Jerry Davis is a retired biology professor who grew up hunting and fishing in Lafayette County and now lives in Iowa County. He writes for several Wisconsin newspapers, including the Wisconsin State Journal, hosts an outdoors radio program and has a weekly outdoors spot on WIBA.
The Wisconsin Badger Football team did not play Saturday. And the Green Bay Packers don't play the Minnesota Vikings until Monday night.
Wow, a weekend with no Badgers or Packers football games. It must be gun-deer season in Wisconsin.
It's almost as though hunters and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources biologists, including DNR Secretary P. Scott Hassett, planned it that way so the hunters would stay in the woods all weekend and enjoy the season. The more hunters hunt, the more likely they are to help reduce Wisconsin's deer herd to a more socially and biologically acceptable number.
At his pre-season teleconference late last week, Secretary Hassett explained that these football schedules are prepared at least two years ahead. Then, with tongue-in-cheek, Hassett, who has been DNR secretary for nearly three years, said this has given him time to work with coaches Barry and Mike, of the Badgers and Packers, and arrange schedules to fit deer hunters, many of whom are also avid Badgers and Packers fans.
Of course Hassett was giving himself credit for something he quickly admitted he had no part of and no control over. In fact, probably the football coaches have little to say about their own teams' schedules, either. But it certainly worked out to the advantage of sports fans and deer hunters.
During many past deer season-opening weekends, it seems deer hunter densities took a real dip about the time football games begin Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Those numbers were then reflected in reduced deer being registered during opening weekends, too.
It seems, then, that as powerful a magnet gun-deer season is to nearly 650,000 people, Badgers and Packers games are even more powerful magnets to some hunters. Of course, with wireless technology, some hunters have found a way to tune into games and still remain in a woods, in a tree stand or in a marsh.
If not by radio, cell telephones and other gadgets, at least some people have been known to make frequent trips back to their vehicles, with an excuse of needing to warm up and rest their tired bodies or fill their stomachs.
Now that Hassett has found a way, albeit by shear good fortune, to keep the Packers and Badgers football games from interfering with gun-deer season during 2005, don't be surprised if he starts working on shopping malls, particularly because the number of female hunters is increasing.