WISCONSIN DNR LAUNCHES 5-YEAR STUDY ON CWD NEXT MONTH

State wildlife officials plan to launch a five-year study next month that they say should provide unprecedented data on how predators, chronic wasting disease and other factors affect deer survival in southwestern Wisconsin.

The study is part of a series of initiatives Gov. Scott Walker announced in May after conservationists renewed their criticism of the state’s strategy of passively monitoring the deadly disease and CWD prevalence hit a new high of nearly 10 percent.

The study aims to bolster CWD surveillance and better understand the disease. The governor called for more studies on deer populations, research investments, a best practices plan for captive deer farms and biannual deer farm fence inspections.

The Department of Natural Resources will start the $3 million effort by capturing and placing radio collars on deer and their predators, such as bobcats and coyotes, in Dane, Iowa and Grant counties in October.

The agency will start capturing and collaring deer in January. The collars will be equipped with GPS tracking devices that will record and display information on the animals multiple times per day.

Plans call for capturing and collaring 200 adult deer, including bucks and does, 100 fawns and 60 predators annually. The agency plans to use staff and trappers to capture and collar predators and hire between 15 to 20 field technicians to capture and collar deer, DNR big-game ecologist Kevin Wallenfang said.

The study should result in unprecedented information on movement, behavior, habitat use and predator-prey survival, DNR Wildlife and Forestry Research Section Chief Scott Hull wrote in a memo to the agency’s board.

The study will take place in two areas: One spans the Grant and Iowa county line with low CWD-infection rates, and the other will span a portion of the Iowa and Dane county line where CWD infection rates are high. Running the study in both areas will help DNR scientists better understand how the disease may be interacting with predators and other environmental factors to affect deer survival, Hull wrote.

Chronic wasting disease affects deer’s brains, causing them to grow thin, act strangely and ultimately die. It was first found in Wisconsin in 2002 near Mount Horeb. The DNR initially attempted to contain the disease by eradicating as many deer as possible, a plan that generated intense public backlash and led to the agency ultimately backing off on eradication.

The DNR’s current strategy centers mostly on simply monitoring the disease’s spread, but also calls for reducing local herds in isolated areas of infection that appear far from known disease clusters.

The disease has moved beyond southwestern Wisconsin into 41 of the state’s 72 counties. Test results released in March show 9.4 percent of the 3,133 deer tested last year were infected, the highest prevalence rate since the disease’s discovery in the state.

Walker has also called for more studies on deer populations, research investments, a best practices plan for captive deer farms and biannual deer farm fence inspections.

The money for the the Southwest Wisconsin Deer and Predator Research Project will come from federal Pittman-Robertson grants, which are funded through federal sales taxes on guns and ammunition.

“We chose two study areas with different CWD (infection) rates, which will help us understand the relative impacts of various factors on deer populations,” said Dan Storm, a DNR research scientist.

Whitetail deer in the Iowa County study area have a 16 percent “crude average” prevalence rate of being infected with CWD, said Storm. The prevalence rate is about 3 percent in the Grant County study area.

To date, the DNR has not directly researched CWD. Instead, its efforts have largely been just monitoring deer, said Wallenfang, who called the project “groundbreaking.”

“This is really the first (CWD) project the DNR has done that can be called research,” Wallenfang said. “We’re looking at how CWD influences deer populations, growth or decline. It’s never been done before in Wisconsin.”

Adult deer will be humanely live trapped in the winter and fawns in the spring and summer months. Blood tests and other data will be recorded before they are released and tracked by GPS devices that transmit information to a satellite.

“Trapping deer is labor intensive, and volunteers will be used extensively,” Wallenfang said. After the collars begin transmitting data, DNR staff won’t have to go back into the field.

The DNR also hopes to collar a combined 60 bobcats and coyotes, the primary predators of deer in southern Wisconsin, to study their impact on deer mortality, said Nathan Roberts, a DNR carnivore and furbearer research scientist.

“We know CWD impacts the deer population, but we’re unsure how much predation there is,” Roberts said. “We don’t know but suspect there’s a healthy bobcat population in southern Wisconsin because they’re doing pretty well in northern Wisconsin and moving south and they’re moving north out of Iowa, too. The study should give us a pretty good handle on it.”

The DNR will rely on trappers to report incidentally capturing a bobcat or coyote to supply animals for the study, Roberts said. The method was used to capture and collar 36 bobcats for a similar study in northern Wisconsin, he said.

Volunteers who want to assist in the study and landowners willing to allow access to their property can learn more at an open house from 6-8 p.m. Thursday at the Dodgeville DNR Service Center, 1500 N. Johns St.

Up to 18 field technicians would be hired for the project, about 30 volunteers recruited and dozens of landowners enrolled at the height of the study, Storm said.

The comprehensive project comes a year after the Legislature cut staffing at the DNR’s Bureau of Scientific Services. Questions about how the staffing reductions might impact the DNR’s ability to conduct the research project were referred to spokesman Jim Dick, who did not return a phone call.

When CWD was first discovered in Dane and Iowa counties, more antlerless permits were issued and the unpopular “Earn a Buck” program — in which hunters were required to kill an antlerless deer before they could bag a trophy buck — was adopted in an attempt to reduce the spread of the disease by reducing the deer population.

Some efforts were discontinued when CWD was discovered in counties far removed from the original CWD management zone. Instead, the DNR imposed bans on feeding deer and transporting deer carcasses between CWD-affected and non-affected counties.

“We know CWD kills deer but is it enough to slow down the population growth?” he said. “What is CWD’s prevalence rate impact on the population? That could be used to determine hunting regulations in the future but, if nothing else, it lets us know what impact CWD, predation and habitat have on deer.”

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