I never minded the drive to Pike County, Illinois. In five years of archery hunting there, I hadn't connected with a huge buck, but I had seen them. The place I hunted operated under a strict regulation that a buck's rack had to score 150 or more. I'd had many lesser bucks in arrow range, bucks I jokingly called "Visa" bucks (the fine for shooting one was $1,500).

One afternoon, my Maryland hunting buddy Brenda and I scouted a secluded meadow for a spot to place a pop-up blind. Each day, as we headed to our respective tree stands early afternoon, we'd seen deer grazing in the meadow, in the shady area near a pond.Almost as soon as we'd set up the blind, I'd started to second-guess the location. I told Brenda I'd climb a little knoll that would give me a vantage point to check out the pond, using binoculars. I didn't want to add any boot prints to the cattle-path of deer tracks in the soft soil around the pond.What I saw through the binoculars was heart-breaking. In the pond, and at the pond's edge, were three buck carcasses, all sporting good racks (one would score in the 170s). We learned later that the deer were victims of a virus called Blue Tongue. The disease crops up in periods of drought, when deer congregate at the very water sources that are also the source of the disease vectors, biting insects.That was 2007. The disease affected deer in 40 of the state's 102 counties, and wildlife professionals estimated that 50 percent of the deer herd in some localized areas died. I have so many great memories of hunting deer in Illinois, but the sight of those dead deer is one I wish I could forget.When people talk about threats to the Pennsylvania deer herd, they mostly talk about loss of habitat, vehicle collisions and hard winters. They don't envision having the herd decimated by a virus or disease. And yet our whitetails are already being impacted by Chronic Wasting Disease, a fatal neurodegenerative disease that's been steadily increasing.Maybe we're lulled into a false sense of security because the numbers seem low. The trouble is, the numbers are growing."The total number of cases in Deer Management Area 2, where CWD is in the wild herd, was at 27," said Wayne Laroche, Director, Bureau of Wildlife Management, Pennsylvania Game Commission. "We had 12 new cases in 2015.""We continue to get confirmations of CWD-positive road-killed deer from 2016, with seven new cases confirmed January 6," he continued. "The total number of confirmed cases stands at 34 and growing - with a large mass of hunter-harvest samples (about 1,500) in the cue for testing."So why should we be worried?"CWD is always fatal," Laroche said. "CWD outbreaks in, for example, West Virginia and Wisconsin have resulted in exponential growth in the number of infected deer, bucks and does."CWD - What Is It?CWD is an infectious prion disease which can affect five of the cervid species (whitetails, mule deer, elk, moose and reindeer). Prions are infectious proteins. Similar prion brain diseases have been around for decades, for example, Creutzfieldt Jakobs Disease in humans, which was first diagnosed in 1920. CWD was first recognized in a captive mule deer herd, held for research in Colorado in the 1960s, but other cases could have occurred in Colorado and other areas before the disease was recognized. CWD currently has been detected in free and captive cervids in 24 states and three Canadian provinces.It's not like Blue Tongue, with obvious symptoms such as bleeding from nasal passages and swollen tongue. CWD infected deer decline slowly, with deteriorating health and alterations in normal behavior. In Wyoming, in an area where CWD is endemic in whitetails, mule deer and elk, researchers recently completed an eight-year study. They found that bucks lived about 107 weeks after testing positive for CWD."According to the Wyoming research, the deer population being studied is projected to be virtually extinct within 41 years," Laroche said. "The deer hunting industry exceeds $1 billion per year in Pennsylvania."Given what is predicted for the deer herd in Wyoming, can you imagine the effects of a similar loss in Pennsylvania? What is being done in our state? What can we hunters do to support our wildlife officials as they research CWD and try to prevent its spread?See CWD part II, next week.