The bad news:

Last year our ten-man hunting club just North of Greensburg, Louisiana noticed an overall reduction in the number of deer on our property. This year it's even worse, as has been proven by low sightings and game camera results.

We first got this 900 acre pine plantation lease in 1997 and implemented a set of rules we thought would make sense for this 'less than prime' habitat. The goal was to maintain a decent deer population and still give every member an opportunity to take some deer. We limited the doe kill to two per man, allowed no bucks under five points, and allowed no guest except minor relatives of club members (with any deer killed by the guest counting against the member's limit).

The plan worked well. Members would see deer on almost every hunt. A few members had no interest in taking a doe and never shot any. Most would kill one or two 'meat does' each season. Some members would take any buck of five points or more. Some would only take mature seven or eight-pointers. For the next fourteen years we were happy campers, with a yearly kill rate averaging twelve does and seven bucks. It's as much a social club as a deer killing club.

Then we had a sudden decline in 2011/12. Of course, we had all of the usual discussions.

- Has the maturing forest greatly diminished the available food supply? (Yes, to some extent.)

- Has coyote predation gotten worse? (We've certainly been seeing more of them in the last few years.)

- Are we taking too many does? (Seems unlikely. We took the about the same number every year for fourteen years with no adverse impact on the population.)

- What about disease?

In October, the Louisiana Wildlife & Fisheries issued a bulletin titled 'Hemorrhagic Disease Outbreak in Louisiana White-tailed Deer'. (See it here: http://www.wlf.louisiana.gov/news/36024 ) Then last week we got a report from the Forester who manages the timber on our lease, and on many other leases in the area, that the tree cutters are finding a LOT of dead deer in the woods. Yesterday a buck was killed on our lease that had sloughed hooves, a sure sign he had recently survived Hemorrhagic disease.

We have now halted the killing of does on our lease at least for this year. It's probably going to take a year or two for the herd to recover.

For those who hunt for meat as much as (or more than) big racks, we're allowing the killing of bucks of any size. Regardless, it's going to be a poor season this year and possibly next year.

The good news.

The Swamp Dragon has fed. (More on this later.)