MILWAUKEE – The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has released the final totals for the 2023 gun deer season, with the number of total deer harvested down 17.6% compared to the 2022 harvest. In total, hunters registered 173,942 deer during the season.
“We had hunters that had their best deer season ever and hunters that had the worst season ever,” said Jeff Pritzl, deer program specialist for the DNR. “This year, statistically there’s probably unfortunately a few more people find themselves in that camp on the side of, the season didn’t meet their expectations.”
Pritzl said he was among the latter, logging 14 hours on opening weekend without seeing a single deer. Despite weather conditions that were favorable to humans this season, Pritzl did acknowledge that last year’s snowfall created unusually great conditions in 2022.
“We knew that enhanced the 2022 numbers,” he said.
Still, compared to the five-year average, 2023’s numbers fall 11.1% short.
Hunting registrations were also down, although not nearly as drastically as the harvest numbers. There were 434,817 licenses sold for the gun-deer season, with year-to-date sales for all deer licenses down 0.8% compared to last year.
“That fits within the trend we’ve been seeing over recent decades,” Pritzl said. “Actually, less than a percent decline in license sales is better than what we’ve been seeing in recent years.”
The DNR has received reports of chronic wasting disease, confirming that positive cases have been recorded among the deer submitted for testing this year. Herd health specialist Erin Larson said labs are hard at work testing deer to get final numbers for the season.
“We bring samples every night, and we have those results back to those hunters, but we still have a lot more as you can imagine, the volume from the nine-day [season] is very high,” Larson said.
Since the opening of the bow and crossbow seasons, hunters have registered 266,132 deer statewide so far this year. With the 2023 season behind us now after the end of gun-deer hunting, Pritzl and the DNR are turning to the future.
“We will add everything up and take stock, and what the hunters shared with us this year will inform the path we take next fall and we have that ability to make those adjustments,” he said.