 Hello, welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgart, your host. Thank you very much for joining us because us is the Department of Natural Resources, Dan Lakey, who's new but not new, and I don't know how to explain that, Dan, but I will in a minute. Dan is the Wildlife Supervisor, that's ducks and deer and other things, for this area. And he's been around for about a year, has it? That's right. So welcome to the program and welcome to the cable TV and we're going to inform the people about the good work that you're doing. But before we do that, why don't you give the viewer a little background on where you came from and what you've done, maybe a minute of that, just to tantalize them a little bit. Appreciate it, Jim, and thank you for having me on. I really do appreciate that. I actually grew up in Wisconsin in a town called Medford and stayed there until I was 22. I graduated from UW-Stevens Point, accepted a position in Kansas as a wildlife biologist. You left Wisconsin? I left Wisconsin. The game plan was I would be there a year or two. I had just gotten married and that I'd be there a year or two and then come back to Wisconsin and work for the DNR, and here we are 30 years later and I finally made it. Spent some time, like I said, with Kansas Wildlife and Parks. I was an area wildlife biologist there in the LaNexa Kansas office, which folks around here would think that is the Kansas City area. Spent 15 years there and then took an opportunity and went to work for the extension service as their natural resources agent and then also as their director. I did that for 11 years. Oh, great background. Well, we're very happy. You've been here about a year or a year and a quarter? A little over a year and a month. Well, and so you have to learn where the marsh is and Sheboygan and places in between? Absolutely not. Do you represent how many counties down? Yeah, I'm the area wildlife supervisor of what they call the Lake Michigan District, which is seven counties. So I gather up the Dorn Brown County, come down to Kiwani, and then do Calumet Manitowoc and then Sheboygan and Fond du Lac. One of the things that I've seen, Dan, that you do or you have been doing is one the Sheboygan County Conservation Association, which is 25 or 30 clubs, meets every month. You've been showing up on a regular basis to update them. You provide them a little publication. Woodchuck, I think, is the name of their little e-mail publication. And answer questions. So anybody that's the public when the Conservation Association meets and it's open to the public, they can come and ask you and the wardens questions. Yeah, it's very nice. It's a great association. I mean, the very active group do a lot of great things in the community related to hunting and fishing and shooting and educating our youth on the opportunities that are available to them. So it's a great group. And it's just something that's really enjoyable to do to get the put a DNR face out there for folks. We've had a little bit of turnover in our office, so it's nice to get out there and let them get to know you. Well, and you're not like a 24-year-old fresh out of college, your person with experience. I stopped at your office to invite you to this program and saw all those big deer heads sitting in there and I said, are these Wisconsin deer heads? No, they were from out of the state. But you know how to hunt deer anyway. I really enjoyed deer and turkey hunting. Kansas is just a different world out there. On the opening day, you've got less than 100,000 people rifle hunting. Is that right? And the state's just as big as Wisconsin. It's sort of a fleck state too, isn't it? You know, it's kind of a misnomer. The Eastern personal and the Western personal. I have some very big hills in them absolutely. You have a couple of things that the legislature threw a curve at the county association and I'm sure department personnel, they added to the budget that you don't have to have tags for deer, goose, and turkeys. That is right. You don't have to have the carcass tags. Right. You don't have to tag the animal and you don't have to carry those anymore until the meat's consumed. But you have to report your deer, don't you? Yes, sir. Not the goose? Not on the goose side of things. For the deer and turkey, you have to still register the animal. You have to 5 p.m. the day after you harvest it. And you do that by telephone? You can do that by telephone or by a computer. Or an iPhone, you can go ahead and do that. And so that's a nice process there. And they change for geese from the standpoint you used to have to report your harvest. They're going to do something after the season with harvest surveys. So you do not need to do that for geese anymore either. So if they call in, the person calling in has to have a certain identification number somehow. When you register the animal, you need to have your tag number or your authorization number. So what we're recommending people do, because we've already issued before this budget bill was passed, we issued over a million carcass tags. Okay. But we remember they're out there. They're out there, they're still valid. The easiest thing to do I think is to consider them as a coupon. Okay. So you've got the information on there that you need. Once you go online to fill it out, throw the coupon away because you know you're done with it. Right. And you've got all the information right there in that credit form. Or keep it for souvenir. I normally do that when I don't form and I have a staff like that. In Wisconsin we used to have metal tanks for deer and we used to save all of those that we never closed, which meant we didn't get a deer. We have also a change. She's working in Madder Rock County, Cali Men and a couple of others, because of an incident of chronic waste disease that appeared 15 years ago. The county in Madder Rock, she wasn't closed down the feeding of deer. That's correct. And then a year later the state closed it down and then this year the state legislature changed it and opened it, but the counties still have their ordinance in place and that is being worked through