Hunting Opener Registration Drop 'A Referendum On Wildlife Management,' Says Krueger

WAUKESHA — I spent twenty-six years deciding when to call in the plow trucks, and I can tell you the hardest part was never the snow. It was the forty-eight hours before the snow, when everybody wanted you to commit to a number and you didn't have one yet. Opening weekend of deer season this year had that exact feeling, except the number was 52.

That's how many hunters registered for opening day at the Waukesha Rod and Gun Club, down from 87 last year, a 42 percent drop the club's range officer, Lonnie Petracek, attributes almost entirely to chronic wasting disease advisories that went out to license holders in September. Petracek, 58, has worked the registration table at the club for eleven seasons and said this is the first year he's had to print fewer forms than the year before.

"We ordered 90 clipboards worth of forms like we always do," Petracek said. "I've got 38 sitting in a drawer now. I don't know what you do with 38 extra deer registration forms. I'm not going to use them for anything else. They're specifically shaped for this."

The math nobody wants to do out loud

Down at Lund's Outdoor Supply on Sunset Drive, owner Carol Lund, 49, said ammunition sales are off 28 percent from last opener, which tracks with the registration numbers almost exactly, close enough that Lund keeps a dry-erase board behind the counter comparing the two percentages like she's running a small, very specific hedge fund. What's climbing, she said, is everything adjacent to caution: tick-removal kits, wildlife-health reference guides, and a laminated chronic wasting disease identification chart she reordered three times in six weeks. Combined, those categories are up 60 percent.

"Nobody's buying the chart because they think they can diagnose a deer in the field," Lund said. "They're buying it because owning the chart means you did something. It's the same instinct as buying a weather radio. You're never going to use it right, but you feel better having it on the shelf."

I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds coming from a guy whose entire professional life was salt tonnage and plow routes. But hesitation is hesitation, whether it's about a deer herd or a residential collector street at 2 a.m. Nobody wants to be the person who says 'we're not doing the thing this year.' So instead you get a 42 percent registration drop that nobody will call a boycott, and a 60 percent increase in chart sales that nobody will call panic. You get a quiet reassessment wearing the clothes of a normal season.

The herd doesn't read the dry-erase board

The disease itself is not new, and it is not close to Waukesha County in any numbers that should change anyone's Thanksgiving plans. County wildlife liaison Marcus Oyelaran, 44, said his office has fielded more calls this fall than in the past three Octobers combined, almost all of them some version of 'is it bad here,' and almost none of them actually about CWD testing logistics, which his office does, in fact, offer, for free, at a table outside the club every Saturday of the season.

"The disease is real, but so is the tradition. People here are weighing both the same way they always weigh snow-removal budgets: quietly, with a number in the back of their head they won't say out loud until somebody makes them."

— Bob Krueger, opinion contributor

That's the comparison I keep coming back to. A snow-removal budget is a number the city commits to in August for a winter that hasn't happened yet, based on averages from winters that already have. Deer season is the same kind of bet, except the variable isn't road salt, it's a prion disease nobody fully understands the spread of, and the bet is made by 52 individual guys standing in a gravel lot at 5:40 a.m., each one deciding on his own terms whether the tradition is worth the unknown this particular year.

What actually changed on the ground

Petracek said the club is adding a second testing cooler this year, a 7-cubic-foot unit the board approved in an emergency vote two weeks before opener, specifically so deer can be dropped for CWD sampling without hunters waiting in a line that wraps around the clubhouse like it did on the one Saturday in 2024 when everyone showed up at once. He also said attendance at the free testing table, as opposed to registration itself, is up slightly, which he reads as a sign that the people still hunting are hunting more carefully, not less seriously.

Lund, for her part, has moved her tick-removal kits to the counter display where the beef jerky used to be, which she says has nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with the fact that customers now ask for the kit by name before they ask for anything else. If you're in the market, she's currently out of the premium kit with the magnifying loupe attached, but has the standard tick removal kit (paid link) still on the shelf, assuming you can find parking on Sunset Drive during a Saturday testing window, which, as of this week, you mostly can.

None of this is a crisis. It's a county quietly doing the arithmetic on a tradition it isn't ready to give up and isn't ready to pretend is unchanged either, which, again, is exactly how we used to handle salt budgets. You don't announce the number is down. You just print fewer forms and order more clipboards you won't need, and you call it a normal year, because most years, if you squint, that's what a normal year actually looks like.