A disease spread by biting flies that has claimed over 11,000 deer in Michigan this year has not spared Jackson County.
Brent Rudolph, deer and elk program leader for the DNR, said he is aware of 313 cases of deer dying from epizootic hemorrhagic disease in Jackson County. The actual number may be higher, he added.
“This has been very out-of-the-ordinary outbreak,” said Rudolph. “We’ve seen a drop off in the harvest because of the number of cases.”
The drought conditions this year have been ideal for the spread of the disease as ponds and rivers are transformed into mudflats, which are breeding grounds for the biting flies, known as midges.
The midges die in colder weather, said Rudolph, and new cases are unlikely to occur this late in the year.
The disease cannot be spread from one deer to another, but only by midge bite.
The meat of the diseased deer is not harmful to eat, said Rudolph. It might be unpleasant to look at, he added, though deer succumbing to the disease and those felled by hunters die from internal bleeding alike.
Because the disease is not spread deer-to-deer, the outbreaks tend to be concentrated in relatively small areas. For this reason, some hunting spots could be unaffected while others could be all but devoid of deer, Rudolph said.
That fits the pattern that Craig Hatch, owner of JJ’s Meats in Horton, has been seeing. Overall, the number of deer his store has gutted and chopped up for hunters has declined slightly from last year, though not enough for Hatch to say it is attributable to the disease.
“I’m hearing from multiple people that in certain small areas they’re not seeing any deer,” he said. “I couldn’t say we’re hearing more from, say, North Adams than from Concord. It’s depending on the specific area you’re in, the terrain.”
To put the numbers in perspective, Michigan has about 1.7 million deer. Each year, hunters kill about 400,000 of the herbivores. By comparison, the number of diseased deer is small.
Other states, particularly to the south, deal with larger midge-related disease outbreaks most years, said Rudolph.
Poster Comment:
Our local herd no longer exists. Haven't see a deer nor a track since around mid-august when you could smell the rotting carcasses. Never since anything like it.
