Outdoors Blog

Category: Chronic wasting disease

We knew this was coming, right?

Perhaps the most emotional discussion coming out of the chronic wasting disease discussion is the ban on deer baiting and how it will affect the people who grow and sell ag products for deer bait.

It's a pretty sad tale. There are people across Michigan who have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into this year's bait sales, and an outright ban on baiting will ruin some of them.

It's not a good time to make decisions that can wreak that kind of financial havoc. Michigan is already in enough trouble without adding more bankruptcies.

But given what we know about how devastating chronic wasting disease is, it's difficult to understand how any good business plan could include that feast-or-famine strategy.

Michigan drew up its CWD action plan in 2002. For six years, a public document -- available to anyone -- has stated plainly that when CWD reached Michigan, baiting would be severely restricted.

You'll notice I said "when" and not "if." The scientists and wildlife managers never wavered on that point. They beat the drum early and often. CWD is coming. It's coming. It's coming.

Despite knowing all that, there were still people out there with all their eggs in the deer-bait basket and no contingency plan.

Now CWD is here, and the lines are drawn. The state's decision-makers have to decide whether to protect the deer herd or to protect the people who chose not to hear the drumbeat.

Maybe there's a compromise. Maybe there isn't.

But if the Natural Resources Commission sides with the deer herd, it won't be hard to understand why.

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Category: Wildlife

Invasives strike again

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- It's a fishing tale that packs a wallop so strong it broke the jaw of a southeastern Arkansas teen and covered him in fish blood and guts.

Seth Russell, 15, of Crossett, was cruising Lake Chicot on a large inner tube towed by a boat when a silver Asian carp leaped from the water and smacked him in the face. Seth was knocked unconscious.

"He doesn't remember anything at all," the boy's mother, Linda Russell, said last week. "He was laughing, and the next thing he remembers, he is waking in a hospital."

The teen has had oral surgery to wire several teeth together and still experiences back pain that doctors attribute to whiplash from the high-speed collision, his mother said.

He's not the only one who's has a run-in with the "flying" Silver Asian carp.

"They do not fly, but they are quite good jumpers," said Carole Engle, director of aquaculture and the fisheries center at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. "Over the past year, we have had some calls about fish jumping and causing injuries on Lake Chicot.

"Their jumping behavior is a problem, and their population appears to be growing there," Engle said.

Silver Asian carp were first imported to the United States in the 1970s. Catfish farmers brought them here to remove algae and other suspended matter from their ponds. The Environmental Protection Agency started a program allowing cities to use the fish to help clean the water in sewer treatment plant ponds.

Category: Wildlife

Another bad acronym for Michigan deer: EHD

The Michigan DNR said today that it was epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) that killed more than 50 deer along the Clinton River in Oakland and Macomb counties in recent weeks.

The viral disease is a nasty one, transmitted by teensie little flies -- midges -- about 1/10-inch long. It causes confusion, progressive weakness and often death.

It has appeared in Michigan before, most recently in 2006 along the Allegan River. Michigan had outbreaks in 1955 and 1974, too, and it has been seen in other states. Indiana has been losing deer to it in the past several years.

It usually comes in late summer and dies off when frost kills the midges.

Category: Deer hunting

CWD news could raise new questions

Let's not muster up a parade just yet, but the news on chronic wasting disease isn't all bad.

Steve Halstead, the Michigan Department of Agriculture's top veterinarian, says he expects tests for the four remaining suspect deer from the Kent County herd to come back negative.

If you've been following the CWD developments, you remember that a Kent County deer tested positive last week and all 50 or so deer from that deer farm were killed and tested.

All negative.

That left the four deer that were shipped off that facility in the previous weeks.

They too have been destroyed, and test results for them are due any minute now.

If they come back negative, the scientists' attention turns toward one single question:

How?

As Halstead said, it's not likely that the single Kent County deer had one-in-a-zillion bad luck and developed CWD spontaneously.

That disease came from somewhere, and it's likely that taxidermy and illegal movement of captive deer will get the microsope next.

For now the trail seems to have gone cold. That's probably better than the alternative.

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Category: Deer hunting

Is CWD spreading?

If you were to compile a map of Michigan's chronic wasting disease areas, you'd obviously start with a dot on Kent County, where a 3-year-old captive doe was confirmed positive last week.

Then what?

Well, Michigan Department of Agriculture officials confirmed this morning that in recent weeks, the owner of that facility moved a few animals to other deer farms in other counties, namely Montcalm and Osceola.

So make Kent County, where Grand Rapids sits, the epicenter. That's where one case was confirmed and several other deer were shipped. Add those other two counties as "definite maybes".

Montcalm abuts Kent to the northeast, and Osceola is a little farther north, past Big Rapids.

Watch them.

If the news gets worse, that's where it will come from.

Category: Deer hunting

More on chronic wasting disease

If you've been following the horrible news that Michigan is now a chronic wasting disease state, you know that the Department of Natural Resources has been very aggressive in its efforts to stop the spread of the insidious, fatal disease.

