 A lot of seasons to talk about, even if you don't know much about it. Welcome to this week's Legislative Update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host. Thank you very much for joining us. All of a sudden I was on and I didn't realize that. It's always good to be surprised. But I think we have a nice surprise for the viewers today because we have Dan and I get this right. And Dan is the Supervisor for the DNR's Wildlife Program covering about five, six, seven counties, isn't it? Yep, seven counties in the northeast called the Lake Michigan District. And you're stationed in Plymouth. Absolutely. I'm glad to have you because Dan is fairly new and he's going to give his background in a moment. But he's not new. I mean, he's been around for a while, but new to Wisconsin for the last year and a quarter, year and a little bit. And I've had the opportunity to meet him as he's come to the Shoeing County Conservation Association meetings, which meet all the clubs have delegates. They meet once a month. Dan shows up, answers questions, and does a little newsletter for all the delegates to be able to look at and have those things go to the club. So thank you for being in Wisconsin. Why don't you provide the viewers with a little history of your travels? Jim, I appreciate it. These are not gullible travels. These are Dan's DNR travels. They could be similar, but I appreciate the opportunity to visit with the folks here and get my face out in front of them. Like I said, I've been here a little over a year. I graduated from UW-Stevens Point back in... My alma mater, by the way. Very nice. Yeah. Graduated in 1986 and then accepted a job offer with Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks right after that. And so the game plan was to move down there with my wife and spend a year or two and then come back up to Wisconsin and work for the DNR. But 30 years later, I finally got here, a bunch of moves in between. But with Wildlife and Parks, I was a wildlife biologist and did a bunch of the same things that go on here. You know, trap and ban, waterfowl. We did the turkey reintroduction back 30 years ago. Very successful program. Had an opportunity to move on and work for the extension service there. And was the natural resources agent and also the director for the last 11 years. Which really, you know, it has its way. That's what got me to come up here as my administrative background. And so 30 years later, here I am, and really looking forward to getting to know the area better and looking forward to this upcoming season. Well, and we're going to talk about the season shortly. And we appreciate the fact that you're here because you've got all of those experiences. And those are hard to come by. And, you know, when people talk about, yeah, I'd like to work for a DNR award and wildlife fisheries. You know, and I put, you know, a dozen years in that wonderful experience. But sometimes you're waist down and muck in a marsh with waders on and the wind's blowing and it's snowing. And you wonder what you're doing. Or you're sitting in a fishing research boat doing a chubb research and the boat is bobbing around like a cork in the water. And you wonder if you'll get out alive and loving it after it's all over. Absolutely. It sounds like we have a number of the same experiences. But it's not easy. And it can be very rewarding. And I'm sure that you've had many a day like that. Why don't we talk about some of the seasons? Because we're quickly going through the minutes and we shouldn't be targeted to each other. We should be talking to the viewers. We've got a whole bunch of things. The pheasant season is on. And I understand there aren't as many native ones that get hatched. And the conservation association plants a bunch of pheasants. A couple of thousand, I think. DNR plants some. Where do you hide these things? Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. The pheasant season just opened this past weekend. This will be a few weeks from now, I'm not sure. Good point. So pheasant season, basically we go out and we stock several areas twice a week. And in the Sheborgen County, we hit Adele, the Sheborgen Marsh, Nichols Creek, and the Ketema Rain, the northern unit. We stock birds there twice a week. And it's a very successful program. We have a lot of hunters that are always trying to find out when they're releasing them. We try to keep that a little bit of a secret. But it's a very successful program. You know, our spies out through that. They know what's going on. So that's great and provides some recreation for a lot of people and some food for the table. And you just have to be a little careful when you chew down on a pheasant leg. There might be be in there. What about the other ones? We've had squirrel seasons on for a long time. We've got rabbit season opened up with the pheasants. That's a very productive one for people that run dogs. Yeah, it's one of my favorite styles of hunting where I grew up in Medford, Wisconsin. We had a bunch of beagles and we'd go after snowshoe hairs. And around here I know it's cotton tails, but I know that there's a lot of people that really enjoy doing it. And if you like dogs, it's a great sport to get into. Well, in snowshoe hairs we used to hunt up in Florence County. And before the snowshoe hair population dropped when they were up early in the season, these things are almost twice the weight of the cotton tail. You get a couple of those. You put some real meat in the people and they're very good. Oh, they're excellent eating. You see that after they've lost a few pounds by late January, they aren't quite as good, of course. But it's still good exercise getting out there and snowshoeing them or walking through some of those swamps and they change color. Absolutely. Yeah, they go from their rabbit color to all white and they're sometimes pretty hard to see. Absolutely. We have four hunters that are red and gray fox that continues. And on the southern end of the state we've got a rough grouse season that opened up with the pheasant season. And that goes until December 31st. Yes. But there aren't a lot of... Not a lot of birds around here. As far as, you know, as long as I've been here, I haven't heard a lot of activity