It’s no secret that the hottest trend in hunting right now is crossbows. With more and more states creating hunting seasons for these lethal marvels of engineering every year, we feel that we owe it to you to put the new bows through the wringer as we do with so much of the other gear you rely on in the outdoors.
Hot weather and standing water is a proving to be a fatal combination for whitetails in Montana's Milk River Valley.
Last week, between haying and mowing irrigation ditches, I found five recently deceased whitetails, so freshly dead that they hadn't started to decompose. Neighbors all around me are reporting the same thing: dead and dying whitetails.
Mature bucks are dead. Does are dead. Yearlings are dead. Today I diagnosed why one of my irrigation turnouts wasn't flowing as it should. It was blocked by the carcass of a fawn so young it still carried its spots.
We haven't heard an official diagnosis from Fish, Wildlife & Parks, but it has all the makings of an epidemic of epizootic hemorrhagic disease, or EHD. Sometimes mistakenly called blue-tongue, the disease strikes whitetails later in the summer in years like this when the temperature spikes, and the biting black midge that carries the disease has plenty of wet habitat in which to breed.