The 50 or so deer in the Kent County facility where the disease turned up have been destroyed. A testing program for road-killed and hunter-killed wild deer in the area has been established.

All 500+ of Michigan's captive deer and elk facilities are under quarantine.

Feeding and baiting deer are banned in the Lower Peninsula until further notice.

But there's more.

I hear that the owner of the deer that tested positive had sent five deer to two other facilities in the weeks preceding the positive test, greatly increasing the chances that CWD now has at least three homes in Michigan.

Nice.

If this disease reaches the state's wild deer, we're all going to feel it. And any measures the DNR and the Department of Agriculture can take to stop its spread whould be widely applauded.

Let's hope like hell it's enough.

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Category: Deer hunting

Put down that bait -- please

So chronic wasting disease is in Michigan now.

No big surprise there. With all the game ranches and deer and elk farms, it was only a matter of time.

What counts most now is whether it can be contained to that one single captive deer in Kent County. Let's hope like heck it can be.

The DNR deserves some credit for taking aggressive action. They've quarantined all 580 farms that raise deer and elk. They're testing hundreds of deer around Kent County and have made it mandatory to have deer killed by hunters around there tested.

And they've banned baiting and feeding deer statewide.

That's the big one, and it's the one that will take the most cooperation.

The state banned baiting in bovine tuberculosis areas when that disease broke out a few years back, and it took roughly 32 seconds for everybody to ignore the ban.

If that happens this time and CWD spreads into the wild herd, the effects will be huge.

CWD is horrible. Its victims wither away and die, period.

In our state, deer hunting is not only a cultural institution but also an economic necessity. If our herd gets this disease, it will be devastating.

That's why we need to do anything we can to stop it for now. Bait piles bring deer nose to nose, and that obviously is a way that disease spreads. It sure seems like a good time to set that method aside.

I'm not necessarily opposed to baiting deer, but it has always seemed kind of silly to me that in a state so crammed with deer who clearly have enough to eat, you'd even need to.

It's just not that hard to look at the habitat, observe the sign and figure out where deer are coming and going.

What a novel concept.

Category: Waterfowl

Duck, goose seasons set

At last, Michigan's Natural Resources Commission has simplified the hunting zones for geese.

Now, just like ducks, the goose zones are simply north, middle and south. Easy enough.

North is the Upper Peninsula. Middle is the northern Lower Peninsula. South is pretty self-explanatory. The dividing line between Middle and South zones roughly runs through Midland, but check the DNR's Web site for the exact location and other ducky details.

Here are the seasons:

Ducks

North zone: Oct. 4-Dec. 2

Middle zone: Oct. 4-Nov. 30 and Dec. 6-7

South zone: Oct. 11-Dec. 7 and Jan. 3-4

Geese

North zone: Sept. 22-Nov. 5

Middle zone: Oct. 4-Nov. 10 and Nov. 27-Dec. 3

South zone: Oct. 11-Nov. 13 and Nov, 27-Dec. 7

Late goose season is Jan. 3- Feb. 1 in the south zone.

One other thing: There will be no canvasback hunting this year.

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Category: Deer hunting

Knucklehead, knucklehead, knucklehead

We all make mistakes, right?

Right?

If you read the previous post about how magical the trail cam is, you may recall that since there didn't appear to be much traffic around the salt block, I moved the trail cam.

The new spot was very clearly a heavily traveled zone between cover and cornfield. A veritable highway of activity. Deer Central.

Except for one thing: No one told the deer.

First camera location: 600+ pictures in five weeks.

Second camera location: 20 pictures in 10 days, and two don't count because they were of the doofus moving the camera.

First camera location: At least 10 different bucks, including a couple dandies.

Second camera location: No bucks, and the few does looked, I don't know, disinterested.

First camera location: Dozens and dozens of deer posing dutifully for well-composed photos.

Second camera location: Deer butts. Deer necks. Deer ears. You get the idea.

Today the camera went back to its original spot.

And the doofus learned something.

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Category: Deer hunting

Scout's honor

The camera doesn't lie.

Deer hit the salt lick. Hard.

On July 5, I put a digital trail camera out to scout my main bowhunting spot. To give the deer a reason to stop, I added a salt block. A plain old water-softener salt block.

And then I left. For five weeks.

I retrieved the memory card last weekend. The salt block looked intact. The game trails didn't seem particularly traveled.

I wasn't too hopeful. I even doubted the position of the camera so much I moved it.

But the camera doesn't lie. It said 640 pictures were taken from July 5 to August 8.

Boy, were they. Of those 640, about 10 were of some big dope trying to get the camera working. A couple were of raccoons hitting the salt block. A few, less than 10, were of nothing. I assume that was the wind moving the tall grass enough to set off the camera's motion detector.

The rest? Deer. Deer 'til the cows come home.

Big deer. Little deer. Does. Bucks. Dozens and dozens of deer, and a couple sizable bucks that I'd be happy to harvest.

That camera is like a window into an unknown world, one you never see when you stomp off to the woods with all your human noise and scent and movement.

It's magic. And it doesn't lie.