'Pretty crazy around here': Hunters, meat markets gearing up for 2022 gun deer season

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WASHINGTON COUNTY, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Over half-a-million hunters from all over the country are ready to put on their blaze orange and head out into the Wisconsin wilderness Saturday morning for opening day of Wisconsin's 171st gun deer hunt.

"We sell licenses to all 50 states and several foreign countries," said Jeff Pritzl, deer program specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. "The collective effort that everyone's going to be putting in this weekend is amazing."

Pritzl says roughly 555,000 licenses are expected to be sold for the 2022 gun deer season, a slight decrease from the 575,000 he says the DNR sold in 2021.

"As the baby boomer generation is aging out of hunting, unfortunately, they're not being replaced at the same rate by the younger generation," Pritzl said. "We've known this for 20 years, that we are slowly losing our hunting population due to simple demographics of our population."

In 2021, 175,667 deer were harvested, roughly 8% less than 2020. Despite a slight decrease in hunters, Pritzl says the DNR is expecting a better harvest in 2022.

"The buck harvest was pretty stable, but where we lost ground last year was the antlerless harvest," Pritzl explained. "I'd expect we're going to have a pretty stable buck harvest. The antlerless harvest (from archery season) so far has returned to what we'd call closer to normal, increased from last year."

Once harvested, many hunters will take those deer to local meat markets to be processed and made into jerky, sausage and other foods, including Gehring's Meat Market in Hartford.

"Deer season itself is pretty crazy around here," said Bob Gehring, a second-generation butcher at the shop. "Saturday's kind of quiet, everybody's out hunting. Sunday afternoon is when it really opens up."

Gehring says the market will typically process between 400 and 500 deer a season, staying open late and bringing in extra help to meet demand. Still, sometimes that's not enough.

"Last year we stopped taking them closing Sunday. That was the last day we took deer," Gehring said. "I anticipate we might have to do that again this year."

Gehring says as more shops stop offering deer processing services, the demand falls on other shops, adding more work that can't always be accommodated.

"One of our biggest concerns is we'd like to keep all our regular customers happy, but we know it's very possible we're not going to be able to," Gehring explained. "You want to, but you can't. We hit our capacity of our building and our employees and everything, and you can only do so much."

Gehring says as of now, deer will be accepted on a first come, first serve basis.

"It's too hard, in my mind, to tell people we're not going to take them this day or that day because none of them are dead yet, they're all running around," Gehring said. "Until the deer start coming in and we actually see how much we get in, how we can handle it and everything, we don't know."

Wisconsin's nine-day gun deer season starts Saturday, Nov. 19 and runs through Sunday, Nov. 27.

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