It sure is a different world now than the one I grew up in. While I could be talking about our phones, electric cars, or how much of the world is obsessed with social media, I am not. I’m talking about habitat, after all this is Conservation Corner and I am the Habitat Man. I don’t want to make out like everything was perfect. The quality of the habitat was poor, but the quantity was immense. The reason we had so much grassland was that farmers needed to put whole fields into CRP. There wasn’t a lot of the first CRP that was enrolled because the landowner wanted something for hunting. As a result, a majority of our neighbors had significant acres in CRP. Some were almost whole farms.
On the pheasant front we of course benefited from the birds that were produced and that wintered on the neighboring grounds. Sometimes stuck in the middle can be a good thing. It did make for some interesting stories like people sitting in lawn chairs in the ditch to pass shoot at birds flying from our corn to the neighboring CRP. Or, another neighbor staking mules out to create a Safety Zone to combat said loafers. As you can imagine the lawn chair thing wasn’t popular around the neighborhood. It does speak to the number of birds that were flying back and forth in order to give someone that bright idea. Now I’m not someone that ever wants to do away with our road hunting rules but as one of the people responsible for enrolling private land into public access I do get a little perturbed when I see a full hunting party hunting road ditches (just a friendly reminder Fido isn’t allowed on the other side of the fence either). There are many opportunities to hunt areas open to the public, do we really need to be walking road ditches with the full gamut of hunters in each ditch with dogs and blockers? Sorry may have seen that exact thing the other day which steamed me a bit.
I have lots of interesting stories growing up where I did, some of the best coming from the fact that since the CRP acres weren’t put in for the purpose of hunting, my family had access to deer hunt quite a bit of it. Some of it we hunted with the neighbors, and some of it we were the only ones. Given that farming was different there were areas that weren’t CRP that also made excellent deer hunting like our neighbor that still used a lister to plant. (If you don’t know what that is you might have to ask grandpa because I’m not sure Google will even know that one.) Anyway, before I was old enough to go along deer hunting my dad and older brother walked that short weedy corn which produced the giant almost perfect 5 by 5 typical deer that was mounted just above the TV. Of course, that’s what I got to stare at every day of my young life. That was the start of how my dad, brothers, and I formed our way of hunting. Yeah, sure we would sit in the morning and evening when deer were moving, just like many of you in your deer blind condos. That was only to pass the time as our time to shine was during the time in between. With all that habitat to hunt we took the fight to the deer instead of waiting for them to be in the right place at the right time. We have some good memories, a lot of success, ……..and some misses, but those memories were afforded to us because of the habitat. We have since lost my older brother, and dad, and my younger brother and I no longer hunt together. If we were all still together though would we even be able to? It is a completely different world. I still have a hard time recognizing it. I do have land to hunt that we have just gotten back into CRP with other features to hunt. My kids are just about at the age where they can get tags, so it could be good timing. I have a very big worry though, disease, more specifically EHD or Blue Tongue. Now my kids won’t be inexperienced when they can apply as they have been getting their practice in walking after deer. We are pretty good at finding them but just as last year went this year has started, not much to report. I don’t know if the down tick over the last couple years is because of EHD specifically as I haven’t found any carcasses that look like it. The fact that we have had a deer population that is far below the Shangri-La of my youth, I do blame it for.
It started in 2012, what I can only describe as a nightmare. Finding dozens of mature animals, does and bucks alike, around every slough that still held water. What 2012 didn’t finish off, it seemed like 2013 did. There were and still are areas that have withstood this disease better but not in my home territory. We have had it a few more times when conditions are right, or wrong whatever fits, that knocks us back just when it seems we are about to make a little rebound.
What’s the cause, is blaming the disease the right justification? Better question, is blaming disease going to fix anything? What is almost always the reason for disease? Conditions right, especially in animals. The years in between the loss of the CRP acres and 2012 we still had the high deer numbers that the habitat produced. With the habitat gone now we had overpopulation. It was just a matter of time before we got what we got. The population was now more concentrated and any time you overpopulate a species something is going to give. Just as I like to point out it isn’t the predator’s fault, the disease isn’t to blame. It’s habitat or lack there of, that is the culprit.
Now I do feel good about the new CRP acres around my area, I just hope we can keep building on that I get some assemblance of the good old days back, so my kids aren’t cheated out of that experience.