Welcome to the morning show and WRC.
Oh, it's our day to talk about the great outdoors John Claire is in with his buddies.
It's a dear camp here today in the morning show studios John the Risen County Year Advisory Council member and delegation of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress Doug Durham is here conservationists and land steward and Dave is here.
I guess that's all
we know Besides I'm with him on the
yes, you are absolutely Dave Barron is here.
We just
We had to start out and swing at him once anyway.
So
got to take a shot when you can.
Good to see you boys.
All right.
Well, let's talk about the great outdoors.
Pretty nice weather here lately, John.
Yeah.
The deer season is off to the bull season portion of the deer season is off to a pretty good start.
Um, people are harvesting some animals and the weather has been too warm on some days.
Um, but it's been a great start.
What have you heard about the herd?
Uh, it seems like there's a
fewer or less deer on the landscape, at least from what I've been seeing on my little corner of Richland County, but there's still plenty of deer out there, but it seems to be a few less.
Seasons are underway?
Yep, after the middle of September and goes through the end of January with all of them included.
There is, of course, the youth hunt as well.
In fact, my neighbor boy was involved in that, so really excited about it, but that's an awesome thing that is happening every year.
Yeah, I had the opportunity to take a friend's 13-year-old daughter out on the youth hunt, and she scored on a nice eight-point buck, and she was happy.
So was I.
Wonderful.
Good stuff.
Dr. Ron is here.
How you been,
Doug?
I'm doing great, and have been great.
enjoying life and interested in the conservation in the county and in particular obviously we're here to talk about deer and it's been an interesting
few years to, uh, consider what we have done and not done with the deer herd.
And, you know, whatever you want to talk about, I'm here to talk about it.
Well, I wanted to talk about, first of all, your award winner.
I see field and stream named you hero of conservation for your decades of stewardship.
So congratulations on that.
Thank you.
It was a surprise.
And, uh, it's like, sometimes I, I feel like, uh, you know, why me?
I'm sitting here in the room with two guys who have done all kinds of great things for conservation.
Maybe it's because I had a big mouth and I know a lot of people and actually Travis Hall, the guy who wrote the article came last spring to the farm and during that time that he was there, he asked me a bunch of questions and just answered them as I always do.
And then a couple of months later, he asked me about, hey, would you be okay if we
put this in field and stream and field and stream is that magazine that I read when my dad always got it and I you know so it was kind of a big deal that he said oh and I said yeah I'd be happy to and they'd actually put an article in last year about on the online version about um the Doe Derby and deer hunting in in Wisconsin and I thought it would be an online thing so when the big print magazine shows up and it's in there it's I mean it's just a real honor and I'm kind of
sheepish about it but it's a humbling thing to have that kind of attention.
Well deserved.
Well thank you.
Yeah some things that you want to talk about today Doug.
Oh man I could talk about about the the dear population of the of the county and the decisions that the CDAC has made this past year.
There's an old adage that if you want things to change you have to
You have to start doing things differently.
This spring, the County Deer Advisory Council decided to make some changes in the number of antlerless tags that were given out or that were given with each license.
I wasn't at the meeting.
I had a conflict and I wasn't at the meeting.
So it was interesting to see what transpired because
Dave and and John and one other member were sort of overwhelmed by some of the rest of them But it was really the first year where we really had a split decision by the CDAC about what to do as you might know two three four years ago.
We were given out three and four tags and Hunters and landowners especially in the southern part of the county
given out antlerless tags, especially in the southern part of the county, started talking about seeing fewer and fewer deer, and they were concerned about that.
So the CDAC decided to only give out one antlerless tag with each license, but also that making
as many antlerless tags as the quota allows, which we've never reached, but if a hunter wants to kill a second or third antlerless deer, he's gonna have to buy, or she's gonna have to buy the tag for $12, which I think is great because the folks that brought that forward are supporting the DNR by getting folks to buy those extra tags.
As far as the effect on the deer herd goes, I have questions about that.
We've seen a decline in antlerless and buck harvest in the last five years.
There's been almost a 30%, 27.7% decrease in the last five years, steady downward in the harvest.
So you would think that then the population would go up.
if we're not killing as many antlers this year especially.
But the population has also decreased 16% in the last five years.
