Even after 50 years of participating in the Wisconsin gun deer hunt, outdoors editor Paul A. Smith still looks forward to the season’s opening. This 2025 edition runs Nov. 22 to 30.

• Wisconsin’s deer hunting landscape has changed significantly over the last 50 years.
• The state’s deer population is at a record high, with more deer now in southern Wisconsin.
• Hunting regulations, hunter tactics, and the number of hunters have all evolved over the decades.
• Chronic wasting disease is a modern concern for hunters that did not exist 50 years ago.

This year will mark my 50th gun deer hunting season in Wisconsin.

And while five decades is a substantial chuck of time, it’s a relatively small fraction of the state’s regulated deer hunting, dating to 1851, according to the Department of Natural Resources.

And it’s infinitesimal when you acknowledge Native Americans have pursued deer for thousands of years in the area we now call Wisconsin.

But my personal experience and the much longer history of deer hunting in this region have one thing in common: change.

I clearly recall my first deer hunt near my boyhood home in Racine County. The area was “shotgun only” in those days.

Racine County didn’t have many deer in that era. But no matter the low odds of success, to me the chance to hunt deer was priceless. My father answered my pleas and obtained permission for us to hunt on a farm in Yorkville.

In the days before that season we went to R&W Supply in downtown Racine and bought paper slug cartridges to shoot out of our 12-gauge shotguns. The smoothbores were primarily used for ring-necked pheasant hunting.

I could barely sleep the night before that first season and I’m sure it was one of the rare days of my youth when I was up before the rest of my family.

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We set out before dawn, wearing red stocking caps and carrying a knapsack with a couple sandwiches and a thermos of hot chocolate, and set up along a fenceline. To the east was a picked corn field, to the west an oak woodlot.

As the day brightened, I watched every leaf of corn flip in a light breeze. Could it be a deer?

But by noon no whitetail had been seen.

The highlight – and believe me it was exciting – was the finding of a deer track frozen in mud along the field edge.

I would end up hunting more than 10 deer seasons before I’d put a tag on a deer.

Over 50 seasons I’ve been privileged to hunt from suburban woodlots to coulees in the Driftless Area to pine forests in Jackson County to mixed farmland areas in Marquette and Waupaca counties to the big woods of northern Wisconsin.

So many things have changed over the decades, from the deer population to the hunting regulations to hunter tactics and preferences.

Not only is the deer population higher than at any point in my life, it has substantially shifted in abundance to the south.