Well, so far our predictions are falling into place. With the relatively mild winter of 08-09, we had pretty normal mortality rates in the deer herds, so the local Bambi count looks good heading into August/September.
The coyote and wolf populations seem to have taken a hit; we’ve had no where near the sightings that we’ve had in years past. It could be that the hard winter (14 feet of snow) of 07-08 thinned out their ranks, and, we noticed that a lot of the wild canines were badly afflicted with mange last year…so it is quite possible that last winter thinned a lot of them out as well. Can’t say that we’re too concerned over that.
The Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) decided not to distribute any supplementary deer tags in this Wildlife management Unit. Initially, Jim and I thought that this wasn’t a very good thing, because it was the first year that the Province of Ontario was making supplementary (doe) tags available to American Non-residents. However, if you think of it, after local hunters get their first and only deer, they won’t be back in the bush, which means less hunting pressure on the properties adjoining our leases. That’s a good thing.
Even though it’s been the wettest July in ˝ a century, it’s been a great summer for crops; the corn and soybeans are doing well and so are the natural forbs and fruits. We’ve been tending the food plots and experimenting with our own brands of frost resistant seed mix. We planted several of the sites in our biennial mix last August, and the new legume growth this summer has been exceptional, so we’re not going to tamper with success too much.
In other news, a Glengarry County buck scoring 176 5/8 was shot last fall not to far from here. So, the real Big Guys are around, we just have to dig them out! We’ve seen several nice three-year olds and one big old bugger that would look great on a magazine cover – lots of does and twin fawns as well.
We’ll put another page or two up before mid-October…keep checking The Scrape!