I think we are still bounceing back from Drought,EHD,and mast crop failure.I hunt 2 different sides of the county. It seems to me the south side of Benton may have been hit harder than the North ??Real hard to tell for sure soo many deer are being shot in the summer by farmers with and without the depredation permits.

Remember this...



It was in the Hunting Guide for the past two years advising hunters of the EHD losses of 2007. Not only was it pretty accurate but it goes to show the usefulness of our check-in system and data collection efforts.

Some areas appear to be more affected than others. I seem to see the biggest reductions where deer spend a lot of time in bottomlands during the summer (perhaps more susceptible in low areas with a lot of standing stagnant water).

Although my personal property is primarily uplands, and we lost few deer to EHD (around 15% of our summer population), during the hunting season we rely heavily on drawing deer up out of nearby agricultural bottomlands. The deer in those areas seemed to be hit the hardest.

Here's the number of unique bucks we've photographed on my place from August through January each year. We topped out in 2006 at scary-high numbers. We then took a big tumble after the EHD outbreak and have stayed fairly constant since then. However, notice how our summer resident population continued to climb right through the EHD outbreak into '08. I'm still trying to figure out the funky results from '09 with our resident bucks. I tend to believe this was some strange anomaly due to the super wet and cool summer conditions, as many people reported having trouble getting bucks on cam in the summer of '09:




What had me most worried was the low fawn recruitment we observed in '07 and '08. I believe that was due to the severe late-summer droughts we experienced those years. Luckily, observed fawn recruitment appears to have bounced back this year. But those two years in a row of poor fawn recruitment will probably slow our recovery from EHD by a couple of years, if we ever completely recover (and I kind of hope we don't--deer densities were too high in some locations, mine included).

WOW you get A LOT of seasonal range shifters,Im guessing cover is the reason?

on my lease in mcnairy we have a old cattle pond and I wonder if the EHD outbreak can spread through the water supply