it. At this moment in time when we're talking, and it may be different by the time the show shows, you cannot feed deer in Sheboygan and Madder Rock County. Now, how will it be after the county board meets in February? We'll tell you after that. We don't know. My committee voted 6-0 to keep the protection of trying to keep the spread of chronic waste disease, which is a subject that you have some information about that there's a new program to provide information on people with mature deer. They can bring them in, always could do that free, and get them checked for chronic waste disease. What's going on? Yeah, I appreciate you asking that, but it's important for our sportsmen to understand what's going on here. Sheboygan and Madder Rock County and then Washington, Ozaki, and one other county, there's five of them in a clump. Basically what we're doing is called weighted sampling, and what that means is we're looking to sample adult deer, mainly adult bucks from the standpoint of they have the most opportunity to show if this disease is present. It's currently not found in the wild population in Sheboygan County, and we want to stay ahead of that. So what we're asking is that individuals, we're working with some taxidermists, can also bring your adult deer in to get it aged or to have the CWD tested to our office. I'll give a number out, call for a wildlife management folks at 920-893-8541 and set up an appointment during the nine day gun season. We'll put that on our trailer of the end of the program so people can write that down and call if they get a deer that they want checked. Very good, because we really do, this is our opportunity to make sure that it's not in the county. And again, we're working with taxidermists already getting in there, skinning and caping them. And it's a simple process for basically removing lip nodes from the base of the jaw, right on the neck. And we've really gotten much better at getting the samples back, the results back. Last year it's right around 10 days, so it might even be a little less this year. So if somebody gets a deer, wherever they get it from, they can bring them in, although you want to concentrate in those five counties. But if somebody goes up north to Florence County where I was done and want to check it out to make sure the deer are safe, they could bring in the head to call first, set an appointment and save the meat to keep the chops and freeze them and the stuff that you're going to make sausage out of, freeze them. And then when you find out if it has or it has not chronic waste of these, the recommendation by the Wisconsin what societies, the medical, the Center for Disease Control. Center for Disease Control and the Wisconsin Health Department. And also the World Health Organization. Yeah, the World Health Organization recommends that if your deer has chronic waste of these, it is their recommendation to destroy the meat. That is correct, right. The recommendation is not to do anything. No, not even if you don't like the neighbor, but there is no known passage of this disease from deer to humans, but there is some new data showing it from deer to monkeys and other things, which is the first time that's been documented, so we have to be careful. Absolutely, much rather than you be safe than sorry, there's never been a case that has been passed on in that situation with the trial with monkeys, some of that was injected straight into their brains, which you would expect that to maybe happen, but there actually was a case where it was just by eating the meat. And people are eating infected deer from age two to age 78, like you want to be sure that it's safe. So, we'll make sure that that telephone number is on there, and we encourage people, if you get an adult deer, even if it's not a buck, you're allowed to bring it in and you'll test it free. Absolutely, and we'd really encourage anybody who harvests deer in Sheboygan County, we'd really like to get some aging information, because the place where we've normally collected that aging information is not collecting deer this year, so if you're having an adult deer buck over there, we'd love to have you bring it by so we could age it. Oh, you want to see if we have old deer over there? We tried to shoot those things then early. Anything else you want to add to the public for hunting? Obviously, a lot of hunting is going on right now. Deer, they just finished the use hunt. I got a picture from one of the classics, the 12-year-old shot up a nice 13-point buck. Oh, very nice. And that'll appear in my column in a couple of weeks. So, safety is important? Absolutely. I can't encourage people enough to take the hunter safety courses and to just maintain that. I would speak since, you know, the bull season and things like that going on. Tree stand safety, you need to wear a strap when you're up there in case you would fall. There's so many instances of people falling and getting injured. Make sure you have that safety strap on. Same thing with the stand that's up on the tree. Strap it down. I mean, make sure that it's solid before you get up there. All of the gun safety rules apply. You mentioned seasons coming up. I know the pheasant season just opened up. We put a lot of stock birds out there. And so, looking forward to seeing how the hunter is going to be enjoying that. Well, and we've also had, this is the third year you have had the crossbow. At the same time, the archery season, and I've seen some reports that they've been pretty successful, but not overly successful. I agree. That's pretty much what it is. They're very accurate, but the people operating the crossbow are normally operating irregularly by ourselves. They're right in front of you. And some of us are older that need a crossbow. We've got to go down. Time is over. I do want to thank Dan for coming in with the Department of Natural Resources. If you have a deer, please give a call to the telephone number we list on the credits and make sure that you find out if your deer is safe from chronic waste disease. And until next week, this has been Legislative Update. So, now we have to wait for the...