The Whitetail deer are dying from EHD in our area. The parks dept just eliminated all leftover tags for my area and is also offering refunds if a person wants to turn in tags. So far this seems to effect whitetails only. A good freeze would help to stop the spread.
last I heard there were at least 1100 cases.I've seen 3 sickly looking deer myself while bow hunting antelope and taking the kids out for their mentor hunt.

It has hit a lot of states this year due to the drought. Michagan got it bad with at least 3000 dead. Here is a buck that was just found 20 mins from where I'm at in Ohio

Southern Wisconsin is experiencing the same thing. This was the same area where the Chronic Waste Disease (CWD) took hold and the herd was decimated. I used to live down near that area MANY years ago. It used to be just real prime deer hunting in those areas. The EDH or "blue tongue" is spread by a midge fly. Northern Wisconsin has had two good frosts already, one a real hard frost, so that should put an end to the midge flies and most of the other bugs hopefully.

Sure sorry to hear of the deer herd affected in your area. A good hard frost will slow this down for you it seems. What always makes me laugh is.. our DNR will tell you the deer is safe to eat. Yet I talked to a warden about CWD once and asked him "off the record, if you shot a CWD deer, would you eat it?" He kind of smiled and just said, I don't like venison.

I might call my friend that owns three farms down there. And ask him if he is deer hunting this year. When CWD was peaking, he refused to let his family deer hunt. He's one that believes you shoot it, you eat it. And he did not want to hunt sick deer. This should really set him off. And he's so much fun to get angry over the phone.

Reports of a lot of dead ones around here.

Missouri and Kansas has taken it on the chin also. We have found a lot of dead deer this year, that drought and very warm weather did not help the situation at all.

Wow Cayugad!
If that spreads north in WI ~ I wonder what the 3 times the expected population of wolves will eat? They'll dine okay for a while...

Here is a SE area WI link tot he EHD report
http://www.necn.com/09/14/12/Deer-disease-EHD-reported-in-southern-Wi/landing_nation.html?&apID=a23714cda8fd40e7800c99ea 06d33837


The Spooner area has a report of CWD so baiting has become illegal in the NW area there and CWD was reported in the SouthEast Region ~ Kenosha/Racine/Waukesha county too!

Link for CWD in the Shell Lake area of WI
http://www.jsonline.com/news/wiscons...150464095.html

JW

I am not sure that I can add too much to this thread, but there are certain environmental factors that create these types of issues. Yall hit the nail on the head when you spoke of the drought. Another issue is over-population of ruminants with in a given area and the biggest issue is climate change/shift. I am not a tree hugger or anything like that, but I will tell you that it is proven that the release of Carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere causes the climatic shifts. This is a cycle and a way Mother Nature cleans up a mess we make. Now the effects that we see are actually from China which is in their Industrialization period. Their population is released in the atmosphere but the jet stream carries it to the US. So, with warmer winters and high populations of ruminants coupled with drought you will see several outbreaks. Sorry to hear it is happening but until we figure out ways to minimize the global changes in climate we will continue to see this type of effects on our wildlife.

V/R
Mike

Blue tongue almost falls in cycles here in NC. The area I used to hunt would get nailed about every 5 years. We had a pretty mild winter last year but I have not seen any deer affected so far. In Virginia where I mainly hunt the deer seem healthy. They are predicting a wicked cold winter from what I have read so maybe the mite will get killed off.