there. We had a meeting up in Hayward last week and they were getting after them. There were a bunch of birds up there. So it's one of those things you may have to travel a little bit, but when you get into them, they're very enjoyable. Great tasting bird also. And interesting enough, I read in the paper, Paul Smith's article from the Milwaukee Journal of Fentanyl, the early reports on drummings, you know, that's how they tell how many grouse if the numbers are up or down, were up to spring, but the harvest is now down. So they're not sure why. Could be the weather, maybe, throughout the year. Could be part of that. Part of it could be the ability to shoot with all the leaves on yet. That makes it a little more difficult. The leaves haven't come down yet. I would always go to shooting some leaves down, but not always good at getting... What about deer season? This is, of course, a big one. And we talked in last week's program about chronic waste disease. And maybe before we get into the deer season, you want to just maybe mention a little bit about the chance to have your deer checked for chronic waste disease free at the plinthestation, if they call. Yeah, I appreciate that. I really want folks to understand what's going on there. Sheboygan and Final Act counties have been selected for a weighted sampling it's called. And Manor-Watt and Calumet. There's five counties clumped together, but in my district, it's those two. But the game plan is to go ahead and try to stay ahead of the curve and we're going to check adult bucks to make sure that we don't have that CWD within our population in Sheboygan and Final Act counties. Adult bucks are the ones that would have the most opportunity to contract the disease and carry it. And they seem more susceptible than they do for whatever reason. Yeah, they move around a lot more. They have the ability to come in contact with it. So that's one of the reasons we go after those adult bucks. Yeah, and it's going to be a three-year program and at the end of the three-year, because they're going to do a lot of testing if everybody brings in their deer. We should have a good idea if there is any chronic waste disease in this Lakeshore area. We're looking at between Final Act and Sheboygan County. We need 200 deers to get a good sample. Oh, right. There's a chance. Make sure your deer is CWD free. Just call at a time and we'll put that number up. We have the deer turn season November 18th to November 26th. That's nine days. Yes. That if you go out there and the weather is nice, a little cover of snow and mild temperatures, you can have a great time. I haven't lasted for the first time in 30 years in Wisconsin. Did you? Right here in Sheboygan County. And the wind was blowing about 50 miles an hour for that opening weekend. It reminded me about what Wisconsin deer hunting was. It can wake you up a little bit. But it's a great time of the year where families and friends get together. Fantastic condition. It's just great. We do have a mother loader season that goes after that from November 27th to December 6th. Is there anything that you have to qualify to be able to hunt with a mother loader? If you harvest a deer, you can't hunt, or not sure? It's one of those things. If I'm following the question correctly, I'm not sure if I'm asking the question correctly. That's fine. There's an actual mother loader season where you have a permit. And you can go ahead and use it just like you would during the winter season. Check the rules. Get in the regulations. Our website has everything listed out there. It's pretty easy to find. Just type in the search box, mother loader regs. Mother loader regs. And we have, of course, the archery season, which now in the last couple of years have been at the same time the crossbowl season. My understanding is you buy a license for one or the other, or you can buy one for both. You can buy one. My understanding is if you buy the regular archery one, it's a $3 fee to increase it to a crossbowl. Okay. And then you have to use it in one or the other. All right. You can't have one crossbowl in one. No. You have to choose which one you want to use it in. Crossbows are heavy. You don't lug them around without some effort. Do tanks. They're sort of not new because the legislature at the last minute in the budget said you don't need tanks. New situation that people need to be aware of. We've already, before that budget bill passed, printed off about a thousand carcass tags for both deer or turkey and for the... A lot of people have them. They already have them, which is no problem. The information that's printed on there is what you need to register your deer. You still need to register your deer by 5 p.m. the day after you harvest it. So what I suggest is use that. If you already have it or have printed one off, use that as a coupon. Just carry it with you. You harvest your deer. Go ahead and mount your iPhone or get on the computer or call on the telephone. Register the deer. Once you're done with it, throw the coupon away. Yeah, assuming that you're in an area that has connection with the tower. That's a good point. Well, we have to 5 p.m. the next day. So you have to go around. In Florence County, we sometimes had to stand up on the picnic table to use it. If that didn't work, we could drive up to the hill next to the cabin and connect. But it wasn't from the cabin that we could do that. So we are all registered. Anyway, we are running out of time then. Make sure that if they have any questions, they can call you at the Plymouth office. Do you have a number there? Yeah, they can call their office there. We actually have support staff there from 11 till 2. And the number there is 920-892-8756. And people can also call to set up appointments so they can have their deer checked for CWD. That is correct. And that's a different number. We can go straight to one of our wildlife guys. Okay, remember that. Remember that. 920-893-8541. We'll try to put that on the screen so that you can mark it down and give it to your husband or wife wherever it's hunting the white-tailed deer. We thank you for coming. We thank Dan for showing up and providing the service that he's doing. Until next week, this has been Legislative Update.