MANITOWOC, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Wisconsin’s bow hunting season opens in about a month.
Once again, many communities, including Manitowoc, are allowing hunters to shoot a deer, within the city limits as the practice becomes more popular.
Signs may say “no trespassing” but starting on September 16, the opening of bow season in Wisconsin, the Manitowoc Police Department is encouraging hunters, who have the proper permits, to take to public land in the city to harvest a deer.
It was more than ten years ago when the city started to allow hunting within the city limits.
People are allowed to hunt on public land or private property, with permission.
According to Lt. Mark Schroeder, “Chief Tony Dick identified that there were a lot of car deer crashes and that’s where the original plan came up to allow bow hunting in the City of Manitowoc to kind of reduce accidents.”
Since launching the program, Manitowoc says it sees anywhere from 100-110 hunters applying for permits each year.
In 2006, when the program launched there were nearly 50 car deer crashes in Manitowoc. Last year, the city recorded 24.
While Manitowoc has seen a reduction in the number of crashes, the PD doesn’t believe it’s solely attributed to urban hunting.
“I can say, from living in the city there are more deer in the city than there were so the population in the city higher. So, it’s probably not the greatest thing to go with is the accident reduction. The big thing is Act 79 which happened in 2013, which the state stated that people should be allowed to hunt in the City of Manitowoc on their own property or if the city can provide property,” says Schroeder.
Jeff Pritzl, Deer Program Specialist from the Wisconsin DNR, says urban hunting is more popular now than ever before. “The list of communities in Wisconsin that do not consider or think about or haven’t partaken in some form of deer management is probably shorter now than the list of cities that have and it’s just a reflection of what has happened over the last number of decades.”
Damage to personal property, like vehicles or plants and vegetation, from a healthy deer population have led communities to seek out remedies like public hunts as a way to control the urban deer population.
Pritzl says the urban hunt is also beneficial to the deer herd.
“At certain population densities they over browse their food sources and then disease starts to pick up, in terms of, those are natural mechanisms that kick in to suppress the population when nothing else does but in some cases it’s just necessary to take steps to not letting it get that far,” adds Pritzl.
And with a healthy deer population in Wisconsin right now, urban hunting is here to stay. The DNR saying it’s recruiting representatives on its county deer advisory councils to specifically address and track urban deer situations.
