- Hi, I am Dan Small.

Welcome to "Deer Hunt Wisconsin."

This is our 35th annual special to help you get ready for Wisconsin's gun deer season.

You know, today, Wisconsin hunters are required to wear blaze orange or fluorescent pink outerwear during any firearms or muzzle loader season.

But many of us are old enough to remember when this red and black buffalo plaid was the unofficial uniform of lumberjacks and deer hunters everywhere.

Coming up, we'll visit a deer camp that's been around for more than 100 years.

We'll also hear from successful hunters, get a peek at some white deer, update you on new rules and changes in deer management units, look at non-toxic ammo, and provide a hunting forecast for each region of the state.

All that and more coming up on "Deer Hunt Wisconsin 2025."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) We asked you to send us photos of your hunts and you did.

Here are some scenes from hunts that took place just last month, and the first two were bow hunts.

Mike Strome of Burlington got several trail camera photos and videos of a buck that he eventually walked in front of his stand.

- Here he is.

(upbeat music) - Kurt Lentz of Elkhart Lake, photographed a monster buck for six years leading up to his successful hunt.

And Bart Prow of Appleton captured trail camera shots of this 10 point buck on his family's managed forest land in Waupaca County and Bart's 14-year-old daughter Shavon shot that same buck during this year's youth hunt.

Well, I guess that shows us the value of trail cameras, eh?

If you've got trail cam shots or photos and videos of a hunt, your hunting blind or your deer camp, message us on Facebook at DeerHuntWI.

Some of the most photographed deer in the state are those with all white coats.

Perhaps you've seen some in Vilas County or central Wisconsin.

Here's Bob Haase of El Dorado with some thoughts on white deer and whether we should be hunting them.

- According to the DNR, white deer are present in about 40 counties in Wisconsin.

A genetic creek called leucism is what caused the deer to become white.

A true albino is a little different than a white deer.

It's caused by different conditions, and albino seem to have more health issues than common white deer that we see around Wisconsin.

I've seen estimates we got about 200 to 300 white and albino deer in Wisconsin, but I know we've got a lot more than that, but probably still less than the 1% of the total population of deer in Wisconsin.

I do have pictures of two white bucks.

They're about eight years old, and I took those in a Boulder Junction area this last year.

White deer create a economic benefit to that area.

While I'm out photographing white deer, I come across people from different states and even other countries that come to the Boulder Junction area just to see and photograph a white deer.

And this has a positive economic impact to the Vilas County area.

The central part of the state of Wisconsin, we don't have that.

Most people don't even know we got white deer in the central part of the state, but we do have white deer here and we've got quite a few of them and it seems to be increasing as well.

I'm not against having a white deer in Wisconsin if that's what hunters want, but before establishing a deer hunt, let's look at the pros and cons and for example, there might be property owners out there or non-hunters that don't have a problem with shooting brown deer, but may have a different opinion of shooting a white deer and might say, "Well, who cares?"

But it may affect landowners giving permission to hunt on their property if they think you might shoot a white deer.

Another issue is if we have five counties that can do this and the number of people that might come from all over the state to get into those five counties there's possibility of shooting a white buck or a white doe.

That could maybe be solved pretty easily by just running a white deer hunt just like you do, or elk hunt, same type of, you know, conditions and that might be a solution to it.

Let's take the time, do it right, look at the pros and cons and see what we end up with.

- This year the nine day firearm season runs from November 22nd through the 30th.

That's followed by the 10 day muzzleloader season, the statewide four day antlerless hunt, and then the nine day antlerless only holiday hunt in the farmland zone counties shown on this map, which is on page 11 of the hunting regs booklet.

You'll find these season dates and all the deer hunting regulations in the booklet, and that's available at any licensed vendor.

Our Facebook page has links to the regulations, season dates and more.

Here's what's new for this season.

The northern and central forest and central farmland zones all have new boundaries and the deer management units in the Northern forest zone have been redrawn to reflect habitat types instead of county lines.