So there's this elephant over in the corner of every room that you have this discussion.
It's like, well, if hunters aren't killing the deer, what is killing them?
Because something's killing them.
Our harvest is going down and our population is going down.
I think that it's pretty hard not to point to chronic wasting disease and the effect that it's having sort of slowly falling dominoes going north.
I have another kind of startling statistic that in 2014, we had less than 5% positive rate in the county.
Last year in 2025, it was 43%.
My goodness.
And you can't expect
uh, with that kind of a disease and that it's kind of indiscriminate.
It sure it takes older deer, but 43% of the deer of the deer that were harvested or testing positive that at some point it's going to have a, it's going to have a negative effect on the population.
And I'm afraid that we're seeing that now.
Not only on the population of the deer, but the hunter is going out because you think that they're losing interest as a result.
Um, actually when I looked at the tags sold, one of the interesting things you can do is there are,
You have to make a choice when you buy your deer license about what county you're going to be hunting in.
Our deer license have been pretty steady over the last, really over the last decade.
A little bit of a decline, but it doesn't seem to be attributed to, you know, chronic wasting disease.
There's all kinds of reasons.
There's all kinds of reasons why the deer population could go down too.
I mean, there's all kinds of reasons that the hunter participation could go down.
Deer population, the number of factors, just the
I see the big one as CWD.
Um, as terms of hunters, let me look at the three guys you're talking to.
I'm the youngest guy of these three of the three of us old goobers here and, um,
I'm in the middle
by a lot.
I think, um, it looks it too.
Anyway, um, I Nancy, um, uh, and so.
People are aging out, folks of our generation of the baby boomers are aging out, and we're really not being replaced.
And so that's problematic.
Yeah.
What about counties?
I mean, are there some counties where there's no CWD in the state of Wisconsin?
A few.
There's a few in the far north and scattered along the eastern side of the county, but most of them have baiting bans.
And I forget how many.
It's something like
50 or pretty close out of 72.
Yeah,
50.
Some counties have CWD at some level.
Um, and of course we've had it here since 2000 and while we had it before 2002, it was found in Iowa and Dane County or is identified in 2002.
And then we've been a part of the hot zone, southern part of the county, especially been part of the hot zone since really 2004, 2005.
Um, I, you know, I hate to say it, but the chickens that we've been in here
talking about are now coming home to roost and That said on a positive side.
I can tell you this I'm up in the Northeast as you know in the Northeast part of the county and we've taken a lot of antlerless deer over the years You know we really controlled population and we Even though our our positive rate went up just like it did for the rest of the county in the last couple of years It started to drop our population
By design, we've killed a lot, I mean, we're killing 25 animals a year in a 600 acre area.
Our population is going down by design, but our percent positive is going down and anybody who hunts big giant bucks in Richland County, I can tell you that we've got some really nice bucks and we have a higher percentage of bucks.
So really our buck to doe ratio up there is probably closer to one to one.
Our population probably down 30%.
as I said, by design.
And I'm sure CWD, well, I know CWD has taken some of them.
I mean, I've found dead deer that we're clearly emaciated.
And that was the, that was, I mean, I don't know, I mean, get them tested because they don't want to know anything.
I mean, DNR doesn't want to test deer that in an area where CWD is as prevalent as it is, because there's only so many funds that they can put towards this.
And that's another issue that I think we should talk about is the funding it.
at DNR and not only for deer but in general.
Yeah the DNR funding issue is really coming to roost this year.
They've cut back on them a number of fish they planted and the reason is that the DNR from early on got their funding through license sales and as Doug mentioned license sales are going down because
the baby boom generation was a giant influx of population is aging out, either passing away or just deciding that hunting is not for them anymore.
And so the license sales have gone down.
And the last license increase was in 2005.
So that's 21 years ago.
And they have been dealing with that same number of license
dollars since then.
And of course, costs of everything have gone up since 2005.
And so what the problem is is we're looking for solutions to that.
The last governor's budget had an increase in license fees attached to it.
The legislature took it out.
And so now we're stuck again and we're looking for a solution.
This year at the Conservation Congress meetings and how that works is in April there's a meeting in every one of the 72 counties.
A lot of the different things that people can vote on.
