Today’s Deer Hunting Traditions Often Get Lost in Time

   Wisconsin deer hunters love quoting “tradition” when talking about bowhunting or November’s nine-day firearms season.

   That’s especially common when bowhunters badmouth crossbows, when old-timers yearn for backtags, or when everyone at the bar says the Department of Natural Resources gives away too many antlerless tags.

   Whatever the complaint, it's easy to invoke “tradition” too loosely. Heck, some teens think 2010 was “back in the day,” and some old guys can’t distinguish tradition from bad habits.

   Deer hunting holds a special place in Wisconsin’s culture, but its traditions seldom sit long on the same stump. For example, November’s nine-day gun season doesn’t date to antiquity, unless you define “the good ol’ days” as 1986. That’s when our nine-day season and its Saturday-before-Thanksgiving opener was first applied statewide. In the decades before, we had two-day, five-day and “2-plus-7” split seasons across many counties.

   Likewise, deer hunting clothes weren’t always blaze orange or fluorescent pink. Blaze-orange hats and torso-wear became mandatory in 1980, and blaze-pink became a legal option in 2016. Yep. Just nine years ago. Talk about old traditions, huh?

Wisconsin’s deer hunting traditions keep changing, which is apparent in photos like this from Langlade County in the 1960s, when red hats and jackets were mandatory during November’s gun deer season. — Patrick Durkin family photo

   As a reminder, lawmakers OK’d regular ol’ orange as a substitute for red clothing in 1951, six years after they made red mandatory in 1945. I can’t pinpoint when Wisconsin declared yellow a suitable substitute, too, but I often wore my dad’s yellow insulated pants in the early 1970s, just to be safe.

   Deer hunting’s “traditions” often change faster than we can reload. Most deer hunters today recall when shotguns and rifled slugs — but not buckshot — were mandatory across much of southern Wisconsin. Why? We assumed shotgun slugs were safer than centerfire-rifle bullets because slugs can’t fly as far. But when agencies actually studied accidental shootings a quarter-century ago, they found no safety benefits from shotgun-only restrictions.

   Still, some folks fought ending that restriction. To test the safety studies, the Department of Natural Resources allowed rifle hunting in 2008 across southern Wisconsin’s management zone for chronic wasting disease. Sure enough, rifles caused no more shootings than shotguns the next five years, and Wisconsin allowed rifles statewide starting in 2013.

   Maybe that’s why the deer hunting traditions I find most interesting seldom involve bills, laws, rules, schedules or other mandates from Madison. I’d rather hear or read about folks who hunted in the 1940s, ‘50s and ’60s with lever-action rifles while wearing red-plaid Woolrich and organizing deer drives with neighbors and cousins.

   I also wish more hunters, young to old, took the time to record their hunts on paper in journals and scrapbooks. I also wish more deer camps had a boss who keeps those records and forces everyone to contribute before rushing home on Sunday or later in the week.

   And yes, I’m negligent. I’ve never kept a hunting or fishing journal, but I do write weekly newspaper columns and share my photos. I also enjoy reading old books by famous hunters like Theodore Roosevelt. “Hunting Trips of a Ranchman” and “The Wilderness Hunter” come to mind. Roosevelt knew the value of hunting stories and how they inadvertently trace hunting’s ever-changing traditions.

   In the foreword to the Modern Library’s 1996 edition of those two TR books, historian Stephen E. Ambrose wrote: “(TR) was a great listener. Many of the hunting stories he tells he heard around the campfire. He seldom identifies a specific source, probably because he often couldn’t see the face of the narrator. This gives the stories a timeless quality. Storytelling began with Stone Age hunters sitting around a campfire recounting their deeds.”

   Teddy Roosevelt might have liked hunting Wisconsin’s Northwoods. He wrote: “No one but he who has partaken thereof can understand the keen delight of hunting in lonely lands. For him … is the joy of the rifle well held; for him the long days of toil and hardship, resolutely endured, and crowned at the end with triumph.”

   Then again, maybe TR wouldn’t have liked hunting deer in our Northern forests. In “The Wilderness Hunter,” he wrote: “(The whitetail) is a shrewd, wary, knowing beast; but it owes its prolonged stay in the land chiefly to the fact that it is an inveterate skulker, and fond of the thickest cover. Accordingly, it has to be killed by stealth and stratagem, and not by fair, manly hunting. … In consequence I care less for its chase than for the chase of any other kind of American big game. Yet in the few places where it dwells in open, hilly forests and can be killed by still-hunting as if it were a blacktail; or better still, where the nature of the ground is such that it can be run down in fair chaise on horseback, either with greyhounds or with a pack of trackhounds, it yields splendid sport.”

   Yikes. Try getting those tactics through the Wisconsin Conservation Congress or the Natural Resources Board.

   Roosevelt thought still-hunting — moving slowly and quietly through the woods — was the ultimate test. He wrote: “The highest form of hunting craft is shown in the science of the skillful still-hunter. With sufficient practice any man who possesses common sense and is hardy and persevering can become, to a certain extent, a still-hunter. But the really good still-hunter is born rather than made.”

   What did TR scorn? Baiting, which in his era meant hunting over mineral licks. He wrote: “Killing a deer from a boat while the poor animal is swimming, or on snowshoes as it flounders helplessly in deep drifts, can only be justified on the plea of hunger. This is also true of lying in wait at a lick. Whoever indulges in any of these methods save from necessity, is a butcher, pure and simple, and has no business in the company of true sportsmen.”

   Geez, Teddy, that seems harsh. To hunt a natural mineral lick, you first must scout and find it.

   So ask yourself: Should we embrace all the hunting tactics TR considered “traditional”?

   Or maybe we should check back next century to see what our grandkids and great-grandchildren think of our hunting traditions.