Friday, September 20, 2024
By Greg Seubert
Shoulder mounts of two illegally harvested white-tailed deer have a new home.
The mounts of the 10- and 12-point bucks, shot in Waupaca County in 2016 and 2017, respectively, are now on display at Mosquito Hill Nature Center in New London.
Local taxidermists Buzz Jossie and Ron Worthey donated the taxidermy for the mounts. Jeff Knorr, one of four state Department of Natural Resources conservation wardens covering Waupaca County, contacted them after investigating one of the cases. Kaitlin Kernosky, another Waupaca County warden, looked into the other case.
Knorr’s case involved the 10-pointer.
Taxidermist Ron Worthey donated the shoulder mount for this 12-point buck that was illegally shot two years ago in Waupaca County. The mount is now on display at Mosquito Hill Nature Center in New London.“This deer was shot by a hunter in the Readfield area during the 2017 archery season,” he said. “He had shot this deer and trailed it to the neighboring property owners’ land. He shot it with archery equipment. When he went to the neighbor for permission to keep tracking the deer, the neighbor denied him access to the land. The hunter called me to see if I could get involved with helping recover his deer. I told him that unfortunately, that’s not anything that the wardens get involved in.
“He was concerned that the landowner would go out and look for the deer and recover it,” he said. “We started looking into whether the landowner had a license and it so happened that that night, after the contact with the hunter, that landowner registered a buck well after hunting hours. The next day, I went to talk to the landowner and found out that the landowner and a relative went out after the hunter came and asked for permission, went out, found the deer. He used his archery deer authorization to register this deer and was going to mount it as if he was the one who shot it.”
The fact that the landowner registered a deer caught Knorr’s attention.
“We had a conversation and the landowner saw the error of his ways and agreed to relinquish the deer back to the state,” he said. “He started to tell me the history of his neighborhood and people hunting near his (property) line. He turned it around and had concerns that maybe this hunter was hunting on his property and actually shot this deer in the landowners’ woods. I assured him that I had no evidence of that.”
Knorr’s investigation led him to the location where the deer was shot.
“The hunter was using mineral blocks and shell corn near his tree stand,” he said. “Waupaca County, for the last several years, has been in a deer baiting and feeding ban. He should have never been using the bait in Waupaca County and got the explanation that the mineral blocks were for squirrels and the corn must have accidentally fallen out of a backpack. It was illegal for him to be hunting there and he was issued a citation for hunting over an illegal bait site. He went to court and the court confiscated the deer because of illegal hunting activity.”
The hunter received a $387 fine, but the landowner wasn’t cited, according to Knorr.
“He decided it was in his best interest not to get himself in trouble,” he said. “He began to cooperate and wanted to make sure that if we looked into this deer that it was going to used for educational purposes. He said, ‘I didn’t shoot it, I just through this was the right procedure.’”
Jossie operates Buzz Jossie Taxidermy in rural Manawa and mounted the 10-pointer.
“We need law enforcement if our natural resources are going to stay as nice as they are,” he said. “People need to support and respect people that do that. This was a chance where I could help out a little bit.”
Jossie said he would have charged about $425 for the mount.
“The idea was that people could see it,” he said. “The story Jeff told me I thought was typical. They say people are friends for 51 weeks out of the year and then there’s deer season. It would be nice if people would avoid that and do things the way they should.”
“If they’re deer that we encounter through the course of our work, those get sent down to Madison to be used for educational purposes or sold at public auction,” Knorr said. “Because of the local significance of this deer, the unique story and the size of it, I just thought it would be a better thing to try to have it mounted. I reached out to local taxidermists in the Wild Rose, Waupaca, Manawa area to see if anyone was willing to help us out.”
A hunter shot Kernosky’s deer Nov. 11, 2016, at night near Manawa.
“An individual had come home from going to the grocery store,” she said. “He had a large field right behind his house. As he was turning in, his headlights spotted this deer in the field. This is a deer that had been chased by everyone in the neighborhood, so it was one he was familiar with. He ran into the house, grabbed his .243 rifle and made a decision that he was going to harvest the deer at night.
Buzz Jossie of rural Manawa donated the shoulder mount of this illegally harvested 10-point buck.“The archery season would have been open during the day,” she added. “After he shot this deer, he took his archery equipment and shot an arrow into the side of the deer to make it look as if it was an archery-killed buck instead of a gun buck.”
Kernosky found out about the deer the next day.
“I had received a call from a concerned citizen in the area regarding the deer,” she said. “Upon speaking with the individual and looking at a few different factors, he did admit that he shot it with a firearm and came clean about the story and what had actually happened. He claimed he wanted to end a neighborhood feud over this deer. Initially, criminal charges were filed against the individual. The end result was $687 in citations. The individual lost his hunting, fishing and trapping privileges for a year. The court confiscated the buck and the rifle and arrow which were used. The firearm will go toward educational purposes, probably for hunter safety classes or something along those lines.”
Worthey, who operates Action Arts Taxidermy out of his Waupaca home, mounted the deer.
“I was pleased to have them call and ask if I’d be winning to donate my time to do this,” he said. “I was more than happy to do it for them. I guess I wanted to get the information out there to follow the laws and don’t do anything that you’re not supposed to do. Get a license and hunt the way you should. If this was legally taken, a family could have this trophy in their house.”
Knorr and Kernosky said they investigate poaching cases each year.
“Between the four wardens in Waupaca County, we’re constantly dealing with baiting issues and people shooting deer at night, whether from their homes or in vehicles,” Knorr said. “There’s no lack of work going on for us and it’s not the easiest thing to address.”
“I would say we see quite a bit of cases similar to this where somebody either uses their headlights to spotlight a deer and shoot it with a firearm or they actually use a hand-held spotlight and shine fields and shoot at night with a firearm,” Kernosky said. “They must (think they can get away with it) because they attempt to do it. There are people that keep a close eye on their neighborhood and their properties that give us a call when they hear a suspicious shot or see something suspicious, which is a good thing.”
Mosquito Hill naturalist Mike Hibbard was on hand as the deer heads were hung on a wall Sept. 13.
“We’ll have them on display here and there’ll be a write-up accompanying each head to explain the circumstances of how they were taken illegally,” he said. “The reason we want to have it here is to make people aware of illegal activities that take place and let people know that if they see any illegal activity to call the (DNR) tip line or contact their local warden.
“We’d like people to hunt legally to protect the resource. We have thousands of people come through that look at the displays, so this will be a chance for the general public to be able to realize that some deer are taken illegally,” he said. “We want to try to eliminate that.”
“Anyone can come here, see the story on it and think, ‘Boy, that’s too bad, that could have been somebody’s first deer that they harvested,’” Knorr said. “That’s why we have wardens, to catch people that are doing this or make sure that people have a fair shake at getting an animal like this.”