You can show up in person or you can do it online.
And there are four or five different methods on which we could make
of the DNR budget a little better.
And the ones that actually passed and they have to go through each county and then they have to go through the statewide meeting which happens in May, the ones that actually passed were a 25% increase in license fees, a 66%.
license fee increase, and those both passed, and those were forwarded.
But of course, the legislature has everything to do with that, not the Natural Resources Board, who the Conservation Congress advises.
And then another one, which is really interesting, and I know Dave will want to talk about this, is a one-eighth of 1% sales tax.
Now, one-eighth of 1% is 0.125.
All right, that is on everything that is eligible for sales tax here in Wisconsin.
People wouldn't probably notice that that much, but the good part is that everybody, residents, non-residents, everybody gets to pay for conservation, not just the hunters, fishermen, trappers, etc.
If you like to hike state trails, you got to pay a little bit.
Currently, you don't have to pay anything.
If you go to a public boat launch, which is funded by the Department of Natural Resources through fishing fees, if you have a kayak, you don't pay to launch the kayak, you just launch it.
And a kayak, of course, doesn't fall under a registration fee like a motorboat does.
So that's a better alternative, I think, at least in my opinion, than a raise in the license fees.
but license fees are really cheap in Wisconsin.
I get the conservation patron license, which gives you a right to do everything that falls under the DNR and that's 165 bucks.
For a year, that's exceedingly cheap.
For a lot of fun.
Yeah.
And I spend money lots more foolishly than that.
And my wife is worse.
I would, I'd like to mention something about that.
And I was recently at an event in Minnesota
And Minnesota has a one-eighth of one percent sales tax that goes to their conservation legacy fund that's spent on a broad bunch of conservation issues, including their Department of Natural Resource funding.
But they've also, as a result, created a conservation fund that is protecting and increasing the conservation on
public lands, but then also on private lands.
The person who's the head of that legacy thing was there and I connected him or tried to connect him with the folks that are at the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation who are running this whole thing.
But the numbers were, excuse me, the numbers were staggering and it was sort of interesting how they were broken up.
Some of it went to the DNR, some of it went to, you know, conservation easement funds, some of it went to
these land improvements for both public and private land.
And to me, it made nothing but sense because conservation is something that benefits everyone, not just hunters and fishers.
Most definitely.
Dave, anything you want to add?
Yeah, I'm going to jump in on the one eighth percent sales tax.
I'm originally from Missouri and in 1972, Missouri passed the one eighth percent sales tax.
The DNR can't spend all the money they have.
I was just talking to the supervisor of Big Game out of Dodgeville.
He said he was just down in Missouri a couple weeks ago and he says the state parks, the trails, he says that money is going to good causes and he says Missouri's got it.
He says they're just rocking and rolling down there.
So, you know, they've got all kinds of programs that covers purchasing land, building new state parks.
And as John mentioned, you don't even notice the one eighth percent.
And so this year it passed through the Conservation Congress in all 72 counties.
It went to the National Resource Board.
They passed it.
And when it got to the legislature, they killed it.
I mean, the DNR budget is the same as it's been for the last five years or six years.
I was just reading in the, in the, in the sporting news this morning, because they've got it every, every even year they have to propose their budget.
And this is a year the new governor is going to get to propose to, you know, the budget.
And we don't, they don't have money.
I mean, we'll get down to bare bones.
You know, we put out the archery club dug.
We put out dumpsters to collect the waste from the deer kill to keep it off the land so CWD doesn't spread anymore.
Was it three years ago?
We had five dumpsters.
We've got one this year.
Two.
Two.
Two.
Dugs.
Yeah, but Doug, you pay for it yourself.
I don't pay for the whole thing.
I pay $750 for the privilege of having that dumpster on my farm.
Right, and the archery club does the same thing.
We pay the one-time start-up fee and then the conservation department pays for the rest.
And some of that was a result of federal budget cuts as well because a lot of that funding came from the federal government.
The interesting thing about the dumpster program, I'm glad you brought that up, Dave, the interesting thing to me in the observations of almost a decade now, when we first started the dumpster program as a group of people, not really with the DNR, is that I would say, correct me if you've seen something different, but I would say half of the carcasses that go in there,
Don't have their heads cut off.
