Weekend scouting trip brings some relief.

I was out scouting our deer hunting property and general area on the cattle ranch around the property last weekend.

The Good News: First, I saw several groups of deer in the open fields browsing on new grass AND best of all was that I saw several yearlings. Reports had been coming my way that there was a total absence of yearling deer indicating heavy wolf and winter kill. That appears not to be the case in our immediate area anyway.

The Bad News – Wolf populations are now out of control and this harsh winter illustrated what happens when this situation is allowed to go unchecked.

Friends have a property 2 miles from mine, and they have found 19 wolf killed deer on their property and on the public and adjacent. The have the wolves on the trail cams and there can be no other explanation for this many dead deer in one small area.

They have identified at least 8 individual wolves on trail cam footage. Which means there are probably many more in the area. This is madness not to have vastly more wolf tags available as a way of at least slowing the rampant population growth.

So a mixed bag, but good news that the deer population had survived a little better than I had feared.

Grouse

Yeah! They can’t come up with an accurate moose population (black on white snow and 10-12 times the size of a wolf) How do they think they can even be close on wolves?

The wolf thing is only going to get worse before it gets better.

Quote:

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I was out scouting our deer hunting property and general area on the cattle ranch around the property last weekend.

The Good News: First, I saw several groups of deer in the open fields browsing on new grass AND best of all was that I saw several yearlings. Reports had been coming my way that there was a total absence of yearling deer indicating heavy wolf and winter kill. That appears not to be the case in our immediate area anyway.

The Bad News – Wolf populations are now out of control and this harsh winter illustrated what happens when this situation is allowed to go unchecked.

Friends have a property 2 miles from mine, and they have found 19 wolf killed deer on their property and on the public and adjacent. The have the wolves on the trail cams and there can be no other explanation for this many dead deer in one small area.

They have identified at least 8 individual wolves on trail cam footage. Which means there are probably many more in the area. This is madness not to have vastly more wolf tags available as a way of at least slowing the rampant population growth.

So a mixed bag, but good news that the deer population had survived a little better than I had feared.

Grouse

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The real question is how many turkeys did you see?

Joel

I was up working on the property this weekend.

You can really tell where the grass is greening up. It’s wherever you see a deer standing!

One 35 acre field had 12 deer standing in it feeding. Including a yearling that looked TERRIBLE. Poor little thing was scrawny and ash-gray colored. They were all on a hillside that is obviously catching the sun and greening up faster.

So nice to see some deer out there, but this is in an area where the deer have good access to spillage from cattle, so I’d expect that these deer fared better than the average.

Grouse

We found a bunch of turkey carcasses at Todd’s this spring. Only 1 deer, that was a fresh kill. Hopefully the deer faired better than we thought.