Has Bovine tuberculosis been found in a Michigan Doe?

Clinical Signs and Pathology in Wild and Captive Deer and Elk
Click here to see pictures of tuberculosis lesions in wild deer from Michigan
Bovine tuberculosis is a chronic disease, and small lesions in wild white-tailed deer often are not readily recognized. Abscesses may not be visible to hunters when field dressing wild deer. Indeed, most infected white-tailed deer appear healthy. Affected animals may have yellow to tan, pea-sized nodules in the chest cavity or lungs. Lymph nodes of the head and neck can be swollen and necrotic.
Captive cervids with tuberculosis often appear healthy because infection is localized in one or a few lymph nodes, usually in the head or thorax. Tuberculosis is a chronic, progressive disease that can cause gradual debilitation and is manifest as emaciation, depression, and intolerance to exercise. Because infection often involves the lungs, coughing, nasal discharges, and difficulty breathing can occur in severe cases. In some instances, superficial lymph nodes in the neck will develop large abscesses that may rupture and drain through the skin.
At necropsy, tuberculosis lesions are variable in appearance and size. Subclinically infected animals may have one or a few small necrotic nodules that usually are associated with the lymph nodes of the head and neck or the lungs. More severely infected cervids can have multiple pea-sized nodules or large cheesy or pus-filled masses in the same areas. The classical tubercle, which is firm, white or pale yellow, and gritty when cut, does occur in cervids, but many M. bovis lesions in these animals are filled with pus. In cervids, tuberculous lesions are most often seen in the lymph nodes of the head and neck or in lung tissue; however, lesions can occur throughout the chest cavity, under the skin of the chest, and in the abdominal cavity as well.
(Source of the above text on this page: Field Manual of Wildlife Diseases in the Southeastern United States, 2nd Ed., W.R. Davidson, V.F.Nettles, Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, 1997)

Red-tailed hawks are no longer on the endangered species list

You see red-tailed hawks everywhere nowadays — big, bulky hawks, with pale fronts and dark backs and tail feathers that glow bright russet in the sun when the hawks circle in the sky.They’ve set up shop in downtown Danbury, coolly watching humans pass by while waiting for lunch to show up along the banks of the Still River, or taking out a squirrel in a city backyard.

“A few weeks ago, I saw some crows eating carrion in the road,” said Frank Dye, a professor of biology at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. “Two red-tailed hawks flew in and buzzed the crows, trying to intimidate them off the carrion.

“It seems like I’m seeing red-tails much closer to the ground and in more densely populated areas than I ever have before,” Dye said.

They are a fixture along the interstates. The highway medians that serve as a greenway for mice and voles are like a cafeteria line for hawks.

“One time I drove along I-84 from Connecticut to New York to Pennsylvania,” said Milan Bull, senior director of science and conservation for the Connecticut Audubon Society. “I counted 62 red-tailed hawks along the way. They’re doing quite well, not only in Connecticut but nationally.”

There are several reasons for this red-tail boom. In the early decades of the 20th century, hawk populations in general declined because people shot them as varmints. National and international laws stopped that practice.

In turn, the environmental movement taught people that these birds — along with

being beautiful — play a useful part in the ecosystem by killing mice and rats.”We’ve learned that predators don’t control the numbers of things they feed on — they follow them,” Bull said.

But perhaps the most important part of the return of the red-tailed hawk is this: They’ve learned they can coexist with people. They’re still wary. They still keep their distance. But they seem to have learned that in general people will leave them alone.

“They seem to have adapted quite well,” said Joan Morrison, a professor of biology at Trinity College in Hartford who has been studying urban hawks.

“They nest in my neighborhood, and I live in Meriden,” said Patrick Comins , director of bird conservation for Audubon Connecticut.

It’s hard to know how many red-tails there are in Connecticut today — the most accurate count of birds, the Breeding Bird Survey, is keyed to counting songbirds, not raptors.

But Comins said all anecdotal evidence — which has value — shows the red-tail population in the state is climbing.

That evidence shows up in the Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count. In the late 1930s, birders almost never saw red-tailed hawks in their Christmas counts. Since then, if you plot the numbers of red-tailed hawk sightings on a graph, Christmas after Christmas the line just keeps climbing.

“It goes up the way you’d like your stock to go up,” Comins said.

Morrison said she’s been surprised to find red-tails nesting in front yard trees in urban neighborhoods. A pair now nest on the windowsill of the State Office Building in downtown Hartford.

“They’re a predator in an urban environment,” she said. “They’re feeding on rodents and pigeons and squirrels and things they find in the river.”

That’s a lesson in how generalists — species that can live in a lot of different places and eat a lot of different things — can survive in a place that’s now largely a mix of suburbs, cities and woods, with the occasional open field thrown in.

