I've lived on and hunted Northern WI for 40 years. Absolutely big, beautiful country. Plenty of room to roam and get away from other hunters. For most of those years we've enjoyed decent to good hunting. We've killed some really good bucks through the years, all on public land.
But, for the last decade or so, our deer hunting has been tough. We just don't see much for deer. Don't see large bucks at all. They're logging as much or more than ever in our area, so I don't buy that habitat is getting too old, which is the DNR's standard excuse as to why there just isn't many deer.
But, we do see wolf sign and wolves regularly. Our joke for years has been that, based on the amount of sign and animals we see, if there's only 1500 wolves in the state, there must only be 3000 deer. So I have to laugh at these estimates that 1/3 or even 1/2 the amount of the total population was killed off due to the wolf season overrun last year. Let me assure everyone that we don't even notice a difference; there's still plenty of wolves in WI.
Look at it this way, if they could kill so many, many more than the quota in a matter of hours, isn't it more likely that the population estimate was way low than it is that they somehow managed to kill off a third or half of an entire population within a few hours? Northern WI is heavily forested. Parts of it are big country. The season only ran a few days. It's just preposterous to me that claims that the population was devastated after last year are taken seriously by any sort of objective arbiter.
There is no question the wolf population is increasing and has an impact on not only deer but the elk. Another predator should be brought into the equation as well, the Black bear. In 1989 there was an estimated 9,000 bears and the most recent estimate is 24,000. A couple years ago a friend and I were floating the Flambeau River for bass and we heard a bleating sound ahead of us and when we came around a bend there was a Black bear on the shore with its front paws on a fawn. It saw us, grabbed the fawn and high-tailed into the brush. A relative farms near Stevens Point and while he was mowing 1st crop hay a big Black bear jumped up ahead of the haybine. He slowed thinking maybe there were cubs still in the hay, but he came up on the remains of a fawn.