In other words, they're not getting tested for CWD.
So people who are concerned about CWD are putting them in there.
People who are apparently not concerned about CWD, at least on a personal level, are putting them in there.
It's a really good service that people have been really supportive of and interested in.
It's going to be interesting to see this year how that changes.
You know, Sharon sold the store in Rockbridge.
We had a dumpster there that was mine and I funded, but
Or paid the initial pardon that she's not doing CWD testing there anymore either and the DNR needed to cut the number of places number of kiosks as well because they only have so many You know what the folks moving around?
I have still a testing kiosk at my place and I take those heads to spring green where I now live so it actually is fairly convenient for me but So that service is still there at no cost to hunters so a hunter can get their deer tested if they if they want to
and my understanding is that it costs the DNR about 25 bucks ahead.
So if you're buying only a gun license, that's what?
24
bucks.
24 bucks and you're getting a deer tested, you're costing them money.
But so the point is that they've been able to, the DNR and groups like ours have been able to provide an awful lot of service with a very little bit of money.
And now the funding is being cut back.
And if I looked in those dumpsters and saw nothing but carcasses with the heads caught off, well then we might say that people don't, it's only people who are concerned about CWD.
It's people who like to have a place to dispose of that carcass without having to take it out on a country road and throw it in the ditch because you know that's where they used to go.
Right, exactly.
Well
they still do.
Right.
Well
by you anyway.
That's a whole different thing.
But Dave, should we be talking to our representatives and things like that about this?
Yes.
everybody needs to write a letter and you know it's hard for people to do that though you know here we'll let Doug write the letter we'll let John write the letter you know but the only way we're going to get action is if we go to our legislatures my tongue don't work this morning if we go to them and tell them what we think you know maybe we'll do some good
we'll
find out yeah once the election is over and they're done insulting each other on every commercial on TV it seems we were gonna talk about that and we know who is actually going to be our representatives everybody needs to contact them and whether you
are for or against an increase in the license fee or a sales tax, it's your choice.
But you need to contact those folks and make your feelings known.
What about out-of-state licenses?
Are they the same price that they've
done?
No, they went up a little bit.
They went up to $200 for a deer license.
Okay.
It used to be $1.65.
$35
isn't a little bit.
Yeah, it went up quite a bit.
But they, you know, that's
That was kind of the easy way that the legislature could look like they were doing something without making anybody in their district.
Because it's comparative to other states, it's still the bargain.
I have friends in Iowa and Illinois where I can't get a deer tag, not that I really try to, but I can't get a deer tag.
They come to Wisconsin to hunt and they just, it's over the counter.
And a license in Iowa is $400 and some
dollars.
Our dear license is dirt cheap.
You go anywhere.
All the states around us is about five times the license fee is what our out of state people have to pay.
And God forbid you want to go west.
It's
really expensive there.
Yeah, you know, an elk tag is $800.
In some states it's more than that.
In Colorado they're around a thousand and you have to buy a hundred and eighty dollar stamp.
It's a license, you have to buy a small game license for a hundred and eighty dollars just to apply and you may not get drawn.
So if you don't get drawn, they keep twenty percent of the money and give the rest of it back.
We really need fees increased on out of state
people.
Some things need to change.
We'll be back with more on The Morning Show at a moment.
We're talking about the great outdoors with John and Doug and Dave and we'll be right back.
Our outdoor experts on the air with us today, John Clare, Doug Durran, and Dave Barron.
We've had some calls from listeners.
So one of them asking about EHD, who wants to tackle it, John?
Yeah, EHD is episodic hemorrhagic disease, and it's spread by a midge.
A midge is a tiny little biting fly, and it usually
occurs when there's a drought and water levels and ponds and long streams goes down and then the midges hatch out of the mud and any deer that comes for a drink gets bit and there is the deer if they do get EHD they die with just in a couple of days.
It's very very quick.
The deer does not look starved like they do with
chronic wasting disease, they just die.
And a lot of times it's around water or in water sometimes.
And there was an outbreak in the eastern side of the state.
Southeastern Wisconsin had a real serious one this year.
They estimated that something like 2,500 deer died from it.
And I know some folks that live there and they said there were certain parts in some of those counties where you roll the windows down and you could smell dead deer.