Comins said among the state’s other hawks, it’s the generalists that are doing well. Cooper’s hawks and red-shouldered hawks seem to be on the rise, he said, with Cooper’s hawks being dropped off the state list of threatened species. Like red-tails, they’re able to live in different habitats.

Once DDT levels in the environment dropped, peregrine falcons learned they could hunt pigeons from the tops of office buildings as well as from mountain ledges. They’re also off the federal endangered species list.

Because of the DDT ban, and because humans built nesting platforms along the coastline, the osprey — striking, fierce, white-headed fish hawks — have returned as well.

Other raptor species are emerging in the state, but more slowly. Merlins — chocolate-brown falcons — may be extending their range south into Connecticut, Comins said.

The northern goshawk — the state’s largest hawk — needs a forest habitat to thrive. In the 19th century, there were almost no woods in Connecticut, because it was almost entirely an agricultural state and trees were sawed down to make pastures. As a result, goshawks totally disappeared from the scene.

It’s only in recent decades, as abandoned fields have grown back to woods, that these big gray hawks have returned.

But the loss of grassland habitat has made the American kestrel — a small, beautiful falcon of the fields — almost nonexistent in Connecticut. They need open country.

Likewise, Comins said, the northern harrier — a low-soaring hawk that cruises over pastures and marshes looking for rodents — is hard to find in the state, nesting in only a few places.

One reason red-tailed hawks are doing well is that they can eat a lot of things — mice, voles, rats, pigeons, squirrels, chipmunks, pigeons, domestic chickens, carrion, and the young of other birds.

The national highway system has also given them a surprisingly useful place to hunt.

“They have great eyesight, and the highways give them nice long sight lines,” Comins said. “There are a lot of rodents along the highways.”

Because people see them as an everyday bird, as part of the morning commute, the red-tails can be easy to pass by. But when you see them circling in the sky in wide loops, or hear their sharp, wild, one-note cry, it’s hard to be blase. Everyone should have such a surplus of riches.

They’ve also proved to be great ambassadors for the state’s wildlife.

“So many people get involved in birding because they see a red-tailed hawk,” Bull said. “They call our office and say, ‘I’ve seen this big bird with a pale breast.’ They go home and look it up, and they get excited about birds.”

By Robert Miller Staff Writer – The News Times.com

Former Horseheads resident shoots 16-point buck

Former Horseheads resident Nick Erway returned to the Southern Tier for deer season and tagged this 16-point monster.

When Thomas Wolfe once famously wrote, “You can’t go home again,” it was obvious he hadn’t met Nick Erway.

The former Horseheads resident, who now lives in Newport, Pa., comes home every year to hunt a few days in the Southern Tier. This year, however, proved to be special.
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CERTIFIED — Wiltonian joins the ranks of Certified Wildlife Habitats

Detlef Fuhrmann stands near a balancing rock that was an Iriquois Indian stronghold and is now part of his Wildlife Habitat property in Wilton. PHOTO BY ALEX VON KLEYDORFFWILTON — Detlef and Edith Fuhrmann left their small backyard in Darien eight years ago to move to Wilton, they wanted a larger property so they could enjoy nature more. They found it at a four-acre property filled with trees, a quarter-acre pond and lots of birds and other animals.
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Sharpshooters Aim to Protect N.J. Mall From Deer

As Deer Populations Grow and Invade Suburbia, Communities Fight Back

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

Deer are in the headlights these days, maimed along the nation’s roadways and nibbling away at suburban gardens. Now they’re closing in on one of America’s poshest addresses — New Jersey’s Short Hills Mall, home to high-end stories like Cartier and Coach — and local officials are striking back.

On Jan. 29, Essex County will send sharpshooters into South Mountain Reservation, a 2,000-acre swath of woodland that sits smack in the middle of tony towns like Maplewood, Milburn and the Oranges for a month-long deer kill.

New Jersey is no stranger to marauding wildlife. In 2004, the state shot more than 328 black bears in one season after widespread reports of the animals invading backyards.. It was the first such hunt in more than three decades, and environmentalists say development is to blame.

Suburbanites from Massachusetts to Minnesota have taken similar action as deer populations find feeding grounds in new subdivisions, causing traffic accidents and carrying ticks that can transmit Lyme disease.

Meghan Berry, a 27-year-old New Jersey graduate student, collided with “an absolutely gigantic” deer while driving one night. After killing the deer, she was traumatized by the fur it left behind on the demolished car.

Days later, a deer plunged into the swimming pool at her New Egypt, N.J., home, damaging the pool cover and nearly drowning.

“I consider myself an environmentalist, and I love animals and am very much against hunting,” she said. “But when you consider the quality of life of deer living in the suburbs and getting hit on the highways, it’s unsettling to see the two worlds colliding. We are killing them because they are in our way. But I can see that population control is necessary.”

