Many Minnesotans will be waking up early tomorrow morning to go find their trophy buck, as tomorrow is the opening day for firearms season. Before any harvesting takes place, hunters in Crow Wing County will need to take their deer to the chronic wasting disease sampling station.

The station is located in the new CWD management zone that has been put in place by the Minnesota DNR in an effort to stop the spread of the disease. In the last two fall seasons, the DNR tested 9,000 deer around the area and has now set up deer permit area 604 in north-central Minnesota. At the management zone, DNR members will extract two lymph nodes from the deer, and then those lymph nodes will be sent to a lab in Colorado where testing will be done for CWD.

“If a hunter shoots a deer in 604, they must wait for the test results to come back before transporting that entire carcass out of the zone; however, they can use a meat processor that is in the zone, and they can also quarter that animal and take the meat with them and leave the remains behind,” said Minnesota DNR Wildlife Health Program Supervisor Michelle Carstensen. “That’s why we set up the adopted dumpster program, so we’re really giving hunters that option that if they don’t want to wait around for test results they can process that animal and go within the same day.”

Overall, the project is set up to prevent the spread any further of CWD.

“It allows for us to do more intensive surveillance and offers hunters in the area more liberal regulations, so they can harvest more deer, and we can both come at this by reducing densities, doing intense monitoring, and really assess what impact this might be happening in the deer population, at least locally in Brainerd,” said Carstensen.

The test results for CWD will take about seven days to return, and if the results come back positive the Minnesota DNR will contact the hunter directly. Hunters will need to provide the township, section, and range of their harvest location when sampling their deer at the Brainerd DNR office.

By — Chaz Mootz