puddle jumper - 12/17/2007 1:16 PM
Was Wondering,
Not being from that area , is the paper or the articals, posted on line anywhere you guys know about??emoScratch emoScratch
Puddle...emoUSA
They are posted online for a week... however the Times Free Press web site is not very user-friendly and can be hard to navigate. Easiest way is to access the "Enhanced Edition" which is a exact copy of newspaper, but you have to register (and perhaps subscribe... I'm not sure?). But I'll save you the trouble:
EHD Hurts Hunters
For December 16, 2007
by Richard Simms
Tennessee's deer herd has suffered a serious blow this year, and not from hunters.
The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) uses a sophisticated electronic system that tabulates hunters' harvests in virtually real time as they check them in at designated deer checking stations across the state. As of now Tennessee's 2007 deer harvest is 20 percent lower than the same time period last year.
"We're on pace to have one of the lowest harvests we've had in the last five years," said Daryl Ratajczak, the Big Game Coordinator for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.
Ratajczak blames the lower harvest on fewer deer. He says a disease called Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (EHD) took a heavy toll on Tennessee's deer herd this year and there are simply fewer animals in the woods.
"We got walloped this year," he said. "And it was compounded when the drought hit at the same time. EHD is transmitted by midges (insects) born and bread near water sources. With drought the deer and midges were concentrated in the same area."
EHD is present in most deer herds all the time, just like there are always some people with colds. EHD does not infect humans. But periodically conditions all come together to cause severe outbreaks among whitetail deer. This was one of those years.
Ratajczak says EHD typically kills one-third of the deer it infects. But he believes that since deer were more stressed due to the drought, the mortality rate was higher this year.
Of course biologists say that disease outbreaks are often Mother Nature's way of balancing things out. Ratajczak says indeed the EHD impact was much greater in the areas of Middle and West Tennessee with much higher deer density. TWRA refers to those counties as Unit L --"L" for liberal because TWRA allows extremely liberal bag limits in an effort to reduce an over-population of deer. Ratajczak says that in one of those Unit L counties, Hickman County, 40 percent of the deer harvested showed signs of having had contracted EHD. The impact in East Tennessee was much less.
He adds however, "The deer harvest has declined in 91 out of 95 Tennessee counties."
Georgia meanwhile, has suffered no ill effects from EHD.
Charlie Killmaster, Deer Project Manager for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources says, "It's been a great year. We've had no EHD problems in Georgia. I've laid eyes on several thousand deer this year and have only seen evidence of it a couple of times."
Georgia does not have a sophisticated checking system like Tennessee. They determine their harvest by post-season surveys so there is no way to know exactly how many deer have been taken. Killmaster however is fairly sure they will be close to last year's harvest of 320,000 animals.
Georgia has been more severely impacted by the drought than Tennessee. Water shortages and mandatory conservation measures have been the norm.
Killmaster says that is one of the most common questions he has been asked this year -- "How will the drought affect deer hunting"
"As far as I can see it's having no effect," he said.
Many hunters across Tennessee say rutting (mating) behavior has been unusual as well.
Ratajczak agrees.
"Rutting behavior hasn't been the same," he said. "It seems to have been delayed and not very concentrated."
Earlier this week the New York Times carried a front page article describing how global warming has impacted waterfowl migrations, and perhaps the behavior of many other wildlife species.
Ratajczak isn’t buying into that theory as far as Tennessee deer are concerned.
"I wouldn't want to attribute it to global warming," he said. "I think what it's going to boil down to is just a blip on the radar screen. We probably won't have another year like this year for 20 years... I hope."
He also does not expect any long term impact from this year's EHD outbreak.
"The silver lining is that the herd was in such good shape going into the year that even though it took a severe blow, it will rebound quickly," he said. "If this had happened twenty years ago it might have taken five years to bounce back."
He predicts the final Tennessee harvest will be around 150,000 deer, a far cry from the nearly 200,000 predicted earlier.
"If we could retract those predictions, we would," he said. "But between a late freeze that killed much of the acorn crop, a severe drought and EHD it's been a rough year for the deer."
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