Wisconsin Hunters Shot 1.26 Deer Per Second During Opening Weekend

   Wisconsin deer hunters once again killed lots of deer during late November’s nine-day firearms season.

   More specifically, we killed a big ol’ bunch of bucks with antlers 3 inches or longer, and a slightly bigger bunch of deer without antlers.

   That surprised some folks, given how many called Nov. 22-23 the quietest opening weekend they’ve ever heard. But y’know, magazine-emptying fusillades seem a thing of the past. Hunters no longer blaze away at deer like we did 30-some years ago. Maybe that's because we seldom walk around to warm up, and we seldom organize drives to flush deer out. Instead, we sit in elevated blinds, wait for a deer to drift by, and fire one well-aimed shot from a rest.

   Those changes also explain deer hunting’s recent safety record. The Department of Natural Resources reported only two shooting incidents this gun season, one of which was a self-inflicted fatality. In fact, 10 of Wisconsin’s past 16 gun seasons had no fatal shootings. The first year that happened in modern times was 1973, but then at least one deer hunter died of a gunshot every season until 2010.

   Meanwhile, this year’s Nov. 22-30 hunt toppled at least 183,281 deer, including 86,522 antlered bucks and 96,759 antlerless deer (does and fawns). The overall kill fell 3.9%, down 7,517 deer from 190,798 in 2024; while the antlered-buck kill fell 4%, down 3,622; and the antlerless kill fell 3.8%, down 3,855.

   November’s gun-kill ranks seventh of the past 10 deer seasons, but it would rank No. 1 of all time if this were 1982, when we registered 182,715 deer. Realize, too, that deer hunters this year numbered 550,611, 13.6% fewer than the 637,320 hunting in 1982.

     Wisconsin hunters bagged 183,281 deer during the state’s nine-day firearms season in November, which equates to 0.56 deer per second, 33.9 deer per minute and 2,036 deer per hour.     — Patrick Durkin photo

And with that, let’s start nitpicking.

   First, remember that roughly 25% of the antlerless kill is buck fawns, deer with little placeholders called “pedicels” atop their heads. Pedicels mark where antlers would’ve grown had these 6-month-old bucks survived their first hunting season and the winter that follows.

   Therefore, gun-hunters actually killed about 110,712 male deer and 72,569 female deer during the nine-day season. Why quibble over buck fawns, aka “Next Year’s Buck”? Because you will not control our farm country’s deer herds when over 60% of the kill is male.

   Besides, whatever the harvest’s sex ratio, Wisconsin hunters love quibbling over the DNR’s deer-kill data. We forever question its accuracy and deer-registration compliance rates.

   Maybe we ridicule DNR data because we can’t picture 183,281 dead deer. It’s much like politicians debating government budgets. As the late U.S. senator Everett Dirksen, R-Illinois, supposedly said during the 1960s: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money.”

   OK, so let’s picture the nine-day gun-kill differently. Try this:

On opening weekend, Wisconsin hunters killed 1.26 deer per second from 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 22, through 4:32 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 23. In other words, we averaged 75.56 deer per minute and 4,534 deer per hour those two days.

   That math is easily calculated. Although legal shooting hours vary east-to-west, each zone provides roughly 10 hours of daily shooting light, give or take one or two seconds. That equates to 600 minutes daily and 1,200 minutes per weekend; and 36,000 seconds daily and 72,000 seconds per weekend. Likewise, the nine-day deer season lasts roughly 90 hours; or 5,400 minutes, or 324,000 seconds.

   Therefore, when opening weekend’s 20 hours of shooting light ended at dusk Nov. 23, the DNR’s computers tallied 90,671 dead deer.

    As we said earlier, that’s “lots of deer.”

    In fact, those 90,671 deer accounted for nearly half — 49.5% — of the season’s 183,281 dead deer. Therefore, hunters shot an average of 0.56 deer per second the entire season, or slightly more than a deer every other second. That equates to 33.9 deer per minute and 2,036 deer per hour from sunrise Nov. 22 through dusk Nov. 30.

   Though impressive, that’s less than half the rate of Wisconsin’s record-setting nine-day season in 2000 when hunters killed 442,581 deer. Hunters averaged 1.36 deer per second throughout that season, which means they killed 82 deer per minute and 4,918 deer per hour.

   Here’s another way to view the gun-kill. Picture all those dead deer wedged into our biggest sports arenas.

   At capacity, Green Bay’s Lambeau Field seats 81,441 fans. Think how Lambeau would look with 2.23 gutted whitetails sitting in each seat.

   How about Camp Randall stadium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison? At capacity, it seats 76,057 fans. Imagine 2.39 field-dressed deer in every fan’s lap.

   And then there’s American Family Field in Milwaukee, home of the Brewers. Try shoehorning 4.35 deer into each of its 41,900 seats.

   Let’s acknowledge, of course, that Wisconsin’s dead-deer densities aren’t spread evenly statewide. Some areas are deer-poor and habitat-bankrupt. My friend Nick Perdiew, who hunts the Northern forests of central Ashland County near Cayuga, text-messaged this postseason report: “I heard no shots along the (Conley) road during the four days we hunted. … I love the tradition, but years like this are a struggle.”

   And it’s been like that for years on that particular road. As Madison’s Rich Bishop wrote in a deer camp journal during the 1980s: “If I had only one day to live and could spend it however I choose, I’d want to be in a deer stand, where every minute seems eternity.”

   On that note, let’s turn to other news from November’s 2025 gun season:

   -- Marathon County led the state with 6,743 deer; and then it was Vernon, 5,496; and Waupaca, 5,469.

   -- Though the top 11 counties all had deer-kills over 4,000, seven saw declines from 2024.

   -- Of the 13 counties with the most documented cases of chronic wasting disease — ranging from 37 to 365 cases — all but three registered fewer deer than in 2024. Four of those harvests fell by double-digit percentages: Richland, Lafayette, Columbia and Rock.

   -- Of the 14,315 deer tested so far for CWD this fall, 1,651 carried the always-fatal disease. That 11.5% detection rate is the highest annual rate recorded since CWD’s discovery in southwestern Wisconsin in February 2002.