Hunting Washington Forum

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Quote from: fishngamereaper on October 09, 2025, 09:22:41 PM

https://idfg.idaho.gov/article/what-ehd-means-clearwater-region-white-tailed-deer-hunters


My property and the thousands of acres we have access to are mostly in 8.
Daily visible deer numbers are down.
We haven't started busting brush yet to see how bad it is... almost don't want to..had some good bucks running around this year.

I wish our fish and wildlife would publish something similar.

They haven’t even addressed blue tongue....kinda weird.  They are more worried about getting the gps coordinates on where you killed your buck.  Losing an entire population and partial year class of deer in the NE due to blue tongue and here we are freaking out over 6 cases of cwd.  Not minimizing cwd, I just think they could have used proactive management instead of now reactive management with the blue tongue crisis.  I don’t think they really give a rip.

And yes a 3rd grader could have seen blue tongue coming well before it started....

Not sure what they can do to address ehd or blue tongue. They are spread by midge bites and unlike cwd they are not spread by contact with other animals. CWD they can attempt to minimize contact between animals, but not much they can do to reduce contact with midges.  Fortunately the midges die with the first frost and also ehd and blue are not 100 percent fatal. CWD is 100 percent fatal and spreads and kills year around.

Totally agree with the physical midge aspect of controlling some of this.  Not much can be done.  I guess I’m thinking a little deeper on it?  That’s why I bring up the management aspect.  We can almost predict these droughty years in the NE where blue tongue is almost predictable.  I personally saw it come and saw it first hand on all of our property beginning in July.  So the no brainer is start managing immediately.  Example would be shut down doe seasons or go to some sort of antler restriction...take your pick?  I watched my neighbor the last six years hammering the heck out of every doe or buck that walked by taking new hunter to his property everyday.  This years lack of deer didn’t slow him.  If it walk it was dead.  With restrictions we could have preserved what was left.  Am I the only goofball that thinks like this?  We were just starting to recover from the last blue tongue epidemic.
After working with wdfw for years I saw how everything was mismanaged by reaction.
Many states deal with both of these issues and still have healthy populations, there is nothing new under the sun on these subjects.  After hunting in many other states over the years, I’m always perplexed NE Wa can’t hold better deer numbers.

The first step in managing are deer herds is managing predators.  If you have a robust deer herd and you have a disease outbreak......they will fare better and recover faster.  The fact that our state refused to manage predators should tell you everthing you need to know.....  They don't care if we have deer to hunt.

Totally agree. Why don’t we ask the people what the drinking age should be? Or speed limit? Or have people vote on what they Want building codes to be?
The people don’t always know best about topics they are not experts on!