Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Wolves in Wisconsin far exceed recovery goal

Dave, I think you may have been sniffing a little too much of that POR-15

Actually it was an under the table trade, 1500 Mn grays for that brent favrey guy.

It didn't work out so good for Mn either... bad deal all around.

No it was really in trade for a Tucker snow machine. But WI only got 25 wolves, but they don't admit to getting screwed because it makes them look stupid.

Ya THINK??? Then why does the dumbazz WIDNR even TRY??? Weather forecasters have a better record..

LMAO.. I dunno - worked OK as far as I'm concerned; why, he ran the Queens chances right into the ground - as usual.. Hehehehehe..

Tooooo late.. The WIDNR is already PAST that little obstacle..

Because you will beat up on them even worse if they don't.

Every state I know of tries in one way or another - more often in a variety of ways (via indices like harvest rate/person/hr effort, DVAs, and aircraft and spotlight survey samples). But these are only good for detecting the slopes of trends, not numbers. Unfortunately, the public, much like the legal system, is pretty ignorant of what is reasonably possible and simply demand perfection and then whine like babies when they don't get it. None of them, of course, can do even half as well as the sad-sack DNRs of the world that are pretty much universally reviled by people such as yourself.

What's new?

If we are going to blame the wdnr for something we need a post about how they have mishandled cwd.

Yeah, and how everyone down to the newborn in her bassinet could have done better, even w/o the benefit of hindsight. Don't forget that part.

At least they got a good cheerleader in you huh.

Not really, I just don't see the need to hate them quite so much as most folks here do.

Hard to like a group who has taken our money and thrown it away. Money meant to manage fish and game has gone towards distruction of the deer herd,and million dollar advertisement budgets for don't move your firewood, and clean your boat.

They are just trying to hold their finger in the dike that is leaking invasive species right and left - species that certainly seem likely to have vast and negative consequences to the natural resources that they are charged with protecting.

Were they to do nothing (the economically correct option), you would fry their asses for doing nothing. But then you will fry their asses anyway.

Why don't you sign up to show them how to do it right?

Personally, I think their attempt to stop CWD in its tracks when it first was detected was courageous. Courageous people do not always succeed but they deserve accolades for trying. In any event, the failure is also and sadly due, in no small part, to the lack of public support that you and others offered. Now, CWD is a permanent part of the Midwestern deer herd and there ain't squat anyone can do about it. Maybe that will be a big deal one day. Maybe not. For a brief moment, they had a chance to remove all possibility of it becoming a problem permanently. I applaud them for trying, but I know you could have done better - I just wonder why you didn't given your vast expertise.

It was a courageous attempt from the science and testing available at the time. And it's the same approach states and provinces (who don't currently have CWD) have in their current CWD management plans.

Of course those states and provinces have the benefit of several years of rather intensive testing to know when CWD first appears. Wisconsin found out after the fact that CWD was more firmly entrenched than first thought.

Sorry to bust your bubble there Brent, you do not need a PhD to count deer. Us redneck's have a formula that will give a credible estimate of deer in Wisconsin.

Divide number of deer road kill into number deer harvested (bow, gun & muzzleloader). Divide that number by 2. Multiply the number deer harvested (bow, gun & muzzleloader) by that number. Example -

2010 Wisconsin total deer kill - 336,871

42,000 road kill (estimate)

336,871 divided by 42,000 = 8.02

8.02 divided by 2 = 4.01

336,871 X 4.01 = 1,350,852 pre-winter population estimate

Sure, we all can and do do exactly that. Didn't I just point that out above? Big deal. Do you think it is even close to accurate? HOw do you account for local variation (I assume WI has different zones that are managed individually). How do you correct that DVA count for nonreports (want to guess what the accepted correction factor is?), how do you correct for regional differences in road conditions, driver density, etc. What about your mortality due to nonhuman issues? (wolves, coyotes, disease old age, blah blah blah?). I have no problem with your guestimate. I have no reason to think it is particularly any better than anyone else's.

Show me how you validate it. Anyone can pick a number. Validating it is another thing. Yours is pretty certain to be an underestimate.

BTW, some strange gyrations in your math there.

2010 Wisconsin total deer kill = 336,871

FY 2010 road kill = 26,595 http://dnr.wi.gov/org/land/wildlife/HUNT/DEER/CKDFY10.pdf

336,871 / 26,595 = 12.6

12.6 / 2 = 6.3

336,871 x 6.3 = 2,122,287

That's using real data in your formula.

And that's a record estimate for over-winter population.

I used this data in my example - Wisconsin salvaged and unsalvaged deer carcasses

http://www.deercrash.org/states/wisconsin.htm

Yes........those are WDNR figures. Years 2000 through 2010.

You can find them here....

http://dnr.wi.gov/org/land/wildlife/hunt/deer/cardeer.htm

Your formula is hyper-dependent on road kills, and the lower the road kill the higher your over-winter population will be. Particularly in the year 2010 when road kill decreased and harvest increased compared to the previous year.

My formula may be as you say hyper-dependent on road kills, however when you average the road kill over a period of time, not like your one year (2010) statistic, it gives a credible factor to use in the formula.

Does it not make sense that "the lower the road kill the higher the higher your over-winter population will be"? In other words, the less deer killed on the road, the more over-winter. It is not quite that simplistic, I realize, but I like that correlation and interpretation part of the formula. But, then again I am just a dumb redneck out here without a PhD.

It is generally accepted by transportation types from agencies, AAA, and insurance companies that the real DVA rate is 3 times the actual count. Some reasonably argue closer to 4. So, multiply that 42k by at least 3 as the 42k is a direct count and thus an understimate, as is the hunter deer kill.

The math that roundoak puts forward is not ecologically rational. It MAY be a good statistical curve fit - I wouldn't know w/o a full set of raw data to test. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY another independent estimate to benchmark this. W/o that, it's just plain crap. Might be on target but its still crap until it's benched against SOMETHING biological.

And roundoak, no it does not make sense. The few deer killed on the road, the fewer there must have been to be killed in the first place.

If you want something based in actual biology you can try this

Total deer population * proportion does * average litter size must equal the total number of deer killed. which I would put at hunter kill + ( official roadkill *3)

and if you do that with a litter size of 1.7 (accurate for Iowa, probably ballpark for Southern WI) and a proportion does of 60% (probably a bit low, but reasonably knowable), then you end up with a MINIMUM herd size of 408.5K.

But this leaves out all other mortality including that from wolves (tens of millions to listen to you guys), coyotes (almost as bad), unreported hunter kills, disease, other accidents, old age, starvation, tree fall, and drowning through the ice and ten dozen other things, and so on. All of them act to raise this estimate - but how many fold? double, triple, tentuple? You can armchair all you want, but you really don't know and all you have left is guessing. Yss we can make more complex models, but they will all have issues, and any of them can be harpooned easier and more fatally than any blimp.

So, in the end, any of these estimates aren't worth a damn, which leaves counting. And counting has huge problems of its own.

But you are all experts, so, now that you have this magic deer count number, what are you going to do next?