MarkDarvin
Well-Known Member
Uncle Ted weighs in.
-
The forum has been upgraded to support both light and dark themes. Click here for directions.
Are we ready to come to terms with CWD?
- Thread starter MarkDarvin
- Start date
Mennoniteman
Well-Known Member
Wow, he leaves nothing to the imagination as to where he stands on this issue.
But what's becoming more obvious as time goes on is that the real world evidence that I have observed agrees with him. Myself and several of my friends have our hunting spreads located inside the main Pennsylvania designated CWD area, and yet none of us, or anyone else that we know, have ever observed anything that looks like CWD?
I always thought that because biologists say it's real, CWD has to be real, and we are the more fortunate ones who just have had all the luck of not being in those bad areas. Surely a reputable state biologist with a doctorate wouldn't sell out their integrity to special interest groups?
But more and more we begin to wonder, do those bad CWD areas with "readily observable deer fatalities" really exist anywhere?
But what's becoming more obvious as time goes on is that the real world evidence that I have observed agrees with him. Myself and several of my friends have our hunting spreads located inside the main Pennsylvania designated CWD area, and yet none of us, or anyone else that we know, have ever observed anything that looks like CWD?
I always thought that because biologists say it's real, CWD has to be real, and we are the more fortunate ones who just have had all the luck of not being in those bad areas. Surely a reputable state biologist with a doctorate wouldn't sell out their integrity to special interest groups?
But more and more we begin to wonder, do those bad CWD areas with "readily observable deer fatalities" really exist anywhere?
MarkDarvin
Well-Known Member
I think CWD enabled the game managers to do what loose hunting limits could not, and that is kill a bunch of extra deer. The one thing I can’t get my head around is how we got to this point of too many deer in so many areas?
Are there areas with too many deer, and by what measure is that judgement made? My opinion of too many deer and a MN state forester are wildly different.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Are there areas with too many deer, and by what measure is that judgement made? My opinion of too many deer and a MN state forester are wildly different.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Mennoniteman
Well-Known Member
Mark, great topic and questions; Years ago I bought a heavily hunted large acreage and then walked it with a wildlife manager. He observed; you've got the best turkey hunting in the county, but the worst deer hunting, there's one deer to 500 acres. So I started a journey of habitat management, and the next several years there were a few deer, which increased each year. I spent most of my efforts on habitat and ignored herd balancing, after all, the numbers were low and hunting pressure was heavy out around, so I ignored the rising numbers. I probably thought the concept of "too many deer" was a bit of a myth.
But slowly and surely, almost invisibly, the condition of "too many deer" that you speak of crept upon us, as I tried fruitlessly to get responsible people to cull does, but they would come and shoot only button bucks, until there were roaming herds eating everything in sight and it was too late to fix it easily. Too much land, too many deer, not enough food, no way to harvest the large quantities of does that needed to be removed, and the available hunters only wanting to shoot a large buck. Finally I was forced admit an emergency, and to take matters into my own hands, getting a large quantity of dmap tags and do some serious herd reduction myself. My earlier lack of comprehension and action on "too many deer" was bad in many ways and took some serious effort to fix.
So yes, the situation of "too many deer" can be very real, and in my opinion it is just as bad as too few deer. For us the measure of judgment was browse lines and everything edible being eaten. However, this measure of judgement is way too far down the road of deer management, a situation where you can't get enough of average hunters with tags into the woods to fix it anymore. A few shots, a few deer harvested, and the large herd just circles around into thicker cover until the hunters leave again, still way over populated.
Thinking of the concept of neighboring hunters balancing your herd, deer are way more localized than most managers give credit, and if a property has the best food, and cover, most of the "too many deer" aren't going to go over to the neighbors overhunted property to get shot. So I understand that you are posing this question as a public land question, and I'm answering kind-of as a private land question, but are the two really that different? Public land also has areas of good cover, and open woods "no cover" areas that give managers challenges. The most drastic browse lines I've ever seen were on public land in Maryland. Still, is using the CWD excuse to manage legit over population of deer a good solution?
yoderjac
Well-Known Member
We started out with an overabundance of deer. We purchased a pine farm where the canopy had just closed. It supported many more deer a few years earlier when it was in early succession. It was bad enough that when I would mow a clover field. Deer would come out of the pines and eat clover at one end of the field while was looping toward the other. The would feed until I looped back around and got within about 50 yards and they would then reluctantly retreat to the pines. By the time I was headed the other direction for the next pass, they would come back out and feed.
