Hunting season a letdown

Just got home from a hunting trip in Woodruff, WI. This year was not the year of choice for the hunting community in the Midwest. Let me put it this way:

Upon buying a hunting license for the state of Wisconsin (unit 36), I was displeased to hear that regulations restricted shooting any doe, and that hunters were only issued buck permits. I'm all for managing the herd for the sake of hunting seasons to come, but what got me bitter was the fact that last year's hunting licenses allowed hunters to buy multiple doe tags. What this means is that the Department of Natural Resources, a department under the Wisconsin State Legislature, was taking the opportunity to make some extra bucks (pun intended) by selling permits out of proportion with what the herd would allow. This particularly irked me as it was the first year that a doe is actually all I saw in the woods, besides a bear.

On top of that, this may be one of the warmest hunting seasons that hunters have seen, ever. Certainly in my lifetime. Saturday morning (the official gun-deer hunting season opener) at 4:30 a.m., the weather was 32° F. I don't have the official temperatures for that day, but you can assume it warmed up under partly cloudy conditions. Sunday morning, same time, 42° F. Monday morning, same time, 44° F. In my lifetime, I've never experienced temperatures over 20° even in the middle of the day.

You might be asking yourselves, "Isn't that a good thing? Isn't it more comfortable to hunt in not-as-cold weather?"

Hunters count on the cold and preferable snowy weather conditions to push the dear around and get them moving. In warm weather they can lay all day in one spot.

On top of the not-as-cold weather, reports on Sunday's and Monday's weather conditions called for rain, and the rain did come. Two bad things about the rain:
1.) If you had your choice of being submerged in 50° F water, or dry in -20° F weather, I would hope that you would value your dryness (trust me, I know). This is why I would rather the temperature have been under the 32° freezing point, so that any precipitation would have been snow and not soaked into our thick mass of orange.
2.) The deer probably hate rain more than we do. This was just more reason for the deer to find a nice thick to bed under for the entire day. What ensues is a cold, miserable day for a hunter who would surely see nothing.

The rest of the state of Wisconsin was on the same page as us. Local newspapers reported they only expected about 300-500 deer registrations this year, down from approx. 700 the year before, and approx. 1,000 the years before that.

Thankfully, some genius invented FM radio so that I could productively listen to the Packers vs. 49ers game on Sunday during my outdoor letdown.