Blue Tongue Comes to the County

I'd hunted over 20 years and never heard of Blue Tongue. There was a touch of it a couple of counties over back in 2002; we heard about it when I took #2 son to Hunter Ed. It sounded icky. We were told if we saw an emaciated or dead deer to call the wildlife officer.

This year rumors of Blue Tongue in Kentucky started cropping up back in August, but they were all coming from the western part of the state. Then the stories started getting worse and then this past week I read of a guy finding 15 dead deer in a field over in the next county.
KY Wildlife EHD site
It turns out it ain't Blue Tongue. It's EHD or Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease, a midge-borne disease that's just like Blue Tongue. I don't care what color the tongue is, my farm is less than two miles from the Pendleton County line. If there's 15 dead deer laying in a field that close, that's serious. Later in the week, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran a story about how Blue Tongue had started to kill off cattle.

Rather than go bow hunting this weekend, I took #3 son down for some squirrel hunting with the idea that we'd scout all the watering places and see if we saw (or more correctly smelled) something. From what I understood, the deer would congregate near water and succumb.

I won't hold you in suspense. We found no carcasses in a half-day of searching. However, they managed to find us. Before sunrise, we were camped out under our best squirrel trees, and two deer busted us big time. Later on in the morning, we saw lots of deer sign after covering less than half the property, I was convinced that we had enough deer to hunt and let the idea go. The image of a field of rotting deer carcasses still haunts me.

Rain drowns the midges that carry the disease. Cold freezes them. Normally its never a problem, but the deer are weakened from the drought and there has been no rain to hold down the midge population. It rained two inches last week. Not enough to relieve the drought, but hopefully it will knock the midges back. Sooner or later, it will turn cold and the EHD outbreak will be over.