A hunter in Wisconsin made a potential $6,000 mistake when she believed she was shooting at a deer and wound up killing two elk instead.
Salina Ann Beltran of Mukwonago was hunting from a tree stand on private property in Rusk County last month as her fiancé hunted elsewhere on the property, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Ladysmith News reported Friday.
Beltran, 41, spotted what she thought was a buck deer walking towards her, telling wardens “I saw it was a fork antlered and its head was down.”
When the animal turned broadside, she fired a shot. The animal didn’t react, so she fired twice more, prompting the animal to turn back and disappear from sight. Moments later, she looked through her rifle scope and an animal came into view.
“All I saw was the body and it looked like the same animal,” Beltran said in the warden reports. She took four more shots.
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After waiting 45 minutes, she began the process of tracking the animal and came upon a fork-horn bull elk and then noticed a spike elk laying about 40 yards away. She immediately recognized her errors and called in her fiancé Jeff Anderson, also of Mukwonago.
They went to the Department of Natural Resources service center in Ladysmith and filed a report about the mistakes.
Court records showed that Beltran was issued a $6,152.50 citation for hunting elk during closed season, a non-traffic ordinance violation, the Journal Sentinel reported. She is scheduled to appear in court Jan. 14.
The report stated that Beltran and Anderson were in tears upon leaving the DNR office.
Fortunately, the animals did not go to waste. One elk was donated to the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission for distribution to tribal members in northern Wisconsin. The other was butchered locally and distributed to food pantries.
While there has been other incidents where hunters have mistakenly shot elk in Wisconsin, this is the first time a hunter has mistakenly shot two elk.
DNR chief conservation warden Todd Schaller told the Journal Sentinel the incident highlights two points about hunting and safety.
“The first is to be sure of your target and what’s beyond,” he said. “The other is, if you make a mistake, be honest and contact the department.”
Photo of an elk courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.