Outdoors with Bob: Higher temps could make lake access difficult PDF Print E-mail
Thursday, 11 March 2010 10:49
If you could measure the length of the hard water fishing season by the amount of ice on most of Lake Winnebago, the 26” plus inches I encountered last week Wednesday while fishing suggest it could go to the end of March.

The problems with the higher temps will be at the access points around the lake.

Unfortunately, my angling experience wasn’t too great. I was out with a buddy off of Brothertown, starting around the two mile marker. It was a classic example of “You should have been here yesterday.” The area we first fished produced big numbers of white bass, a couple of perch and occasional walleye or sauger only two days earlier. Our four hours, including moving twice, got us one small walleye and one keeper white bass. After talking to others who were on the ice, this was an above average catch for that morning.

As of April 1, Warden Disher reminds us that the daily bag will be five fish (pike), not to include more than one sauger. The screw-up in Madison last year will hopefully not be repeated.

While the WDNR is touting its new $2 million program to get a better handle on deer management and numbers, Russ Decker isn’t buying it. The Senate Majority leader from Weston said “Giving more money to the same failed wildlife management team is sending good money after bad. I’m skeptical that a team who didn’t even see the problem coming can come up with a good plan to fix a problem they didn’t think existed until hunters spelled it out for them.”

According to Richard Moore in the Lakeland Times, Decker isn’t happy with funding people in Madison cubicles rather than working with people who are out in the woods. Decker added that car-deer collision data should have been  included in the deer estimate numbers years ago.

I received a chart and e-mail from a Conservation Congress delegate from Manitowoc County that indicated the 2009 buck bow harvest in DMU 64 was 39% of the total buck harvest. That would explain the lack of buck sightings for some gun hunters in 2009.
Meanwhile, the DNR deer hunter survey effort for the fall of 2009 had hoped for 5,000 participants to get an idea of deer abundance. In actuality, it received information from 19,900 hunters.

97,000 folks applied for preference points or a harvest permit to eventually bag a bear in Wisconsin. At present, to get a harvest permit, you will need seven points for Zone A, nine points for Zone B, four points for Zone C and eight points for Zone D.

I didn’t hunt during the early goose season last fall. The total harvest for the early hunt was 15,000 birds, down from 24,000 in 2008. The kill in the Exterior Zone was 31,500 down from 41,000. The breeding population present in 2009 was estimated to be 140,000 birds.
During 2009, 98 permits were issued for goose control, and 2,997 geese were culled at 31 locations.

Wisconsin not only has a successful wild turkey program, but it also has first rate turkey callers and call makers. Ted Klapperich from Kiel received a third place award for a push-button call. Ted has won awards over the years, and this year at the NWTF convention in Nashville, he scored once again.

If you are into wildlife art, you are probably familiar with Scott Zoellick. The artist from Wisconsin will be enshrined into the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward in the “legendary artist” category.

The first piece of wildlife art I ever owned featured a pair of loons that Scott brought to life. It remains one of my favorites.
In the “better late than never category,” The Nobel Prize winning international scientific panel studying global warming is seeking independent outside review for how it makes major reports. While they deny it, the scientists were brought back to some semblance of reality when significant errors were found in their reporting process.

I was down in Florida the first week of February. The weather, as it has been for some time, was much cooler than usual. One positive was that the cold snap sent manatees to warmer water sites and helped produce a record manatee population count of over 5,000, 1,200 more than ever.

Until next time, keep you hooks sharp, your feet warm and your powder dry!

Written By Bob Wilberscheid
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