Hiking for meat

 

This year on the south end we only harvested one small deer. This was a bit of a disappointment. Usually this part of the island is crawling with deer. Just last year we saw herds of 20 or more deer where this year there were none. Partially the weather was to blame for our lack of success. We only had two clear days to hunt where there was no fog. And you can't hunt deer if you can't see them. But even when we did go hunting we saw very few deer - just the occasional doe.

To find deer we ended up hiking entirely out of the river valley we were on and over to another drainage. There we found plenty of deer, but it was a LONG way away. We harvested the one deer and then had to climb 1000 feet and carry it for miles back to camp. That said, it was a glorious hike!

At the end of the trip I was actually a little embarrassed about the lack of deer harvested. But then we talked to a local fishing guide who told us that there had been an extreme localized deer die off last spring. He told us that back in April and May the deer were dying in droves along the banks of the river. He figures that 90% of the local deer died off. He had not been seeing any big bucks either. 

This year I did notice that there is a lot of poisonous water hemlock along the banks of the river. I wonder if the late spring forced them to eat the water hemlock?

In any case, there was an upside to the lack of deer - we got to go on longer hikes. In the past, we never got very far from camp before we harvested a deer and had to go back to camp. This year we go to explore a ridge that extended far from camp. I got to see far more of the landscape than usual (landscape blog post to come).

Patrick