The list of counties closed to deer baiting and feeding will change depending on where new cases of CWD are found.

Part or all of 45 counties will offer the an the antlers only holiday hunt and the archery and crossbow seasons have been extended to January 31st in part or all of 38 counties.

And there are no bucks only counties this year, but antlerless permits are already sold out in many forest zone units.

You may purchase your license and select your free farmland zone antlerless tags, now called Harvest Authorizations online through the Go Wild System or from any licensed vendor.

With each deer hunting license, you'll receive one buck tag valid for any unit statewide and one or more farmland zone antlerless tags valid in the management unit and land type of your choice.

Bonus antlerless tags went on sale in August and these are sold out in some units, but many are still available.

While hunting you must carry proof that you have a license and tags.

And that can be a Go Wild conservation card, your authenticated driver's license, printed copies of your license and tags, or digital copies on a smartphone or tablet.

You must register any deer you shoot by 5:00 PM on the day after the deer is recovered.

You'll need your tag number to do that and you can do it online or by phone.

Instructions are printed right on the tag.

You may also register a deer at participating walk-in stations displaying a deer registration sign.

Nearly every Wisconsin deer hunter has heard of the legendary Jordan Buck, the former world record, typical white tail.

It's still the largest typical buck ever taken in Wisconsin.

Today the Jordan Buck is memorialized with a statue and an annual celebration in Danbury, Wisconsin.

- Jim Jordan Buck was harvested in 1914 by James Jordan.

He was a meat hunter.

He wasn't looking for a trophy.

Jim Jordan did notice the fact that this was an extremely large animal.

In fact, when they finally dispatched it with his last bullet, they weighted at a local meat market and it was 400 pounds, which is crazy compared to what a really large buck is around 225 dressed up.

So this was an immense animal.

Wisconsin has a great hunting heritage and white tails is a pretty big deal in the state of Wisconsin.

The group started looking at this and said, "Geez, we gotta get something that commemorates this."

It's kind a claim to fame, not only to Wisconsin but to Danbury.

And the project was started with the help of the White Tails unlimited chapter in Burnett County, and they helped raise the money along with the county and other private groups to develop the statue.

The statue was manufactured according to specs by fast fiberglass out of Sparta, Wisconsin.

The antlers were designed by Antlers by Klaus out of New Richmond.

So they're authentically duplicating the look of the deer.

And I felt as well as others, seeing is that we're getting a statue we should have something to actually celebrate this.

We have a Jim Jordan Buck Festival annually to commemorate that historical event.

- Today is Jordan Buck Day 2025 for the town of Danbury, Wisconsin.

We have lots going on from one end of town to the other.

This is our fourth year.

There's a parade lineup that will, parade will happen at noon, going down Main Street with 40 floats, maybe, some inflatable bouncy houses, a free throw contest.

We have pinball tournaments going on.

We have a big craft fair and food trucks.

- Festivals like this in small communities like this are important to tourism because it attracts people from all sorts of walks of life.

This particular festival focuses on the hunting culture in the county and it focuses on the importance of stories and the stories that people tell, and that attracts people in.

One of the things we look for in tourism is to put heads in beds and we look for that because when people spend the night in the county that they spend more money, that money gets spent not only in small businesses like restaurants and taverns and sports shops, and gasoline.

It spreads that wealth around everywhere.

- We're a big tourism county, and you know, the economics behind this from my standpoint, were that we could bring a lot more people into the county, get to see this beautiful place and help our businesses in our community.

- There were lots of kids having fun at the Jordan Buck celebration and some of them may become hunters.

The Midwest Outdoor Heritage Education Expo or MOHEE, introduces several thousand grade schoolers to a variety of outdoor activities, including wildlife management and the shooting sports.

MOHEE is held at two locations each spring, the McKenzie Center in Poynett and Havenwoods State Forest in Milwaukee.

