On this Earth Day, I point you to a fantastic and enlightening passage written some years ago by two of America’s top deer biologists, Drs. Larry Marchinton and Karl Miller. In the United States roughly 3 million white-tailed deer are harvested each year… This translates to about 150 million pounds of meat. Add to this the amount of elk, turkey, squirrel, rabbit and other game as well as wild fruits, nuts, and vegetables that is consumed. To produce this amount of beef, chicken, or vegetable crops in addition to that which is already produced would be ecologically devastating. Acres and acres of wild places would have to be destroyed to accommodate this increased agricultural production. More wildlife habitat would have [...]

At the turn of the 20th century, there were about 350,000 deer left in America. Unregulated market hunting for hides and venison had decimated the herds, and while it seems unthinkable today, the whitetail was on the way to extirpation. In the early 1900s, the first forward-thinking wildlife managers saw it coming, and so they established state game laws and banned the sale of venison. Their vision saved the whitetail, and is our #1 conservation achievement. We have an estimated 35 to 40 million whitetails in the U.S. today. NOTE HERE: In recent blogs I have spoken to reduced deer numbers and harvests in some regions, especially across the upper Midwest, as a result of EHD, predators, hard winters and doe bag limits that [...]

From Twincities.com: Sometime early next week, men and women will fan out across the woods of northern Minnesota, many on snowmobiles, and begin laying out feed for wild whitetail deer. A million pounds of feed, give or take. As much as $170,000 can buy…. "We're at 130 volunteers and climbing fast," Mark Johnson, executive director of the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association, said Wednesday…. Whose idea to feed the deer? Hunters, who put pressure on the state to do something because this brutal winter is surely killing some deer in the northern zones. Feeding from now through the spring green up will help the animals survive. The money for the project will come from a fund established from proceeds of hunting [...]