Discovering - Fall camping, CWD Part 2

welcome to discovering tonight it's CWD part 2 we'll take a look at some of the facts and myths about chronic wasting disease but first I'm going camping the secrets trees that flow beneath the cliffs colored stone first again with birch and pine and oak surrounded by the greatest lakes in this world has ever known black bears awesome presents as he roams the hills and fields call of the Timberwolf lonesome troll the eagle soaring high above the trowel lies deep and still these are what I treasure the only way I measured feelings that I have for this farmland there is so much to discover when your longtime lover northern Michigan Paul is without a doubt one of the most special times of the year here in the U P sweet smell of dried maple and aspen leaves fills the air as october rolls into november much of the cover is gone so gross or a bit easier to hunt deer gearing up for the peak of the rut and me well i just have a tremendous craving to be out there in the woods for any reason so i decided the best way to satisfy that craving was a simply head for the woods for no particular reason so I jump-started the firewood truck hooked up the Silver Bullet threw in a sleeping bag the shotgun some cooking gear food and some firewood and headed for the woods the plan eat hunt do a little scouting eat again and kick back buy a hot fire on a cool fall night I'll tell you right out you won't see a whole lot of hunting footage on this adventure firstly it's pretty tough to get any good action shots when you're shooting both a gun and a camera at the same time secondly I was out here more just to be in the woods than I was to shoot video but you will get your share of is food I'm not really sure where my priorities were on this endeavor hunt and eat or eaten hunt but there's no doubt food is one of the best parts of camping on today's menu for lunch a fish sandwich battered deep-fried Lake Michigan lake trout topped off with some onion rings and cheddar cheese added a little hunting and scouting and then dinner breaded and seasoned pan-fried grouse with fresh mushrooms covered with parmesan and mozzarella cheese along with that some nice fresh campfire Dutch oven crusty bread now it was time to hunt I'm not sure if I was hunting in hopes of getting a couple of birds or just a means of wearing off enough lunch so let it be hungry for dinner either way I'm in the woods wandering around with a shotgun and that alone is enough to make my day I'm not sure if any wood burners out there can relate to this but ever notice no matter what you start out hunting for birds deer it always seems to end up hunting for firewood well I didn't need to spend the much-needed day of walking around the woods found some good deer sign kicked up a couple of grouse and yes found some good firewood no time for dinner start off with some Dutch oven bread pretty simple flour water salt yeast leave it sit for about 18 hours this has been preheating on player half-an-hour drawer in bowls found this out a little bit so it's all kind of the same thickness you know capers I don't know what they do but I found them in the fridge so we took Parmesan cheese my wife and some friends stopped out for dinner and to finish off the day sitting around the campfire seems pretty much everyone has a camper these days hook it up find a spot he spent some time in the woods or absolutely no particular reason you here's a look at some of the facts and myths about chronic wasting disease chronic wasting disease is not going to come in and and wipe out the deer herd you know just lickety-split that's not going to happen what happens with chronic wasting disease is it builds up over time and eventually as animals get more more exposed to it they they can live five years with the disease so they will die off eventually and oftentimes these animals become more susceptible to predation more susceptible to hunters to car deer accidents what generally happens is it'll take 30 to 40 years for the deer herd to crash and the deer herd crash will come when you get to a point where 50% of the herd is infected what they're seeing out in Wyoming right now is that they're having a 20% per year decline in their deer herd and they're predicting that at least in the self converse area of Wyoming that that population is going to go extinct in about 40 years their population is about 45 to 50 percent infected the age structure the population is collapsing so that most of your deer are a year and a half old two and a half years old but you're not seeing the five and six year old deer anymore because those animals are dying out right now we have an ethic in the U P we have a strong interest in let them go let them grow and letting our our older bucks our bucks grow to get older and and and bigger and more mature what you're seeing if you go down to Southwest Wisconsin where where the population endemic CWD situation is that over 50 percent of their box three-and-a-half years old and older are infected and those animals are spreading that disease at a pretty high rate because they're going to breed with four or five six maybe seven different dough's and they're going to interact and they're going to swap body fluids with those animals so what we're seeing is that that animal that people really want on the landscape is the one that is most likely to be contaminated most likely to spread the disease and most likely not going to survive to that point anymore anyways because it is sick so you know we really have a quandary here we want to see an older age class we want to see better population structure this disease works completely against that so in those areas where you have chronic wasting disease the concept of for example up here we have three point on a side on the combo on the first tag of the combo tag and four point on the side on the second tag that's not going to work because what we're doing is we're letting the animals pass that are most likely infected so if we get chronic wasting disease that's going to be a matter of discussion for us myth number two we've had chronic wasting disease for years we don't know that we don't we don't believe that to be true over the years we've tested 35,000 animals the first time that we saw chronic wasting disease in Michigan was down in Kent County in a captive facility it was one animal that animal was killed that facility was completely depopulated and all the other animals were tested no other animals had it we tested for three years down in that area never found another case so we don't believe that it's been here for that many years but certainly it's been here long enough that it's spreading out a little bit down there in the lansing area eight animals now that have tested positive we're doing some pretty intensive sampling down there we'll see if there's any more and if it spread any further than that but we don't believe that it's been here for that long so at least in the Upper Peninsula we have not employed any sharpshooters we don't know that we have the disease at this point in time so we are not going to go out and shoot any extra deer we're going to test deer that would have been killed already anyways crop damage deer and the farmers have been very cooperative in fact I'd like to give a shout-out and thank those farmers for all that they've done to help us collect those animals we're picking up roadkill were testing hunter killed deer so at this point in time we don't have sharpshooters on the ground that could change if we find CWD but it will not be a broad scale thing it will be