There were so many of them.
But EHD is real spotty and only happens every now and then.
Some deer are actually resistant to it, but many are not.
And those deer populations that were decimated in southeastern Wisconsin within a few years will be back provided that we don't have another outbreak in that same area.
Has it not been detected here though?
No, we haven't had that here for a long time.
And again, it's drought resistant.
Southwestern Wisconsin had a pretty good rainfall year.
Southeastern Wisconsin missed out on a lot of that.
And so what happened was they had dropping water levels and hence EHD.
The other question was about money collected from the tax.
Would that money help pay taxes that the DNR, land that the DNR buys?
Yes, that was the question.
We were talking about the 1A sales tax.
The 1A
sales tax.
Yeah, right.
Well, I think that's an open question, and it's the classic devils in the details, right?
We had the Knowles Nelson Stewardship Fund, which purchased land and conservation easements from a willing seller, willing buyer thing, and make that public land.
The open question about the property tax thing is, well,
if we do this one eighth sales tax, then what about that?
I think the caller raises a good question.
What would happen with the property taxes?
Well, that would have to be addressed in the bill.
There's
a
dear show coming up, right, Dave?
Not too far
down the road.
Yes, sir.
February 27.
Saturday, February 27.
And it will be held at the community center, like always.
And
that we pre-register the deers.
They can bring them in between five and nine on Friday night.
And the Wisconsin Bucket Bear Club will be there officially scoring your deer heads.
There'll be gun raffles and bucket raffles.
The Archery Club has a tremendous display of old broadheads.
We've probably what, John, got 500 or so?
There's a bunch.
There's
a bunch.
And we'll have vendors booths.
There'll be food and beverage.
And if you want to bring in sheds, they won't be scored, but you can display them.
So missions, $5, children under 12 are free.
So it's been very successful show for years.
And we normally get some really big deer heads.
It's a fun
event.
Yeah.
Hopefully there's no blizzard that day because I think you had that a couple of years ago.
Yeah, but I didn't care last year because I was in Belize at the time.
There was no blizzard in Belize.
Doug, I wanted to go back to one thing that you said when you were talking about hunting in your property and how you take an antlerless deer and you'd seen like CWD instances maybe going down as well.
Is that how we can be proactive?
Is that what you're saying?
Yes, we are not.
Now that we have it, we are not going to get rid of it.
But like many diseases, we can talk about human diseases and wildlife diseases, right?
Like many diseases, by controlling population, we can lower the incidence of the disease.
Chronic wasting disease is a density dependent disease.
It's also a frequency dependent disease, but let's talk about density dependence.
Density dependent, we're both farm kids.
crowd a bunch of cattle into an area.
One of them gets sick and it's a communicable disease.
They're more apt.
The others are going to get sick.
Whereas if you isolate that deer or have your cattle spread out, they're less apt to apply that to deer.
And that'll certainly happen.
Now folks are going to call in and say, yeah, but they lick branches and pee in the same scrapes and, you know, and doing all that stuff.
Right.
Not going to get rid of it, especially since it's on the landscape already, but.
risk reduction does reduce transmission.
Anecdotal at this point in my place, but we went from 40 plus percent for two years last year, our percent positive rate was under 25.
I'm real curious to see what happens in the future.
And our population is down, as I said earlier, I think by design.
And some of it is disease because I have found dead deer.
But our population is down by a third, maybe more than that.
And my buck doe ratio for people who are interested in bucks is closer to one to one.
So like on my trail cameras right now, I got as many bucks on camera as I do does, which is a real interesting thing, right?
I mean, what are we looking to do here in terms of deer management?
I have a couple of smart out comments about this.
surprise.
One of them is that I always say that bow hunting is for people don't have enough to do.
And part of that is there's a certain dedication to doing that, right?
I mean you have to spend time shooting your vertical bow, not so much on a horizontal bow or a crossbow, but then the other part of it is that because the deer has to be so close,
you spend a lot of time at it.
And I know people who dedicate a big part of their fault to that.
And I applaud that.
I mean, there's a dedication to it.
There's a whole, the whole part of that, but it doesn't alter in the least effect that there's spent a lot of time on it.
And for people that don't have enough to do.
