Wisconsin Whitetail Deer Facts

White-tail Deer Facts

Wisconsin DNR

Fast Facts

• Adult deer can run as fast as 40 miles per hour and swim as fast as 13 miles per hour.


• Nine states, including Wisconsin, have claimed the white-tailed deer as their state animal.


• White-tailed deer are native to all three American continents and occupy suitable habitat from Alaska all the way to the Amazon River in South America.


• In velvet, a white-tail deer's antlers can grow as much as ½ inch per day.
  
• Female white-tail deer often begin breeding before they are two years old and typically give birth to one to three fawns per year.


• Wisconsin is home to more than 1.5 million wild white-tail deer.


• The white-tailed deer fall breeding season - otherwise known as the rut - is the most likely time of year to encounter deer on the road. Dawn and dusk are the deer's most active times of the day.

Deer Hunting in Wisconsin

• Wisconsin boasts the largest single season deer harvest ever recorded: 615,293 in the year 2000.


• Deer hunting continues to grow. In 1966 517,225 deer hunting licenses were sold and 116,048 deer were harvested. In 2006, license sales grew to 904,003 total licenses and hunters harvested 507,224 deer.


• The 12th edition of the Boone and Crockett Club's Records of North American Big Game lists Wisconsin as the top state in terms of entries of white-tailed deer with trophy antlers with 627 entries.

In the Last Decade

• Deer hunting has contributed approximately 1 billion dollars to the state's economy annually.
  
• More than 700,000 deer hunters have participated in deer hunting annually and harvested an average of 482,645 deer.