Gun deer hunting season wraps up for 2013



RICHFIELD (WITI) -- Sunday, December 1st marked the end of the nine-day gun deer hunting season -- and FOX6 News spoke with deer hunters at Cabela's in Richfield, which has been doubling as a DNR tagging station since last weekend.

Georg Bressler was out hunting for about half of this year's gun deer hunting season, and got an eight-point buck on Saturday, November 30th.

"He stopped about 125 yards out and I muzzled it up and then shot him," Bressler said.

The buck weighed between 160 and 190 pounds.

Bressler says he scored the buck on a patch of local private land.

"I was just up the road here -- actually a mile north of where we stand right now. Usually I can drag them out pretty quick, but he took awhile. He's a nice buck. They get a lot of good, you know, eating around here -- not much stress, so they grow big -- they get fat," Bressler said.

Bresslers buck was one of 160 deer tagged at the Cabela's tagging station this year. The same tagging station had 111 deer last year. The increase comes after a slow start to the season last weekend.

"Most hunters go out on opening weekend and last weekend was really nasty weather and the harvest was down quite a bit but locally it's seemed to have picked up quite a bit. This week we had pretty nice conditions," DNR Wildlife Biologist Tom Isaac said.

Isaac says they should have a better estimate of the total deer crop for the season in a few days. He also adds that hunting licenses were slightly up this year.

"It was about 615,000 gun deer hunters. I think we'd like to keep as many or more hunters as we have because the fewer hunters that you have out there the harder it is to control the deer or to get enough harvest to make a difference," Isaac said.

As for Bressler's buck...

"He's going home. He's going to hang up in the garage and then I'm going to cut him up. We like venison. Eat a lot of it," Bressler said.

The traditional nine-day gun deer hunting season ended on December 1st.

On December 2nd, muzzleloader season begins and runs through December 11th. Then, December's antlerless hunt begins on December 12th and runs through December 15th.