Every time I blog about Chronic Wasting Disease, or CWD, people read it, yawn and move on. Last year I hosted and produced an episode of BIG DEER TV on Sportsman Channel entitled “State of the Deer Union,” a significant portion of which dealt with the science and dangers of CWD. People watched it and the ratings were good, but I got only a handful of emails on the CWD topic. TIME TO WAKE UP HUNTERS! CWD continues to spread with POTENTIALLY DEVASTATING long-term impacts on America’s deer herds and the future of hunting. The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks (MDWFP) reports the first documented case of Chronic Wasting Disease in the state. The 4½-year free-ranging buck was [...]

Ran across this QDMA map and found it interesting. Does not surprise me that Pennsylvania and New York are 2 of the top hunter-density states, it’s been that way for decades. I do question why Michigan is not in the top 12. A decade ago Michigan was at or near the top in number of licensed hunters in the U.S. Michigan hunters killed more than 340,000 deer in 2016-17, second only to Texas, so there is still a lot of deer hunting going on up there. I mention that the statistics used to build this map came from a 2011 Fish and Wildlife Service study. But since hunter numbers are down across the board and across the states recent years, [...]

I’ve been reading about and monitoring this brutal flu season (and washing my hands more than ever), which experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say will go down as the worst in decades. There are many heartbreaking and scary stories, but this one from Fox News really hit home: A hunting enthusiast who started out with the flu ended up with both of his feet and nine fingers amputated. On January 4, doctors told Brian Herndon of Fort Worth, Texas, he had pneumonia. A day later they told the family that Brian's pneumonia had combined with this year's flu virus and he was in septic shock. Physicians couldn’t detect a pulse in either of Brian’s feet; a couple [...]