Matt Geiger

Poet Robert Frost famously wrote that good fences make good neighbors. When it comes to hunting, not everyone shares Frost’s sentiment. 
A forester and former Jackson County Conservation Congress delegate in Wisconsin alleges that some landowners are putting up high fences to restrict the movement of wild deer, then either hunting those deer themselves or charging others money to hunt “wild” whitetails on their properties.

Starting this season, Wisconsin hunters will receive an either-sex replacement tag if they harvest an antlerless deer that tests positive for chronic wasting disease (CWD) in Wisconsin.
The tag will be good for the 2024 and 2025 seasons. It will be valid in the same zone where the initial deer was shot and not specific to hunting tool. Replacement authorizations were previously only for the same type of deer that tested positive: a buck tag for a buck, a doe tag for a doe.

On Valentine’s Day in the winter of 2017, an 8-month-old buck was captured using a drop net in Iowa County, Wis. He weighed 90 pounds and tested negative, via a rectal biopsy, for chronic wasting disease.
A team of researchers fitted the fawn with an expandable GPS collar, designed with elastic and pleats that would pop and allow it to grow along with the deer’s neck as he matured. They called him Buck 5700, and he wore the collar for three full breeding seasons, giving researchers valuable data about how and where he moved during 2017, 2018 and 2019.