The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) says a deer killed last season in southwestern Montgomery County tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease. The discovery was made by a taxidermist that participates in the state’s CWD surveillance program, and was confirmed by the department after additional testing and collection of DNA samples from the deer. The deer marked the first case of CWD in southwest Virginia and triggered the creation of a new disease management area that includes Montgomery, Pulaski and Floyd counties. For the 2021 season, a mandatory sampling day has been scheduled for November 13. All hunters who bag a deer in the new disease management area that day will be required to take the animal to a [...]

As Chronic Wasting Disease spreads in some regions across the country, state CWD rules and regulations are constantly changing. Keep these things in mind this season: When to Test Your Deer More than 315 counties in 24 states, from Wyoming to Mississippi to upstate New York (new on the list this year) have reported CWD in free-ranging deer. Has the disease been detected near where you hunt? An excellent resource is the CWD map at cwd-info.org which lists all counties in all states where CWD has been confirmed. Check the map, and if you hunt in or near any region that has CWD you should have any deer you shoot tested. Each state’s hunting website has specific (if perhaps confusing) [...]

University of Minnesota researchers have discovered the first-ever way to field test deer for CWD, a potential game changer in the ongoing fight against the deer disease. The new test is cheaper than lab examinations currently in use to check for CWD, and more importantly, it uses field-deployable equipment to test tissue samples from deer and provide preliminary positive or negative results in 24 hours. Imagine this: Shoot a deer, drive to a test site and drop off a tissue sample. The same day or the next day you get a text saying if your deer tested positive (discard it) or negative (eat the meat) for CWD. I wrote about this exciting new development in-depth over at the Realtree website, [...]

The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) has announced the results of the 2020 – 2021 Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) surveillance efforts for two prominent Disease Management Areas, which encompass 11 counties in Virginia. DMA1 includes the counties of Clarke, Frederick, Shenandoah, and Warren; and DMA2 includes the counties of Culpeper, Fauquier, Loudoun, Madison, Page, Orange, and Rappahannock. Within the two DMAs, a total of 20 hunter-harvested whitetails were confirmed to be infected with CWD. Of the 20 CWD-positive deer, 13 originated in Frederick County, two originated in Shenandoah County, and one was harvested in each of Madison, Loudoun, Fauquier, Rappahannock, and Warren Counties. These CWD detections were a result of intensive sampling efforts that resulted in over 3,000 deer [...]