Originally Posted by W9ARcher (Post 3496979)

I hunt just north of Chippewa County and the wolves are moving south out of the Blue Hills. Should be in Chippewa County in the next couple of years and we won't have to worry about Zone 23 being Herd Control any more.

Unless we take matters into our own hands and stop the expansion :)

Originally Posted by UPHunter08 (Post 3496392)

I'm going to have call 'BS' on this one. Unless you own thousands of acres or a game farm, most landowners have very little control individually over the deer herd in their area. Contrary to what some people seem to believe, deer aren't restricted to your 40-acre parcel. That 1 1/2 year old buck that you let pass may get taken out by the hunter on the property 1/2 mile away.

It falls upon the game management agency, the WI-DNR in this case, to formulate a policy that meets the needs of most of their constituents. This means enacting policies that result in deer numbers and doe-to-buck ratios in line with their goals. In my experience, the MI-DNR totally f**ked this up in the Upper Peninsula. In reaction to low deer numbers, they virtually eliminated doe permits in most areas of the western UP, and the long term result is a ratio of 5:1 or even 10:1 (in my personal experience).

Unfortunately, WI seems to be going down a similar road. The ratio is much better here, but overall numbers seem to be much lower. To make matters worse, there seems to be very little restrictions on allowing large landowners to fence in huge areas to create game farms. That just takes valuable habitat out of production to the average citizen...I'd be incredibly irate if I bought 80 acres, only to have the adjacent 1,500 acres fenced off (as has happened here recently). :rant: It's pretty sad when I look forward to hunting the poor deer herd in the UP because I see more deer there than in WI...although there are far fewer big bucks up there, at least I regularly see a lot of deer!

It's all part of the same problem IMO: terrible management on the part of the WI-DNR. If I did my job the way they're doing theirs, I'd have been fired already. The problem we have as sportsmen, is that the gov't bureaucrats in the DNR are not responsible to the average citizen; they only listen to the politicians and special interests (e.g. agriculture lobby).