a focused thing that would be right around where we find that animal what we're talking about when we say sharpshooters we have a contract with wildlife services which is a federal agency to go out and collect deer excuse me collect samples from right around where we found the disease so that we can test other deer and we're not looking to wipe out the deer herd what we're trying to do is to find out what the extent of the disease is how far spread out across the landscape through this process and through hunters I think I think five of the eight deer that we found with chronic wasting disease in the last year were found using those shooters using those contract shooters to go out and take a sample of the population and and help us test them this allows us to figure out what the distribution of the disease is now what we've seen down in lower Michigan is that the disease that's spreading from east to west down across that area in Lansing and so as we find new deer then we expand the area where we take these samples and we hope that leads us to the end of the disease but in some cases what it's doing is it's showing us that the disease is more further spread than what we thought it was myth number four CWD is brought in from farm servants certainly we're seeing especially in Wisconsin that a good number of those deer farms are contaminated and we have big concerns about that probably our larger concern is with the idea of people bringing in carcasses from other places whether it's Missouri or Arkansas Colorado Nebraska Wyoming any of those states that are currently infected and if you come in and you dispose of that carcass on the ground it gets into the soils we know that the Predators can feed on that we know that Ravens and and crows can feed on that and fly away and defecate we know that coyotes can feed on it and it will still be 50% in fact of it and what I mean by that is you know it's for sake of argument if they ate a hundred prions fifty percent of them would survive the digestive process and still be infective so our biggest concern really is that somebody goes out of state shoots an animal brings it back butchers it and throws a carcass out on the ground where the disease can be spread we don't know for certain how it got into lower Michigan but what we do know is that within a ten-mile radius within two or three years of the time that we found it we had over 500 people that went out of state to CWD contaminated States hunting we don't know if they brought things back and dumped them out but we strongly suspect that's how it got here if you look at where they found it in Lower Michigan it's really in a central part of the state it's a hundred miles north of our southern border and then east to west is dead center in the state so we can't come up with another scenario as to how that that disease got down there deer will adapt over time a CWD will go away we're not dealing with a parasite we're not dealing with a bacteria or a virus we're dealing with a genetic mutation and this is not something that populations can adapt to you know a parasite brain worm in in white-tailed deer for example the parasite and host learned how to live together so the animal survives chronic wasting disease would be a terrible parasite because it kills every deer they're not going to adapt it's just not going to happen it can't this is more like you know to use Russ Mason's example saying we're going to adapt to nuclear radiation this isn't a living a living breathing organism that we're dealing with it's a mutation so any deer that gets this disease will die and and there will not be a genetic adaption myth number six state agencies can't eradicate CWD if it gets into our environment if it gets into our soils then that's actually a truth on the other hand there have been two states Minnesota and New York that have found one case inside their borders and they went in and they went in strong and really took out a lot of deer and and really worked hard right around that index case and to date and it's been several years for both states they have not found a second case so if we can get it before it becomes environmentally into our soils we could probably stop it chances are that if we get it we're now gonna find it that soon and we're gonna have a big struggle so our key is to keep it out and do everything that we can to keep it out the DNR wants to eliminate all deer in an area where CWD exists the DNR does not want to eliminate deer any place what we recognize is that this disease is spread in a way that high deer concentrations and here's where we have a problem in the U P because deer do exactly what we don't want them to do in the wintertime they migrate they move to the south and they congregate in high concentrations where they're close nose to nose contact they're feeding close together and that creates a huge problem it's not our intent to eliminate deer but it is would be our intent get the population levels down to a point where we reduce the risk of spread we can just sit back and do nothing as they've done in southwest Wisconsin in which case you know we're looking at 15 to 20 years before our deer herd collapses or we can take the Illinois route where they have unfortunately spent a lot of money and a lot of time and effort but they have worked really hard to keep those populations at a lower level and as a result while the disease is spreading they still only have 1 to 5 percent of their population infected as compared to those southern counties in Wisconsin were 25% of your dose and 55% of your mature box are infected so we don't want to we don't want to eliminate the deer herd but we want to do the responsible thing to keep the overall herd healthy CWD is not fatal CWD is always fatal every deer that gets eventually will die know it may be that you shoot that deer before it passes away from CWD or may be that it can't survive a rigorous winter but the reality is if that deer gets contaminated sometime in the next five years that animal is going to die as a result of the disease CWD isn't widespread and only impacts a few animals I think I mentioned earlier portions of the Wyoming deer herd now are looking at extinction the disease is spread in 24 States three Canadian provinces and two countries overseas one being Norway the other being South Korea the state of Arkansaw last year didn't know that they had a problem and and after they found the first one within two weeks they found a hundred contaminated deer this is not a disease that will go away once once we get it again this is why we're so adamant don't bring it in don't do what it whatever you're doing that might bring it in think about the future of hunting thinking about your kids your grandkids and your great caring kids I don't why I mean right now they have people that are switching over to duck hunting because in places they don't have dear to hunt we're going to be and damps damn tight spot if on November 15 people are thinking about duck hunting let's not be there well that's it for tonight if you'd like to keep tabs on what's coming up on discovering or see where we've been you can join us on facebook or go to 906 outdoors calm thanks for watching and we'll see you next week right here on discovering

Channel: 906 Outdoors

Views: 11,779

Rating: 4.9359999 out of 5

Keywords: discovering, up, u.p., upper, peninsula, michigan, yooper, 906, outdoors, cwd, chronic, wasting, disease, fall, camping, deer, whitetail, whitetails, hunting

Id: -cnyn_9cTz4

Length: 22min 32sec (1352 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2016