That figure includes 23,870 first-time hunters (or those who have not hunted in the last 10 years).
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Wisconsin deer farms and hunting preserves would no longer have to participate in the state’s chronic wasting disease monitoring program to receive Department of Natural Resources approval for their fences under an emergency rule the agency’s board is expected to take up next week.
Pepin County recorded 686 bucks (599 last year) and 1,136 does (1,258 last year).
The agency scaled back the total by nearly thee-thousand deer. They said they discovered a number of inadvertent duplicate registrations hunters made through the state’s new electronic registration system. In Crawford County, the kill was 3,888 deer, up 14.86 percent compared with a year ago. Although hunters in Fond du Lac County got off to a better start opening weekend, for the season they killed 99 fewer deer than in 2014.
Marathon County, which has the state’s largest land area, also had the biggest deer harvest with a little more than 8,000.
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The revised numbers still put the harvest ahead of the 2014 gun season total of 199,583 deer. Deer license and tag sales will continue throughout the remaining hunting seasons. That’s about 2,300 more animals than last year’s gun season.