We are in a DMAP program that provides free antlerless tags good any day of the season. We collect data and samples from every harvest for the biologist. Our DMAP goal was REDUCE for many years. Then we got a triple whammy. First, we had an acorn crop failure. That meant our food plots were the only game in town. Deer had to feed during daylight in spite of hunting pressure. We harvested about twice the number of female deer that season than our average. We then got heavy ice that lasted that winter. Deer had trouble finding winter food that year. Finally, pictures of coyotes which had been very rare up until then, had a huge spike and we were getting both day an night pictures of them almost daily.
Our game camera survey went way down. The state biologist only changed our goal from Reduce to Stabilize, not increase. We internally chose to limit female harvest that year. Since, we have not focused on harvesting does for management, but simply permitted hunters to shoot any does they want for meat. Our camera survey showed our numbers slowly recovered to a reasonable level.
Unchecked, deer numbers can increase geometrically quite quickly if the habitat permits. It takes constant monitoring and management to keep a deer herd in balance. And what "in-balance" means changes as habitat changes. After thinning and managing small clear-cuts in early succession with fire, our pine farm can support more deer than when we first purchased it.
We don't have reports of CWD in our county yet, but a county away is a watch zone and 2 counties away is a hot zone. Time will tell how well it is managed here. We are fairly late to the party, so I hope our state has learned from watching other states.
We are in a DMAP program that provides free antlerless tags good any day of the season. We collect data and samples from every harvest for the biologist. Our DMAP goal was REDUCE for many years. Then we got a triple whammy. First, we had an acorn crop failure. That meant our food plots were the only game in town. Deer had to feed during daylight in spite of hunting pressure. We harvested about twice the number of female deer that season than our average. We then got heavy ice that lasted that winter. Deer had trouble finding winter food that year. Finally, pictures of coyotes which had been very rare up until then, had a huge spike and we were getting both day an night pictures of them almost daily.
Our game camera survey went way down. The state biologist only changed our goal from Reduce to Stabilize, not increase. We internally chose to limit female harvest that year. Since, we have not focused on harvesting does for management, but simply permitted hunters to shoot any does they want for meat. Our camera survey showed our numbers slowly recovered to a reasonable level.
Unchecked, deer numbers can increase geometrically quite quickly if the habitat permits. It takes constant monitoring and management to keep a deer herd in balance. And what "in-balance" means changes as habitat changes. After thinning and managing small clear-cuts in early succession with fire, our pine farm can support more deer than when we first purchased it.
We don't have reports of CWD in our county yet, but a county away is a watch zone and 2 counties away is a hot zone. Time will tell how well it is managed here. We are fairly late to the party, so I hope our state has learned from watching other states.
MarkDarvin
Well-Known Member
In MN, the state pushed the “CWD will cross to humans” story too hard. They had landfills refusing to take carcasses out of fear that they would cause CJD in the workers. They also ran stories that anywhere prions were dropped in the form of droppings, those prions could be taken up by any plant grown in that soil and transmitted to humans.
That was their ‘eat more venison’ campaign. They had to quit with that when they realized that rendered all corn and bean processed food ingredients as CWD transmission vectors.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
CWD has been in deer for more years than anyone probably knows and will be here in some fashion when roaches and coyotes are all thats left. Funny how when the funding dried up for methods such as sharpshooters that seemed to slow down.Also killing all the deer so they didn't hasn't worked much better
Mennoniteman
Well-Known Member
That's exactly what we have observed, CWD is the result of too many deer. As in, too many deer crowded together in one pen. It's nature's way of identifying what appears to be a major overpopulation of deer (a pen with 20-30 deer on 1 acre) and providing a solution (CWD) that lowers the deer population back to a natural level. In Pennsylvania, CWD has always been inside, close to, originated from, or been associated in some way with deer farms. Deer are wild creatures that can't be domesticated, and probably should not be farmed.
Similar threads