But on the other hand is the gun hunter.
And I know lots of gun hunters who buy their tag the night before and they got used to going out and sitting on a stump opening morning and shooting a buck and
got it in the back of the truck and they're home or at the bar or wherever by noon.
So there's sort of these two incongruous groups of folks, and then I'm talking about extremes on both sides, but when we're trying to manage a herd, we're trying to manage a disease, we're trying to manage a landscape, there's a big balance in all of that, I think, that we have to try to achieve.
Don, anything you wanted to add?
Yeah, the CDAC.
We try to manage the deer herd for a number of different groups.
People that are on their highways and so on.
Hunters seem to think that it's our job to make sure that they have targets walking by them on a regular basis.
That's not what we're about.
We have to manage the herd for the good of people and the good of the herd.
Are there changes for the upcoming gun deer season?
Anything that's big?
There's not
a lot that I've noticed for the actual gun deer part.
Locally, of course, we only have the dumpster at Doug's Farm and then the dumpster at the old treatment facility here.
And we just encourage people to get their deer tested.
And I know some people that they don't want to know, so they don't test them.
That's fine.
It's your choice.
But the testing provides us with data that can help figure out what the disease is doing.
John, I got a question for you.
You know, Sharon used to pull the lymph nodes.
She's no longer doing that.
Is there anywhere in the immediate area where you can take your, let's say you've got a big buck and you don't want to cut the head off and send it in?
Do you know, all right, Doug, you got your hand up, as always.
I
really wish we had cameras in this studio.
People would enjoy this whole rigmarole, I think.
The short answer on that is if you've got a big giant buck and you're going to get it stuffed, it's going to get caped.
Take it to a taxidermist, put in a plug for my friend Jim Clang at Lone Birch Taxidermy, and he'll cape the deer.
And when you get it stuffed, he cuts the skull plate out, and then you bring that
that part of the deer to the kiosk and put it in the kiosk.
So you don't really have to lose anything there.
If you want to get a skull mount, you can do the same thing, peel the hide off of it and you're not going to lose anything.
But if you call the Tower Hill DNR office, Krisha is running the program there and she'll take your
She'll take the lymph nodes out if you want to keep it all whole.
But it's not as convenient as it used to be when Sharon was doing it and she just opened it up and then away you go.
I'm not doing any lymph node removal.
I've never done that for folks.
I actually get a lot of lymph nodes dropped into my box where people are doing their own.
Like, I have a neighbor who, all his box, he takes the lymph nodes out himself.
And it's not manned space flight, you know, you can watch a video.
Yeah, it's not
difficult.
There's plenty of videos on it.
I do it if somebody wants to do a European mount at our deer camp.
I'll take the lymph nodes out and we'll submit those.
There was an experiment where they sent out
and DNR sent out kits to certain people.
And I still have one or two kits at the house, so I take my own out also.
I mean, it was easier when Sharon did it, you know.
Sure, probably easier when your wife did it too.
Did you just say that Nancy did used to do it?
No.
Oh, you said Sharon, not Nancy.
Hi Nancy, I'm sorry.
Wrong woman.
But yeah, and so,
There's some workarounds with all of that that they have to do and what folks should remember too is if you get a positive deer in Richland County, actually in any county, if you get a positive buck, you will get a replacement buck tag that's good for this year and for next year.
If you get a positive doe in Richland County, you will get a replacement tag that's good in Richland County for either sex.
that idea was to encourage people getting tested and, you know, harvesting some mail into the steer.
Here, why don't we get the CDAC applied because Richland County's CDAC pushed that through and got it passed.
Yeah.
Through the Conservation Congress.
Yes.
Yep.
I think, and I really do want to say that I've been a proud member of the
And I know you two guys have, too, been proud member of our County Deer Advisory Council.
We have serious discussions in that group, and we don't always disagree.
This is really the first year where there was a split vote on how many antlerless tags to give out.
You know, and fair enough, like my friend Kent Boucher says, if you keep doing things the same way, you can't expect a different result.
I don't know what...
having fewer antlerless tags with each license is going to do, but there was some people who were interested in doing that.
So we went ahead and did it.
As I said earlier, in the last five years, our antlerless harvest has gone down and down and down, no matter how many tags that we gave out.
