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    Patrick Durkin

    Outdoors writer/editor, weekly columnist for 17 Wisconsin newspapers, regular contributor to American Hunter magazine, and former editor of Deer & Deer Hunting magazine.

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    Wildlife Management

    Would Hunting Grizzlies Reduce Conflict with Humans?

    Patrick Durkin

    Dec 9, 2019

    Whether you’re hunting whitetails, trapping wolves, or simply potting blackbirds to protect your strawberry patch, you notice when your prey changes its behaviors and movements to avoid death or capture.
    Can hunting also “scare grizzlies straight,” making the bears less likely to cause conflicts with people and their property? After grizzly bears were temporarily removed from the federal Endangered Species List in 2018, Wyoming proposed a tightly...

    Wildlife Management

    Wounding Loss: How Agencies Account for Unrecovered Big Game

    Patrick Durkin

    Nov 13, 2019

    Wildlife agencies could more easily assess their state’s elk, deer, or pronghorn populations if every animal alive in August fell into one of two groups by Christmas: those registered as hunters’ kills, and those destined to see spring’s fawning or calving seasons.
    It’s never that easy, of course, because legal hunting harvest isn’t the only drain on a herd’s bottom line. The long list of other possible deductions includes disease, injury...

    Wildlife Management

    Helping Biologists by Invading Animals’ Privacy

    Patrick Durkin

    Aug 20, 2019

    Pinpoint data from ever-shrinking GPS devices are giving biologists increasingly detailed information on when, where, and how wired-up wildlife move about their worlds.
    But scientists are just starting to interpret what all of it means. The optimists among them think they’ll one day unravel much of that GPS-driven data and coordinates to explain why birds and mammals make their many mysterious moves. For now, though, they often can only marvel at...

    Natural History

    Isle Royale: Save Wolves or Let Them ‘Die For Science?’

    Patrick Durkin

    Apr 12, 2019

    The National Park Service released four gray wolves on Isle Royale in northwestern Lake Superior in October 2018 to start rebuilding the island’s severely inbred packs.
    Three months later, a female from the foursome fled across Superior’s ice toward its home turf on the mainland 15 miles away. Was that wolf’s departure saying something about the NPS’s “genetic rescue” effort?
    After all, one reason the NPS approved a five-year, $2 million plan to...

    Wildlife Management

    Baiting: Do the Consequences Outweigh the Benefits?

    Patrick Durkin

    Feb 5, 2019

    Most hunters who pour bait for deer or bears don’t intend harm, assuming it’s legal. They just want to boost their odds of seeing game, and perhaps better assess an animal’s sex or size before shooting.
    Baiters certainly aren’t hauling and dumping food to intentionally spread disease, spark spats with neighbors, boost their prey’s fertility rates, reduce their quarry’s daylight feeding forays, increase predation on fawns and ground-nesters, or...

    Wildlife Management

    Coyotes Kill Deer, Not Deer Herds

    Patrick Durkin

    Dec 10, 2018

    Most deer hunters can agree on one thing about coyotes: They can be hell on fawns, muley or whitetail, especially during a fawn’s first six weeks of life. Researchers in some Southeastern states report fawn “recruitment” rates as low as 16 to 25 percent, meaning 1.6 to 2.5 fawns per 10 does surviving their first year.
    But here’s something most deer hunters hate to hear: No matter how many coyotes you shoot, they’ll still be hell on fawns.
    Coyotes...

    Wildlife Management

    Hunters vs. Wildlife Biologists: Who Says There’s Too Many Deer?

    Patrick Durkin

    Sep 19, 2018

    No matter how carefully state-agency wildlife biologists use computerized models to convert elk and deer data into population estimates, one outcome remains certain: Many hunters dismiss the numbers as high, and question the agency’s motives if it boosts antlerless tags to reduce the herd.
    That’s nothing new. Hunters and biologists long ago made “deer wars”part of North America’s hunting culture. During the early 1940s, Wisconsin hunters...

    Wildlife Management

    Grizzly Hunt Opponents Pocket Tags, Prove Nothing

    Patrick Durkin

    Sep 18, 2018

    Non-hunters who drew a Wyoming grizzly tag but intend to pocket it in hopes of “saving” a bear will likely have the same trivial impact on the hunt and grizzly population as deer hunters who think they’ll “save” the herd by buying and burning doe tags.
    After all, every objective review of Wyoming’s pending two-tiered, 22-tag grizzly season finds it will have little or no impact on the bears’ population, assuming the season starts as planned...