering deer. For that reason he could not look back at records. He did say he was told by a DNR member to expect to register about 300 deer, even if he was not open on Thanksgiving or Sunday. By Saturday noon, Lucas had registered 96 deer, 36 of them antlerless.

"One out of Newald was huge," Lucas said. "Eight points and an easy 200 pounds. The guy didn't enter the Big Buck contest. The biggest right now is 173 pounds and ten points."

Bill Hoffman from Laona wasn't registering a deer at the time. Hoffman said he had access to three different farms. "There's hardly nothing out there," Hoffman said. "Three farms and nothing. I hunted and no deer."

LeMaster, getting tickets ready for the drawings Friday evening at Main Street Ed's during which a winner would be drawn each hour beginning at 6:00 and ending at 10:00, said that if registration in Armstrong Creek was way down, he knew it had to be a bad year; and when the DNR held meetings, he intended to attend to offer his point of view.

A check at Armstrong Creek's The Corner Store revealed that the number of deer registered was indeed lower. A year ago, as of Thanksgiving Day's end, 507 deer had been registered. This season, the count was 278. By Friday's end, another dozen or so had been reported.

With not much else to do, supplies for food nearing an end, Argonne and Crandon area hunters left their shacks to pack Main Street Ed's where Ed said the event was "bigger than New Year's Eve." In support of the Argonne Fire Department, Ed had donated to print the raffle tickets and also offered door prizes between the drawings. The orange-clad hunters, this season, talked more about what they didn't see than of what they did see.

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