The Crime of '43

Plus: the fall DNR mag, a $1.3M trail grant, and a beach-walking ticket tossed

Forrest Koslowski
September 10, 2026

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Mornin’ to the ricers. That dry stretch we spent all of last week complaining about did the wild rice a favor. Low water is exactly what manoomin wants while it's floating, and GLIFWC expects a better harvest than last year's 7,900 pounds off 50 waterways. One thing the drought didn't wreck.

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This week’s weekly:

📖 Fall DNR mag is out, Havenwoods on the cover

🚴 Vilas County River Trail lands $1.3 million grant

⚖️ Judge tosses ticket in Lake Michigan beach walk case

🏹 STORY OF THE WEEK: The Crime of '43

📖 Fall DNR mag is out, Havenwoods on the cover LINK

The fall issue of Wisconsin Natural Resources magazine is out now, and the cover goes to Havenwoods State Forest in Milwaukee, the only urban state forest in Wisconsin.
It's 237 acres and 8 miles of trail tucked inside the city, an easy escape when you don't have time to drive upnort.
Rest of the issue: why deer hunting carries the water on conservation here, the science behind fall colors, traditional archery, and Scenic Byways worth a color drive. Brook trout, black bears and PFAS work in there too. Print subscription runs $8.97.

🚴 Vilas County River Trail lands $1.3 million grant LINK

The Town of Cloverland landed a $1.3 million grant from the state DOT to start building the River Trail, the 10-mile connection between the Heart of Vilas trails in St. Germain and the Three-Eagle Trail in Eagle River.
That covers 80% of Phase 1, which is signage along old Highway 70 plus 1.9 miles of new paved trail off the road. Great Headwaters Trails is raising the rest and paying for the engineering.
The Heart of Vilas system already brings about $26 million a year to the towns it runs through. Work won't start until 2029, hey. Their SepTimber Ride goes this Saturday, brewery to winery.

⚖️ Judge tosses ticket in Lake Michigan beach walk case LINK

A Milwaukee County judge tossed the $313 trespassing ticket Paul Florsheim got for walking the Lake Michigan shoreline past Atwater Beach in Shorewood. The walk was protected by the state's public trust doctrine, he ruled.
Judge J.D. Watts wrote that the lakebed up to the ordinary high water mark belongs to the state, so walking below that line doesn't touch a landowner's rights. The municipal judge had gone the other way on a 1923 case about Lake Winnebago.
One circuit court ruling doesn't bind other courts, so this isn't settled statewide. Midwest Environmental Advocates wants that 1923 decision overturned and points to Michigan and Indiana, where walking below the mark is already legal. Shorewood hasn't decided whether to appeal.

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🏹 STORY OF THE WEEK: The Crime of '43 LINK

Archery and crossbow open Saturday, and in a good chunk of this state there have never been more deer to point an arrow at.

The DNR's own biologists say it flat out. Across much of the Northeast District, deer numbers are the highest they have ever been. Six counties up there posted their best buck harvest since 1980. Down south, Rock, Jefferson, Walworth and Waukesha all set all-time records for bucks.

A lot of that is twelve straight mild winters on the Winter Severity Index. Twelve. And we spent last week on NOAA giving better than 90% odds of another one.

Here's the catch, and it's the whole story. Of those six Northeast counties with record buck harvests, exactly one cracked the top ten for antlerless. The biologist's words: an abundant herd, and "less willingness to harvest antlerless deer."

Everybody wants a buck. The herd needs does gone.

Wisconsin has been having this exact argument for 83 years.

Winter of 1942, the northern forest had been browsed down to dirt and deer were starving in it. Aldo Leopold, sitting on the Conservation Commission, said the only real fix was shooting does. The Commission split the difference instead, a short buck season and a long doe season run the same everywhere, which Leopold considered the worst option on the table.

About 130,000 deer came out of the woods that fall, roughly half of them antlerless. Hunters called it the Crime of '43 and held it against Leopold until he died in 1948, over a season he had argued against. His biographer Curt Meine put it plainly: shooting does "was considered heresy."

What's changed is the reason. Last year those 18 southern counties turned up more than 1,500 CWD-positive deer, about a hundred more than the year before, and the DNR's Southwest study found that where prevalence runs high the herd is already shrinking on its own. Leopold was arguing about browse. We're arguing about a prion.

Season runs Sept. 12 through Jan. 3, later in some units, and bonus antlerless tags are still sitting unsold in plenty of them.

One scouting note before Saturday. The Sandhill acorn survey had white oak excellent last fall and red oak at basically nothing, so look up before you hang a stand.

Harness, haul line, three points of contact.

Now get out 'der!

WISCAMPSIN WEEKLY POLL

Last Week's Trivia Check

We asked why oaks bother with those enormous, unpredictable mast years. This one got you. Half of you went for the tannic acid answer, which sounds right and isn't, and only 24% landed on what the tree is actually up to.

The Correct Answer: To overwhelm local wildlife (squirrels, mice, deer) with so much food that uneaten acorns can actually sprout.

The Takeaway: It's called predator satiation, and it's about as cold-blooded as a tree gets. Lean years keep the squirrel and mouse populations down. Then, somehow synchronized across hundreds of miles, every oak in the woods drops at once. Everything with teeth eats until it physically cannot eat another acorn, and the thousands left over are the ones that become the next stand of oaks. The tree isn't feeding the deer. It's outlasting them.

This Week's Trivia

September is harvest time for the state fruit, and Wisconsin grows better than 60% of the country's cranberries. Which is a good time to mention that the commercials have been lying to you. Those flooded beds you see are a harvest trick. The vines spend the whole rest of the year somewhere else entirely.

What unique physical feature allows ripe cranberries to instantly bob to the surface when growers flood the marshes for harvest?

Give it a gut check and click a response below:

A review from the trail… Assigned homework by our own readers. Travels with Charley it is.

Well, how'd we do this week?

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