BANGOR TP. — Successful deer hunter Brian Wahr of Freeland pulled up to the Bay County Deer Check station Wednesday at 3580 State Park Drive to have the spikehorn buck and doe he shot Tuesday morning checked by state officials.
Wahr said the buck was chasing after the doe, and the female deer already was wounded by a wayward crossbow bolt.
“I just decided to put her out of her misery,” he said.
Wahr bagged his two deer in Ogemaw County, a part of the designated bovine tuberculosis zone in the northeastern Lower Peninsula.
With that knowledge, wildlife assistant Eric Schrouder, 19, pried open both the buck and doe’s jaws and peered at the teeth before slicing and powersawing the heads off both deer. He and Sleeper State Park ranger Kathy Beachy then tagged, bagged and boxed the heads for shipping to a testing center in Lansing.
The state is monitoring the spread of TB among deer in the northeastern Lower Peninsula. The check stations also serve to record the ages of deer brought into the check area.
This year, deer aren’t getting all the attention.
“You didn’t happen to see any feral hogs, did you?” asked Nate Newman, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Wildlife Services. Wahr said he didn’t, but he wished he had.
Newman said he came to the Bay County Deer Check station to see if any feral pigs had been spotted or bagged in Bay County or any surrounding areas.
“Some guy caught 13 of them in Midland ... There’s a ton of them in this area,” Newman said. “We’d like to kill all of them because they’ll eventually take over; they outcompete everything.”
Newman said most feral pigs are escapees from domestic game farms. He said the normally nocturnal pigs don’t require a license to be killed on private land.
Beachy said 32 deer filtered their way through the check station on Tuesday, the opening day of regular firearm season, and about a dozen on Wednesday morning. She said checking heads at the station is voluntary for hunters.
Most of the time, Beachy said, the age of the deer is recorded and a collectible patch is given out.
The agents check a deer’s age by slicing open a side of the animal’s cheek, necessary after rigor mortis. They search for any telltale teeth — like tricuspids, which set in after a year and a half — and teeth wear.
Delano Brubaker, 78, of Lee Township brought his 16-year-old grandson’s buck in to check its age and collect a patch. The best guess for Austin Brubaker’s buck, thanks to some molars coming in at the back of the buck’s jaw, is three and a half years old.
Brubaker said he was with Austin when he bagged his first buck Tuesday morning with a .32-caliber Winchester special. He said the buck was tailing several does when he walked into a shooting lane. By Delano Brubaker’s estimate his grandson bagged a nice six-point buck. Beachy and Schrouder considered it to be a nice eight-point.
“Yeah, he’s a proud little guy,” Brubaker said.
http://www.mlive.com/news/bay-city/index.ssf/2011/11/bay_county_hunters_monitor_whi.html
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