Opening weekend gun deer hunt numbers

Preliminary numbers are out for opening weekend of Deer Hunt 2012.

The Department of Natural Resources says hunters harvested and registered 134,772 deer during the first two days of the nine-day gun deer season. That is an increase statewide of 19 percent from last year.

The preliminary buck harvest statewide was 71,989 and preliminary antlerless harvest was 62,783.

• Click here to view county by county numbers

The DNR says warm weather may have led to some quicker registrations.

Out of the nearly 200 deer that came in to Diane Bradley's Denmark registration station on opening weekend, it was her son who brought in the most points.

“I think it's pretty awesome,” said Bradley.

“I was sitting in my stand about 2:30, saw him about a hundred yards away making a rub on a tree and he just came towards me,” said Phillip Bradley.

Phillip Bradley says his 13-pointer is the largest buck he has shot in 18 years of hunting. He says bigger bucks were a trend on opening weekend.

“Guys are starting to let the small ones go by, waiting for the bigger ones,” said Bradley.

Statewide, bucks are up 24% compared to last year. In Northeast Wisconsin, bucks were up 19%. The biggest increase in any county was Brown at 88%.

“Hunters went in with high expectations and everything kind of came in that way over the weekend,” said Jeff Pritzl, a wildlife biologist for the DNR.

Before the season started on Saturday, 614,435 gun deer licenses were sold. That's up 2% from last year.

“We typically get about half of our harvest on opening weekend and then the rest of the season, we get the other half,” said Pritzl.

Pritzl says a rebound in the harvest is because of more conservative antlerless hunting and mild winters.

“What this really shows is how remarkably resilient deer populations are and how quickly they can rebound, when you think just two years ago we were looking at harvests that were the lowest they'd been in 15, 20 years,” said Pritzl.