- Welcome to MOHEE Poynett!

Experience the sights and the sounds of all of our activity stations, archery, BB guns, fishing, fly tying, learn some fire safety and learn more about our state parks and see some live animals.

(wolf whimpers) - I just wanted to say thank you to MOHEE for all the work that you do in partnership with us to get all the kids out here in Poynett and at the McKenzie Center.

- I love coming to MOHEE every year just seeing the kids get excited about all of the outdoor activities that we have to provide here.

Teaching them about forestry and our fire control equipment and just, I hear so many teachers and parent chaperones say that this is one of the best field trips they've ever been on.

There's just something for everyone here.

- This event is not only for the hunters and the fishermen, but anybody that enjoys the outdoors and wants a gateway to the outdoors.

You can't care about something that you didn't even know existed.

- I would encourage anyone to send the kids out here for a day, let them explore and let them learn something new.

And I think it makes just for a better citizen, if you will, down the road.

- Havenwoods State Forest is 237 acres.

We have over six miles of trails on property and we're located right in the city of Milwaukee.

- If you're a teacher or part of the school organizations, I think that you guys should definitely, you know, take a trip out here.

It's great to get the kids in an outside environment and just foster that outdoor education and outdoor recreation side of things.

- With our population becoming much more urbanized than it had previously.

You know, a lot of kids don't get the opportunity to shoot a BB gun or to shoot a bow or to tie a fly or see dogs actually working, you know, retrieving.

So it's a really great opportunity for them to get outside and experience some of those great activities.

- The real great benefit of programs like these are getting kids outdoors and showing them some of the activities that they can participate in outdoors.

If these kids are taking an interest, hopefully they're reaching out to their parents or guardians to participate in safety classes and additional classes that help them learn more about how to hunt, fish, trap and shoot.

(peaceful music) - Hunters throughout the Northeast District should be optimistic about the 2025 season.

The second mild winter in a row set the stage for high winter survival and good fawn recruitment.

The Northeast District offers diverse habitat, ranging from northern hardwood forest in Marinette and Oconto counties, to flatter ag dominated areas of Winnebago, Fond du Lac and Calumet counties.

The central region has a combination of fertile farmland, bottomland hardwood forest, and upland forest, which provides ideal habitat.

Bonus tags are available in numbered forest units, while free farmland tags and bonus tags are available in farmland units.

(peaceful music) The Northern district offers a wide diversity of excellent habitat, including mixed hardwoods, aspen, birch, conifer, and old growth forests.

Hunters and hunting habits have changed significantly, but Northern Wisconsin is still steeped in the history and tradition of deer hunting culture.

After another mild winter, recruitment, growth, and herd health should be superb.

Fawn to doe ratios were up both last year and this year.

Regardless of where you hunt, it's a good idea to scout ahead of time.

Changes in timber harvest, crop rotation, wild forage and more can affect deer behavior.

Expect deer that have ample food sources to move less during daylight hours, so you might want to try still hunting rather than sitting in one spot all day.

Deer camps were once common across Northern Wisconsin.

Hunters would travel from southern cities to the north woods to enjoy nine days of camaraderie, camp life, and of course hunting.

Those camps are dying out now, but a few keep the tradition alive.

Silver Dollar Camp in Bayfield County has been around for more than 100 years, and one camp member, Dale Pitsch captured the camp storied history in this book.

- Hunting Cabin, it's located between Cornucopia and Red Cliff.

It's an old cabin.

We hunt mostly public land up there.

It's a mix of Bayfield County.

You've got the Chequamegon Forest down south of us and we have 13 acres of land.

Once in a while, we shoot one right off our land, but mainly we hunt away from the cabin.

It's a place to come back to, all our meals, our sleeping quarters, we have bunk beds for 12.

- The first time Dale invited me up here, I felt like I went out west and won a lottery and I have that same feeling every year for 44 years.

It's just spiritual.