Deer Problems Nationwide

Other cities are struggling with similar problems. Last year, Kansas City, Mo., had bow hunts for the first time in two public parks. Alamosa, Colo., allows hunting by bows and shotguns on a city-owned golf course until Feb. 28.

In New Jersey, trained marksmen will work two full days a week during daylight hours, and the reservation will be closed to the public. Sharpshooters who finish eight shifts will be rewarded with 40 pounds of venison. The rest of the meat will go to the needy, said county officials.

By SUSAN JAMES – ABC News

The Slug Gun Ricochet Factor

What does a recent study really mean to a slug gun deer hunter?

An estimated 3 million United States deer hunters use shotguns. To my mind, there have always been three reasons for choosing a slug gun rather than a rifle for deer hunting. The first is that many states and localities dictate that only slug guns may be used. I hunt certain areas with a slug gun because hunting regulations demand that I must. The second is economy. If the only place you plan to hunt offers only short-range deer shooting opportunities, a shotgun loaded with slugs is often all you need. There is no point in buying a deer rifle unless you prefer one.
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Connecticut Activists Still Pushing For Deer Population Reductions To Ease Lyme Disease

Dr. Georgina Scholl appears to be spearheading the movement by two very well organized and vocal groups that have had it with the threats of Lyme disease and want something done about it. The Connecticut Coalition to Eradicate Lyme Disease and the Fairfield County Municipal Deer Management Alliance believe the way to achieve this goal is to reduce whitetail populations from around 60 or more per square mile down to around 8 or 10 per square mile.

Scholl was to have met with Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s chief of staff on Wednesday to discuss the issue. Read more

Gun Fans Recoil at Marlin Deal

Making sense of unexpected Remington acquisition

It was a shot heard around the world: North Haven’s Marlin Firearms was to be sold to Remington of North Carolina.

Fans of the company’s popular rifles and shotguns lit up Internet message boards last month as the news spread, many fearing that yet another American firearms maker would shut down or outsource.

But as details of the deal come to light, analysts and city officials say Marlin’s sale may turn out to be a canny move both by a local company shifting its focus and a private equity giant seeking profits.
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Remington Arms, founded in 1816, buys Marlin Firearms Co.

HARTFORD, Connecticut: Remington Arms Co. Inc. will acquire Marlin Firearms Co. in a deal that brings together two U.S. firearm companies founded in the 19th century.

Remington, acquired by Cerberus Capital Management in April, will add Marlin’s long guns, including shoulder arm designs and lever action rifles. Marlin’s lever action .22 repeater, now the Model 39, became the favorite of many exhibition shooters like Annie Oakley, a legendary sharpshooter.
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Three hunters stage river rescue

Trio goes to aid of group of deer that broke through the ice on Illinois River

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

BY JEFF LAMPE OF THE JOURNAL STAR

BARTONVILLE - A trio of local deer hunters turned into deer saviors Tuesday afternoon in Peoria County. After learning a group of deer broke through ice and was stranded in an Illinois River backwater one-quarter mile south of Mendenhall Road, Gary Thomas and Chad Snyder of Bartonville and Kirk Sorenson of Washington rushed to the rescue.

The trio launched Thomas’s 18-foot-long, 8-foot-wide boat, broke ice and pulled three does out of the frigid water. Snyder said Bartonville police officers also assisted.

Eight other deer had scrambled to safety on their own, including one 10- or 12-point buck Thomas described as “massive.”

Thomas said current and a dropping river level may have contributed to the deer breaking through the ice.

The does at first kicked at their rescuers. But they eventually submitted and flopped wearily to the bottom of Thomas’ plate boat, which is custom made for duck hunting and fitted with three ice breakers.

“I got popped in the jaw once,” Snyder said. “But for the most part they were beat.”

Once the deer were released on shore, two does trotted off south along U.S. Route 24. Snyder and Charlie Blumenshine of Bartonville revived the third, warming her in a van for 45 minutes and then leaving her in a grassy spot out of the wind.

Also on hand for the rescue was Peoria County conservation police officer Scott Avery, who said deer often become stranded in or on ice. In the past three days Avery has responded to two such calls. But rescues are uncommon, he said.

“This was a high visibility area right along Route 24,” Avery said. “Who knows how much it happens where it doesn’t go reported or seen. Sometimes the deer make it, sometimes they don’t.”

Even deer that die are not wasted. Avery had to shoot a stranded doe Sunday in Peoria County after the whitetail broke its leg in the ice. The landowner called Monday with an update.

“He said there were about 12 turkey buzzards on the deer,” Avery said. “Then a couple eagles showed up, scared the buzzards off and started eating.”

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