President's Message - October 2024

As bear season has come and gone, hopefully you have had a successful season. First, I have received the latest harvest data from the DNR, and there are some surprises. Bait sitters did extremely well. They killed 2,629 bears in the first week of season which is 60% of the seasons harvest. Opening day alone, sitters killed 1040 bears! Second, the harvest in zone D jumped from 657 bears to 1,215, of which 31 of those bears were AG tags. Overall, the statewide harvest was up 11% for a total of 4,384 bears. To put this in perspective, 2023 was a total harvest of 2,905 bears and 2022 was 4,002 bears. We do not have success rates or the total amount of tags sold for each zone to help us better understand why the harvest data fluctuated this much. We will keep you posted as we find out more.

We are preparing for the Bear Committee meeting coming up in December at which time we will be discussing these numbers and what we should set as the 2025 harvest goals. Also, we will be discussing AG tags as we do every year. There was a total of 51 AG tag bears killed this year in two zones, A and D, and as usual we want to hear from the membership if access to these farms were denied or made extremely difficult to obtain access. Please let me or Lucas Withrow know before the December Bear Committee meeting. I am sure baiting with chocolate and how long we can bait will be discussed. We have no plans to change the current rules on baiting for bears. We will also discuss the results of bear hunters’ surveys which usually target Hound Hunters in a negative way. That is why we always need to be vigilant in representing our sport in a positive way, especially with landowners.

I suggest that anytime you can make friends with new and old landowners you need to make the extra effort to improve your landowner relationships. As larger cities become a poor place to live, we will have more urban people buying land where we hunt. Our hunting land that we have today will get smaller every year and there is nothing that the WBHA and you can do about it. So, take a landowner hunting or make friends with them. It is our future.

Lastly, the update on wolves has not changed. The Sportsman’s Alliance WBHA, MBH, and UPBHA are suing the federal government to reply to our petition to respond. There is also Tom Tiffany’s Trust-the-Science bill, which we support, that is making its way through the House to the Senate, but we do not know if anything is going to happen before the election. Remember to vote! Bear hunting with hounds won't last if you sit on the sidelines and let other people decide how to manage wildlife in Wisconsin.

Thank you,
Carl Schoettel, WBHA President