I always tell 'em, I said, you know, "You can go to church and sit in the front row, but you sit out in these beautiful woods, it's like, oh, you're so one-on-one with God."

Nature if you believe in that.

But I'm as excited to see a deer today as I am 40 years ago.

- As years go by, we were losing people just because of their age, and then there was some guys that decided to go hunt with other people in different areas.

We still maintained a crew of people every year.

- It's a place where it really teaches you respect for the hunt.

The glory of being in that big woods and having a hunting cabin to go to.

All of a sudden the stories start being retold.

- I started hunting up here in 1974.

It was interesting, because the first year I came up, the only buck we shot, I shot it.

(laughs) It was a nice 10 point buck, so I was enamored by that.

The whole hunting experience, you know.

In 1975 we came up and the deer were actually starting to move towards the deer yards, which is their winter area, and it's down along the lake.

There was probably more deer in that area than you'd normally see, and we had 15 guys up here and we ended up shooting 15 bucks by nine o'clock on Tuesday morning.

- You sit around and then when you get the older people telling the stories about when they were young up here and that, that's just priceless.

The stories just go on and on and on, and maybe they get embellished a little bit over the years, but that just makes more fun storytelling around the table.

- If you haven't already switched from lead-core bullets to copper bullets, why not make this the year you shoot non-toxic ammo?

I started shooting copper bullets several years ago, and I'm glad I did.

The National Wildlife Federation presented a workshop on non-toxic ammo at the North Bristol Sportsman's Club in Dane County, and it was a real eye-opener.

- There were many of us involved over the years doing work, investigating the relationship between lead scavenging wildlife and how that interacts and interplays with our hunting and angling background.

And so as biologists, we were interested in the questions of how much lead can there possibly be in a carcass, for example.

So we were all doing these programs, but we have to share this on a landscape scale.

I badgered them for long enough and said, we need to co-lead this program called the North American Non-Lead Partnership and take this information to our fellow hunters so they can make informed decisions as it pertains to wildlife health.

We don't support litigation or legislation at the non-lead partnership.

We made that clear.

What we're selling is a notion of possibility and potential where we as sportsmen and women hunters retain and carry that conservation ethic by leading as hunters and anglers with the science.

Only hunters can solve this problem.

If you're gonna use lead-based ammunition to shoot an animal, domestic or wild, whose remains become a part of the food chain, that's when there's a potential for lead exposure and you can disrupt that pathway of potential exposure by either removing the remains from the field or using non-lead.

It's that simple.

The National Wildlife Federation contacted us, and actually they had a program very similar to ours, but when they asked how they could help with all of their chapters in all the different states, we want to build this from the ground up.

So they were perfectly situated and nice enough to ask us out here so that we could have this engagement with Wisconsin Wildlife Federation and hopefully we'll continue it along every other state we can.

- So when we started our work, thinking about Lead Free Landscapes is what we call our campaign.

I think one of the things that attracted us most to the non-lead partnership was the same vision.

We've always thought it should be done voluntarily by sportsmen and women, educating themselves, understanding what the impacts are and then making those choices.

So when we heard they were already doing that, we saw a natural partnership and gravitated naturally over to them.

- Today at this demo, we'll put a bullet on paper.

You know, it's important that you paper your ammo before you go to the field.

You might have bumped your scope or if you switch brands of ammo, could be the same caliber, same grain weight, it's not gonna paper the same.

Same thing if you're switching to non-lead.

You wanna be sure and paper it, know your tools before you get out there and have confidence.

So we got lead on the left, non-lead on the right.

Notice the difference in penetration.

Now, I'm not saying that that's everything when you're hunting, but there's a lot of power there, because it's not stripped of its weight as it moves through the medium.

So today we'll demonstrate lead and non-lead side by side in the same medium and then we'll, the range will go cold.

We'll walk up, everybody will get a chance to see the bullets after they hit, and then we'll recover them.

We'll take 'em back and then we'll weigh the bullets so we can get the percentage of mass retained.

