As reported by Dr. Dave Samuel a bacterial disease called intracranial abscessation is killing our older mature bucks. The buck deer fight to determine a pecking order in the herd. When the rut is on, bucks fight and
even though those fights look bad, it’s pretty unusual for bucks to actually kill each other. One gives up and high tails it out of the county. Now a study done by Gabrial Karns, a graduate student from North Carolina State University, and Dr. Mark Conners, manager and wildlife biologist at Chesapeake Farms on the eastern shore of Maryland, shows that some fights involving mature bucks do lead to a slow death.
The bacterial disease known as intracranial abscessation (basically a bad infection) affects the brain, deteriorates the skull and leads to the death of some older bucks.
These researchers found the disease in 35 percent of the older bucks they autopsied that died a natural death. That doesn’t mean that the disease killed all of those bucks, it just means that 35 percent had the infection. No one can be sure what killed them. It's highly probable that the older bucks are infecting one another when they fight during the rut. With this new knowledge everyone in camp can feel better about themselves. We can't help it that we hunt in an area with an epidemic amount of deer with this disease. I just hope it doesn't cause the number of hunt hours to plummet. Plus with the new Lower Peninsula Deer Management Initiative (LPDMI) that has proposed a four-point APR for all of Zone 3 in southern Michigan things could get worse throughout the state.
Atta Boy to the researchers working at Chesapeake Farms — a great cooperative effort that might just lead to lowering the mortality caused by this nasty disease.
Get Outdoors Downriver.
Please provide data beyond an opinion where the proposed APR would cause a negative biological impact on the Lower Peninsula deer herd, specifically the buck population. All data that has been brought forth from the LPDMI and supporting data of harvest from DMU 045 refute your claim. In Leelenau, the average production of 8 point bucks is higher than that of all southern tier counties, including the Ohio/Indiana border counties. it appears that your position is one of an anectdotal observation that is not based in relevant fact. Fact, DMU 045 has had APR's in place for 10 years and the hunting there is superb and it was recently voted by a super majority of hunters there to keep in place the APR's.
ReplyDeleteThe fact is that there are absent number of older bucks in our deer herd, resides with the statistic that we kill on average greater than 60% of all yearling (1.5 year old) bucks annually, the next group is in the neighborhood of 25% the 2.5 yr old...and it gets tighter as you go older. The reason there aren't older deer in Michiga, is solely because we kill them as juvenile deer.
"With this new knowledge everyone in camp can feel better about themselves."
ReplyDeleteIndeed! If you look long enough and hard enough you can support your obsessions in so many ways. In fact it's McDonald's fault that people are fat right?
Will the Chesapeke Farms researchers be fitting all of their bucks with helmets now in an effort to lower the mortality of this dreadful disease?
And lastly...
"The usual take is a few sightings and every 4 to 5 years 1 in 10 will get a spike"
Results like these are certainly worth fighting to maintain. WOW!!! 1 spike every 40-50 years of hunting! Certainly it can't get better than that.
Anony #1 citing data on opinions really isn't scientific. The NC State study is. Why do you feel the need to force your philosophy on someone half way accross the state?
ReplyDeleteAnony #2 you haven't been to our deer camp so keep the fat jokes to yourself.