So there's a lot of statistics that make you wonder about what's happening with the herd.
And I think it's a pretty straight line when you look at a 40% positive rate in this county and see a decline in harvest and a decline in population.
And other things haven't changed dramatically.
Hunter participation hasn't changed dramatically.
Predator activity hasn't changed dramatically.
Maybe access has changed a little bit.
I don't think that's a big part of it.
I think that folks got used to seeing a whole lot of deer, and that's what they expected to continue to see.
And that wasn't a sustainable thing.
And that's what we, especially the three of us, really worked at in the CDAC to do it.
As I said, robust conversations.
If I might, I'd like to.
talk about a couple of different things.
One is in the past few years I had an event at the farm called the Doe Derby and you bring in a deer, a doe, you pretty much harvest it anywhere as long as it was legal where you were doing that and you bring it in and you put that head in the box and there were a couple of raffle tags and they didn't cost you anything.
I decided this year to just continue that.
or take a pause.
We'll see how I feel about it this year.
It was a lot of time.
It's a lot of effort.
And part of what I was trying to do is get more CWD testing.
I was trying to get more deer harvested and really neither one of those things were happening.
As I said, the harvest was going down.
So it was a fun event.
We always had a party and John always came and probably still have a party on Saturday night of the four of the four day, but I'm not doing the doderby this year because I had to go out and gather prizes and do all this kind of that kind of stuff.
And we'll see where that goes.
So we're listening to people.
We're trying to do the best thing that we can for the herd and for the overall ecosystem.
And another thing that we're going to ask you about is, you recently were asked on a podcast about the burning topic in this area, the 765 kilovolt lines.
Yeah, thanks, sir.
I was almost, almost forgot about that.
As a lot of folks know, I'm involved with the meat eater media network.
Stephen Ellis, a really good friend of mine.
And he got bombarded by emails from people in the driftless area about the 765 line.
You know, you're concerned about the driftless area.
How come you've not spoken about the, about the 765 line?
And he, his,
producer gave me a call and said, What's going on there?
You got all the sudden we're getting all this.
I saw they kept contacting me.
So I told him to contact you.
So they had me on yesterday.
We recorded the show yesterday towards the end of it's a great that the new show that they do on Thursdays is really interesting because they talk about stuff from all around the country.
But for 15 minutes, we talked about the 765 line.
You know, I'm on the con side so sure we talked about the pros and cons But you know kind of gave the background in and so it's you know those kinds of things are a national issue and so I was grateful for the opportunity to Go on there and talk about it.
Yeah,
could have a
big effect though on you know,
you
might mention that Steve's lives in Montana.
Well, right.
That's just it.
I mean he comes here every year We don't
record a show or anything every year, but he comes and hangs out with me and hunts on the farm at various times of the year.
So he really does love the Driftless area.
I pointed out to him on that podcast that the first year that he came and we recorded or shot an episode, which I think was about 15 years ago now, we were down on Willow Creek.
We went down there at the end of the after the show was after we were done videoing and doing the show, we went down and recorded a
TR Roosevelt Conservation Partnership Conservation Minute.
And we were on Willow Creek and he was talking about the conservation reserve program, better land use and the effect, the positive effect that all of that had on cold water and trout fishing in the driftless.
And one of these lines that they're proposing goes right through the spot where we recorded that.
That hit home to him.
I bet, yeah.
Anything else any of you guys
would like to add
here today?
Just that the deer season is continuing through the end of January.
Go out and have fun.
CWD maybe takes out a little bit of fun out of it, but it's still fun.
Get out there and then enjoy the outdoors, whether you harvest a deer or not.
Go in your part.
Yeah, Dave.
Yeah.
I want everybody to know that CWD is not only a Wisconsin problem.
I was just in Idaho last week.
and their signs up all over the place about getting your deer tested in Idaho and it's in Colorado, Montana.
So it's a nationwide thing.
It's growing all over the country.
Sad but true.
Doug, good to see you again.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
And you know, it's management.
Our whole Driftless area is a wonderful place that we need to do the best we can for.
ecosystem management, deer management, conservation, and protecting it, I think are very important.
Thanks for having me.
You're welcome.
Doug Durand, John Clare, and Dave Baron on today's morning show.