That's the non-lead.

And then we'll collect the fragments.

And that's the eye opener.

When people walk up and they see the lead 'll be on the left and the copper 'll be on the right and you pull out that single copper bullet and it's the beautifully mushroom slug, and then you go back and weigh it.

It's gonna be 99% of its original weight.

And then you pick up the remainder of the lead bullet and all the fragments and you will see it.

People will exclaim, "I had no idea."

That's right, 'cause they're small fragments.

And they say, "Why didn't I ever see that before?"

Go to your butcher shop, see if they ever see lead in their grinder.

They do.

Once people hear about this and they see this demo and they think about it with respect to wildlife, a common question is, "Am I eating it?"

But people get real jumpy when you talk about their health because their health is their business.

We can talk about wildlife, so we're very careful and we just say, here are the facts.

There are studies, numerous studies that have been done to count how many fragments there are in the gut pile all the way down to the packaged meat.

Take that information and make your own decision.

We're not telling you what to think there.

The future of hunting depends on us taking all of this new science, using it, and adapting the way we take care of our environment.

- We've been talking about chronic wasting disease now for more than 20 years and it's not going away.

In fact, CWD is becoming more prevalent every year in south central Wisconsin, and it continues to spread to other areas of the state.

Here's a time lapse look at the spread of CWD from its discovery in 2001 to 2023.

CWD sampling is available statewide and regardless of where you hunt, you're encouraged to have your deer tested and if the test comes back positive to discard the meat rather than eat it.

Deer carcasses are considered solid waste and should be taken to a licensed landfill or placed in a deer carcass disposal dumpster.

CWD sampling kiosks and carcass dumpsters are located throughout the state.

If you shoot a deer that tests positive for CWD, you'll be notified by the DNR and a replacement tag will be added to your Go Wild account.

This tag will be valid for the remainder of this season as well as the entire 2026 season.

It's another incentive to have your deer tested.

(peaceful music) The Southern district covers 18 counties from the Eastern Kettle Marine to the Western Driftless region.

A mix of prime farmland, wetlands, grassland, and woods creates an array of habitat types.

Recent mild winters and early springs have allowed the deer herd to get a step ahead of the recommended annual harvest goals here.

Thanks to these conditions and a lower than recommended antlerless harvest, the population has continued to increase, except in areas with high CWD prevalence.

Last year, more than 1400 deer tested positive for CWD in the district, and baiting is currently banned in all 18 counties.

Private land comprises over 90% of the landscape, but public lands have the greatest variety of deer habitat.

(peaceful music) The rolling valley's, fertile farmland's, big rivers and wooded ridges of West central Wisconsin offer some of the most productive deer range in the United States.

With just a few days of deep snow and below zero temperatures last winter was very mild throughout the district.

The western counties have steep oak and hickory ridges with croplands on the flatter ridge tops and valleys.

Limestone rich soils produce excellent antler growth with some of the highest numbers of Boone and Crockett and Pope and Young entries in the country every year.

While most of the Driftless region is private land, there is extensive public land in the central forest zone counties and deer populations here are not as high and hunting pressure has also been on the decline.

But the central forest can offer a remote hunting experience with ample solitude and elbow room.

The eastern side of the district has an abundance of deer.

The mix of farmland and woodlots provides good habitat, with opportunities for hunters to fill antlerless permits, and perhaps find a nice buck.

Elk are established in Jackson and surrounding counties and their numbers continue to increase, so be sure you're shooting at a deer and not an elk.

All counties of the West Central District have had CWD positive deer detected within or close to their boundaries, so baiting is not permitted.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of "Deer Hunt Wisconsin."

You'll find links for more information on the "Deer Hunt Wisconsin" Facebook page.

And all the segments from this year's show are posted on our "Deer Hunt Wisconsin" TV YouTube channel.

I'm Dan Small, thanks for joining us and have a safe and successful deer season.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music becoming softer)