Never heard of ehd until 2007 when everyone started talking about it. That was the first year we planted corn and needless to say, it didn't do well because of the drought. I also had just graduated college and had tons of time to hunt that fall due to not landing a job yet. That fall I learned the significance of ehd. I don't know how many times I went hunting and didn't see a deer…like 10-12 sits with seeing a deer
. I do remember seeing a nice 8pt in August while on the 4-wheeler at about 30 yards…he just kind of looked at me and dropped his head down and kept walking. Knew that was abnormal.
2019 was almost equally as bad. Only reason for the "almost", is that we still had a population. This one was different in that it wiped out 60-80% of the buck population, while we still saw plenty of does and fawns. Completely sucked, as we had some great bucks the year prior and had very high expectations. But we were still seeing deer most every hunt and we are seeing even higher deer numbers since.
The anomaly was last year 2022 - no ehd that I'm aware of, but the bucks simply didn't show up in their fall transitions. It was drier than any year I can ever remember. While they probably took a significant blow to their health, I am optimistically hoping a couple show up this year being 2 years since we've seen them (likely being 4.5's and 5.5's). I remember seeing big deer in 2021 just about every time I went in the woods. It was a magical season. Then 2022 happened and I'm still puzzled